I don't understand why it seems so fresh in my mind, even now, three years later and a few hundred miles away.
-- Narrator (Pages 1 – 54)

Importance: Although the first person narrator is situated three years after and hundreds of miles away from the day of the accident, she cannot stop revisiting the memory in her mind. At this juncture of the novel, she is unable to discern her obsessive interest in the day that the little boy was hit by the car. Throughout all of the first and third person point of view sections that follow, her mind struggles to remain engaged in the present. As the narrative unfolds, it becomes increasingly apparent that the narrator associates her emotions with the day of the accident to her emotions regarding her pregnancy. The past and the present, therefore, are deeply and viscerally entangled in her mind. Although they have no apparent relation to one another...