Chapter 1

I've rewritten the content in a more concise and readable format, while maintaining the original structure and style. Here is the updated content: **Chapter 1: The Emperor of Gladness** **East Gladness**, a town in New England, is a place where life and death exist side by side. The hardest thing in the world is to live only once, but it's beautiful here, even the ghosts agree. The town is situated along a river, formed when the prehistoric glaciers melted. The valley was once a world-sized lake, and when that dried up, it left a silvery trickle called the Connecticut River. The sediment here is rich with every particle welcoming to life. As you approach the town, you'll see wide stretches of thumb-sized buds shooting out of April mud. Within months, these saplings will stand as packed rows of broadleaf tobacco and silver queen corn. Beyond the graveyard whose stones have lost their names to years, there's a covered bridge laid over a dried-up brook whose memory of water never reached this century. Cross that and you'll find East Gladness. The town is a place of contrasts, where optimism and despair coexist. Down the back roads, the potholes are so wide and deep that, days after a summer downpour, minnows dart freely in the green-clear pools. And out of the dark of an unlit porch, someone's laugh cuts the air so quick you could mistake it for a gasped-back sob. The town has a sense of nostalgia, with its WWII Club, where veterans come home from every battlefield to sit on plastic lawn chairs staring at the mountain ridge before shuffling back into smoky rooms where mini-TVs, the size of human torsos, lull them to sleep. And the last crickets sing through fog hung over pastures pungent now with just-laid manure. Despite the challenges, East Gladness has a library, where a bronze statue of Sojourner Truth stands at the center fountain. Across from that statue stands a four-foot-eight Lego model of a red T-Rex, the pieces glued into permanence. It's a reminder of the resilience of the human spirit. But the town is also a place where tragedy strikes. One afternoon in 2009, a 19-year-old boy, cradled in the heart of the valley, walked alone, his breath fogging in the cold autumn air. He had not been forgiven, and neither are you. As the sky darkened and the cold turned his breath to fog, he glanced over his shoulder and saw the phone lines sagging with crows resigned to dusk and the red water tower in the distance announcing East Gladness in faded white paint. Then he turned from this place, swung one leg over the rail, and decided to jump.