Kelly Waititi’s death is the defining loss in Ava Spirini’s story: it ruptures Ava’s sense of time, recurs in memories and choices, and leaves her searching for what Kelly intended. The narrative gives the event through Ava’s recollections and later interpretations, distinguishing the circumstances she remembers from the questions she cannot settle.

The news and its immediate rupture

Ava recalls being woken by a call to the family house phone at 5:37 in the morning from Kelly and Lincoln’s father. Seven minutes later, Ava’s father came into her room, crying. Ava initially feared that something had happened to her grandparents; when he told her that Kelly had died, she experienced the news as a break in everything that had preceded it. She could not move or properly take in his words. The narration renders the shock as a collapse of ordinary comprehension, rather than as a moment Ava can readily explain.

The loss also alters Ava’s sense of time. Six months later, she feels that life is moving more slowly and that time itself stopped with Kelly. She resents other people’s impatience with her grief: to Ava, six months is no measure of the duration of losing her best friend. She expects the sadness might last for the rest of her life, a fear that makes the death feel not only like a past event but an ongoing condition.

The last afternoon, remembered differently

Ava returns to an afternoon with Kelly when they looked at a photograph and talked together. Kelly then erased a drawing from Ava’s mirror and carefully replaced it with a heart. Kelly had often drawn or written on the mirror, and the afternoon seemed ordinary to Ava at the time. Only after Kelly’s death does Ava wonder whether the gesture carried a meaning she failed to recognize, or whether Kelly was trying to leave her with the knowledge that she was loved and remembered. The recollection offers no proof of a farewell: its force comes from the distance between the ordinary scene Ava experienced and the significance she later fears it may have held.

That uncertainty is central to Ava’s reconstruction of the death. She remembers that Kelly’s mother picked her up, that Kelly ate dinner with her family and said goodnight as usual, and that Kelly later drank a large amount of vodka in her room. Kelly left no note. Ava understands that Kelly vomited while asleep and choked. She then turns over possibilities she cannot verify: whether Kelly changed her mind, or whether she did not want to die but was too impaired to respond. The account establishes the fatal circumstances without resolving Kelly’s intention.

Grief, recurrence, and the search for meaning

Ava counts the Sundays since Kelly died and knows the number has reached thirty-one. The counting makes the loss recur within the calendar: Sunday after Sunday begins, for Ava, with the same absence. Her later thoughts return to the details of Kelly’s final days in an effort to discover new information and understand the scale of the pain Kelly may have been experiencing. That search remains an attempt to interpret, not a claim that Ava can know exactly what Kelly felt.

Kelly’s death also shadows Ava’s relationship with Lincoln. Ava recognizes that being with him can briefly make school, her father’s reaction, and the rest of her troubles recede; it lets her feel something other than misery, in a way that recalls how she felt when Kelly was alive. Yet Ava also understands the contradiction: the intimacy with Lincoln would not have happened if Kelly were still living. In this way, the death continues to shape Ava’s choices, connecting moments of comfort to the loss that made them possible.

Continuing the bond while moving forward

Later, Ava can acknowledge that sadness, hurt, anger, confusion, grief, and love remain present, even when they do not overwhelm her. Her ongoing fortnightly therapy with Nola supports an understanding of grief that does not require a single correct way to feel. Ava does not describe healing as forgetting Kelly or leaving the relationship behind. She sees Kelly’s death as something that will continue to define her, while insisting that it need not prevent her from moving forward.

Ava comes to believe that Kelly wanted to end her pain rather than her life. This is Ava’s interpretation of an intention the circumstances cannot conclusively reveal, but it becomes consequential: Ava decides that her own pain must not end her life and that she should live for both of them. The event therefore remains unresolved in one respect—Ava cannot know what Kelly wanted in her final moments—while its meaning changes in another. Remembering Kelly becomes part of Ava’s reason to keep living, rather than an obligation to stop feeling the loss.