Book excerpt: This is a story about a seventeen-year-old teenager named Sharon Knowles, a senior in high school, who has an eighteen-year-old boyfriend named Andrew Stipes, also a senior in high school. During an uncommon moment of passion between the two, Sharon becomes pregnant, and this pregnancy becomes the defining moment in her young life. Three weeks later Andrew is killed in a snowboarding accident along the Rocky Mountain Continental Divide and Sharon is forced to make important decisions without him. But life goes on, as it must, and she eventually defeats the feelings of guilt, loneliness, and low self-esteem that surround a young person in her predicament. She marries several years later, but the untimely death of her husband during the Colorado Big Thompson flood puts her back in the throes of loneliness again. Then life rebuilding begins slowly, and with the passage of time and the support of friends around her, she learns to live again. This is not a children's story.