Possible Prologue to "You Seriously Don't Want to Know"

Asking for your opinions please...

I want to try something vulnerable and ask for your read as readers, not editors. John Michael Alaia gave me an idea and I want to get your gut feeling.

I’m thinking about placing the piece below as a prologue, before the chapters you’ve already read. If you haven’t started yet:

I’m not asking what to change — only how it lands.

Does it orient you?
Does it feel earned?
Or would you rather arrive at this later? Thanks in advance!

Prologue

I probably shouldn’t dissect it.
But it’s time to bleed.

I didn’t come this far to put my head back under the covers.

The death certificate says she had a skull fracture.
It says she lived three and a half hours after the accident.
It says the fetus was dead.

That’s the clinical report. Old. Mostly handwritten. Cold in the way official things are cold.

The human report is different.

My father saw my pregnant mother on the ground, bleeding, with a fractured skull.
So did my sister.
Maybe I did too — I don’t remember it. I was four. My mind must have decided that part was unnecessary for survival.

My father was crying. He still cries when he talks about it.

He told me he doesn’t know why he tried to stop the car. Why he thought it was possible. Why he didn’t just get us out of the way and let it go. As if there were a correct answer available to him in that moment.

But hindsight is a cruel narrator.

He didn’t know the car could jump out of gear.
He didn’t know it was too heavy — probably too heavy for five people — once gravity took over.
He didn’t know what was about to happen or how fast it would happen or what the outcome would be.

He only knew his family was in danger.

So he reached for the impossible.
Not because he was foolish, but because doing nothing would have felt like abandoning us.

The certificate tells me she was alive for three and a half hours. That means she was alive with me in the ambulance. That sentence lands harder than I expected. It doesn’t explain anything, but it rearranges the room.

The certificate says the fetus was dead. It doesn’t say when. It doesn’t say how long. It doesn’t say anything about Kevin beyond that single, brutal line.

That’s how records work. They reduce entire lives and losses into what can be categorized.

I ordered the certificate because I thought answers would help. Because once I started writing, the silence around certain details stopped feeling neutral. It started feeling unfinished. And I wanted to see what the official record said — especially about Kevin.

But sometimes what you think will be helpful makes you wish you had stayed in oblivion.

The paper didn’t give me clarity.
It gave me weight.

And now I have to carry both versions — the clinical one, and the human one — knowing neither tells the whole truth, but together they get closer than silence ever did. #

Quick reader check:
If this appeared before Chapter One, would you want to keep reading?

• Yes — it feels like the right opening

• Yes — but I’d want something lighter first

• No — I’d rather encounter this later in the book