Kelly’s death by suicide

Kelly’s death by suicide is the defining loss in Ava Spirini’s life: it shatters the assumptions that had made the world feel hopeful and leaves her trying to live with a grief she cannot simply explain or set aside. The novel presents the death through Ava’s memory of being told, then follows its effects across school, friendship, and her changing understanding of pain. It does not offer a simple answer for Kelly’s decision; instead, Ava’s repeated effort to imagine what Kelly experienced exposes both the depth of her love and the limits of what she can know.

The News and Its Immediate Rupture

Ava remembers the announcement as beginning with a call at 5:37 in the morning. Kelly and Lincoln’s father had called Ava’s father, and the house phone woke Ava. Seven minutes later, her father came into her room. His tears made her fear that something had happened to her grandparents; she did not immediately expect news about Kelly. When her father told her that Kelly had died, the ordinary sequence of waking and speaking seemed to stop. Ava recalls being unable to move or properly take in what was being said. The event arrives not as a gradual realization but as a sudden alteration of everything she understood her life to be.

That first shock also establishes the closeness of the loss. Kelly was not a distant acquaintance but Ava’s best friend, and Ava understands the death as unlike the losses people around her try to compare with it. Their attempts to relate through the deaths of relatives or pets do not make her feel understood. She cannot find words for what has happened and does not want to talk about it. The gap between other people’s efforts to comfort her and her sense that this loss is singular becomes one of the pressures of her bereavement.

Grief in Time and Everyday Life

Months later, Ava experiences time as slowed and school as increasingly difficult to inhabit. She has returned full-time only recently, after a period of part-time attendance, and describes the weeks as blurred by distraction, absence, and the effort to get through lessons. Schoolwork feels detached from the scale of what she is living with. She also feels judged: she reads other people’s frustration as directed both at her for not recovering and at Kelly for having died. To Ava, six months is not enough time for anyone to expect her to be over the loss.

Her counting gives grief a recurring calendar. At one point she has counted thirty-one Sundays since Kelly’s death, and each Sunday seems to begin with the same weight. The count is a concrete measure of time passing, but it does not mark progress toward an endpoint. Ava fears that she will feel this way for the rest of her life. The novel thus places the event in two temporal registers: the abrupt instant when the news arrives and the repeated weeks in which its consequences continue to return.

The loss also unsettles Ava’s former confidence in a generally positive world. In a letter to Gideon, she recalls having believed that events happened for a reason and having once been someone who readily saw good in things. After Kelly’s death, that outlook no longer comes naturally. Ava does not describe a neat transition from optimism to certainty about despair; rather, she does not know how a person could recover the old belief after learning how awful the world can be. The death changes not only her mood but also the terms through which she makes sense of experience.

Ava’s Search for an Explanation

Ava’s reflections on the suicide turn on the painful difference between an accidental death and a death involving a decision. She thinks that a sudden accident might have been easier to comprehend because it would not leave the same question of what Kelly had been feeling. The fact that Kelly made a choice is especially difficult for Ava to hold alongside her memory that Kelly could struggle to make choices. This is not presented as a judgment of Kelly; it is Ava trying to reconcile the person she knew with the fact of her death.

Ava returns to the possibility that Kelly’s pain had become so overwhelming that she could see no other option. She searches details and memories for an explanation, wondering whether Kelly’s experience might have resembled the severe distress Gideon has described. But her reasoning remains speculative. She can imagine that suffering had become consuming; she cannot claim to know exactly what Kelly felt or what would have changed her decision. The distinction matters: the novel gives space to Ava’s need to understand without turning that need into a definitive account of Kelly’s inner life.

Connection, Contradiction, and What Remains

Kelly’s absence shapes Ava’s later connection with Lincoln. Ava finds that being with him can make other troubles recede for a while and allow her to feel something other than misery. That brief relief recalls how she felt when Kelly was alive, even as Ava recognizes the painful contradiction that this closeness would not have happened in the same way if Kelly were still there. The bond does not replace Kelly or resolve the loss; its comfort is inseparable from the circumstances created by her death.

By the novel’s later recollection of the loss, Ava can feel calm without treating grief as gone. Sadness, hurt, anger, confusion, grief, and love remain part of her experience, but they are not, at that moment, greater than everything else she is. This ending revises her earlier fear that the pain will always occupy all of life without pretending that Kelly’s death has become inconsequential. The event’s lasting force lies in that coexistence: Ava’s world is changed, and her continuing capacity for connection does not require her to stop loving or missing Kelly.