Blue Hour

Blue Hour Plot Summary

Introduction

The light fades into a soft blue as day surrenders to night - a time photographers call the "blue hour." It's that fleeting, ethereal moment when the world seems suspended between memory and hope. This transitory time mirrors the journey we all face when confronted with profound loss, grief, and the subsequent struggle to find meaning again. Like a photograph exposed in this gentle, diffused light, our stories can reveal their most vulnerable truths during life's most challenging transitions. In exploring one woman's complex journey through grief, racial identity, and motherhood, we witness the universal struggle of what it means to love deeply in an often brutal world. Her story invites us to examine how we piece ourselves back together after being shattered, how we make art from our wounds, and how we find the courage to bring new life into an uncertain world. Through her lens - both literal and metaphorical - we discover that healing isn't about forgetting our pain, but about finding ways to carry it forward with purpose, transforming it into something that connects rather than isolates us.

Chapter 1: The Fragility of New Life: Pregnancy and Loss

"The therapist asks how I feel, and I tell her, dismembered. I do not know where the pieces have been discarded. Even if I did, how would I begin to put them back together?" This is how we meet our protagonist - a woman shattered by grief, trying to understand the complex emotions surrounding her pregnancy loss. The imagery is visceral, conveying not just sadness but a complete disintegration of self that accompanies profound grief. The narrative takes us through her raw experience of miscarriage, where her body "delivered a pulpy plum-sized sac" on the bathroom floor. She and her husband Asher place it in a glass jar as instructed and take it to the hospital. "You handed the jar to the doctor and said, 'Here's our baby,'" she recalls, capturing the heartbreaking simplicity of their loss. The couple had planned to open a second store for Asher's business, but after the miscarriage, those plans were postponed indefinitely, waiting for "life to be normal again" without defining what that meant. Later, we learn of a second loss - their daughter Ellis, delivered prematurely at eighteen weeks. The scene is painfully intimate: "We bury our daughter, Ellis. We are beneath large trees whose old chipped trunks stretch into bare branches that greet the slate-gray sky." The couple cups their stillborn daughter in their palms, not wanting "your stillborn daughter to get cold." These moments reveal how pregnancy loss creates a painful paradox - grieving someone who never fully existed in the world yet was completely real to the parents. The protagonist struggles with how to process these losses. "The one time we were pregnant, we named the baby because my body hadn't caught on yet, and for two weeks I traipsed happy and unaware from subway, to studio, to restaurant, and back home keeping death warm in my belly." Her poetic, unflinching description shows how pregnancy loss exists in a liminal space - between being and non-being, between hope and despair. For weeks after their loss, she sits on the fire escape at night, "blinking at the way-over-there sky and telling our kid stories." This simple ritual reveals how parents must create their own mourning practices for losses society often minimizes or overlooks. The couple grapples with whether to try again, weighing physical trauma against emotional desire, revealing how fertility struggles can place enormous strain on even the strongest relationships. In this intimate portrait of pregnancy loss, we witness how grief becomes embodied - physically inscribed in the spaces we inhabit, the relationships we navigate, and the future we imagine. These experiences transform us not by what they add to our lives, but by what they take away, leaving us to build something new from the absence.

Chapter 2: When Violence Shapes Identity: Noah and America's Racial Reality

The tranquility of the couple's private grief is shattered when Noah, a young Black student from the protagonist's photography class, is shot by police. "Noah's mother had been on the news. She'd sent him to buy milk for his baby sister... He told him to buy a treat with the change because she knew how disappointed he was that the free photography class he'd signed up for that weekend, my class, had been canceled at the last minute." The protagonist had canceled the class to see a fertility specialist - a collision of her personal struggles with America's broader racial violence. This incident becomes a turning point. During a protest for Noah, the protagonist tells her husband, "If we don't get pregnant, I don't want to try again... I can't bring a kid into this. I won't." As a biracial woman contemplating motherhood, she must confront what it means to bring a Black child into a world of such violence. The protest itself turns chaotic - "A high-pitched scraping of vocal cords and eardrums, deep-bellied, animal cries" - as police storm the streets with tear gas and batons. The visceral description reveals both the immediate danger and the systemic brutality that shapes Black lives in America. Throughout the narrative, Noah's presence grows more significant. Though hospitalized in a coma from his injuries, he represents all the vulnerabilities the protagonist fears for her own potential children. She visits him secretly, claiming to be his cousin. "I stand in front of the bookshelf at the entrance, intrigued by your attempt at cleverness or culture." The intimate connection she forms with this injured boy reveals her attempt to process her own racial trauma and fears about motherhood. When Noah eventually dies, riots erupt. The protagonist later interviews his mother, Cynthia, for a documentary she's creating about mothers who have lost children to police violence. This project becomes her way of processing both personal and collective grief. During their conversation, Cynthia says, "I don't speak about how wonderful Noah was - which he was, by the way - to create some tale of a humble boy... He could have had the worst grades, spit in his sister's milk, been on the corner doing God knows what, and he still wouldn't have deserved what happened to him." In following the protagonist's relationship with Noah and his story, we see how racial violence creates ripple effects through communities, shaping identity and life decisions in profound ways. For the biracial protagonist, these events force a reconciliation with her own complex racial identity while confronting the terrifying vulnerabilities of potential parenthood in a society where children like Noah remain unprotected.

Chapter 3: Sisterhood: The Complexity of Family Bonds

The protagonist's relationship with her sister Viola reveals another dimension of her fractured identity. After losing their parents and younger sister Maya in a car accident, the two surviving sisters cope in radically different ways. "Viola blamed me, and we coped in our separate ways, one likely more constructive than the other. I did drugs and slept with half the campus. Viola pretended to be a lesbian and then found Jesus." This stark contrast in grieving styles creates a rift between them that persists for years. Their estrangement is complicated by an incident from their past. When they were teenagers, the protagonist pushed her beautiful younger sister Maya into a door, causing her to bust her lip and crack a tooth. She admits this was out of jealousy: "People called her Princess Jasmine. So, one time, when we were walking through the mall and guys were wanting to fuck her, I pushed her into a door." This confession reveals how sibling relationships can harbor both profound love and damaging jealousy, feelings intensified by their shared grief after Maya's death. When the protagonist undergoes an abortion, Viola reluctantly supports her. "I love you so much I sat in the lobby of an abortion clinic so you wouldn't have to be alone while they took a life from your insides. Do I like what you did? No. Do I get why you did it? Of course I do. But I loved you." This complex moment captures how sisterhood can transcend moral differences while acknowledging their weight. The relationship begins to heal when Viola visits after the birth of Bijou, the protagonist's daughter. In a touching moment, Viola's daughter Jasmine, who shares the protagonist's freckles, calls her "Auntie," creating a new connection between the families. Later, the protagonist finds a check from Viola to help fund her documentary project. When she texts Viola that she can't accept the money, Viola simply responds: "You can and you will take that money." Their reconciliation comes through shared motherhood and art. While developing photographs in her darkroom, the protagonist shows Viola pictures of her stillborn daughter Ellis. "Oh, my sister," Viola responds, holding her hand. "You are a mother." This recognition—that the protagonist's motherhood extends beyond her living child to include those she's lost—helps bridge the gap between them. The sisters' journey illustrates how family bonds can break under the weight of trauma yet retain an underlying resilience. Their relationship reminds us that healing often requires acknowledging both the harm we've caused and received, and finding ways to move forward together without erasing the past.

Chapter 4: Marriage Under Pressure: Love That Bends Without Breaking

Asher and the protagonist meet when she photographs his men's clothing store for a magazine. Their connection is immediate and playful. "All the king's horses and all the king's men..." she recites, feeling dismembered by grief. Yet with Asher, she finds a new kind of wholeness. "I'm usually gone by now," she tells him after their first night together. "But I wasn't gone because you were calm. You felt like a calm place to rest." This confession reveals how their relationship offers her a sanctuary she hasn't found elsewhere. Their marriage faces numerous tests, from fertility struggles to racial dynamics. After losing their baby and seeing Noah hospitalized, the protagonist declares she doesn't want to try for another pregnancy. Asher responds with pain: "I never said I didn't want a child. I said I couldn't go through it again." Their argument escalates: "We're selfish. You're selfish for not wanting to try again, and I'm selfish for pushing you." This raw exchange captures how reproductive decisions can create impossible tensions even between loving partners. When the protagonist conceives naturally but keeps her pregnancy secret for sixteen weeks, their relationship fractures further. "Why didn't you tell me?" Asher asks when he discovers the truth, his pain palpable. She responds, "Because I love you," revealing how protection and deception can become intertwined. Later, they survive a car accident while she's pregnant, and though the baby survives, their relationship remains tenuous. Asher's mother presents another challenge. Jewish and disapproving of their marriage, she suffers a stroke and must move in with them. Her presence creates new tensions, particularly when she makes racist comments about "those people's boys" in reference to victims of police violence. Asher wishes "with every pulsing fiber in his angry heart that the stroke had killed her." This moment reveals how external prejudices can infiltrate even the most intimate spaces. Despite these pressures, their relationship endures. After their daughter Bijou is born, they find a new rhythm. Asher brings the baby to the protagonist when she wakes for night feedings: "You hum without worry; I will be up soon." This simple moment captures their return to partnership. In another tender scene, they lie on the floor with their daughter by the fireplace as Asher tells her the story of how they met: "It all started with The Metamorphosis." Their marriage demonstrates how love can be both vulnerable and resilient in the face of extraordinary pressures. By weathering grief, racial tensions, and family conflicts together, they create a relationship that bends without breaking, finding strength in their shared history and commitment to each other's complex truths.

Chapter 5: Motherhood: From Resistance to Embrace

"I never thought I wanted children," the protagonist tells her therapist early in the narrative. This admission reveals her initial resistance to motherhood, rooted in her complicated family history and fears about bringing a Black child into a violent world. Yet we witness her gradual transformation from reluctance to embrace, a journey punctuated by loss, hope, and ultimately, the birth of her daughter Bijou. The protagonist's ambivalence stems partly from her racial identity. When a classmate once asked, "What are you anyway? Like a mixed breed? Like a dog?" we see how her Haitian-Japanese-American identity has been consistently questioned and diminished. Later, when considering motherhood after witnessing police violence against Black youth, she asks Asher, "I know your life's worth is something you've never had to consider, but our child will. That's the reality we live in." This poignant observation captures the additional weight parenthood carries for those whose children will face racial discrimination. Her journey includes multiple pregnancy losses that both deepen her desire for motherhood and intensify her fear of it. After losing Ellis at eighteen weeks, she describes sitting in the bathtub with Asher as she delivers their stillborn daughter: "Naked, we step into the bathwater. I sit between your legs and begin to push." The raw intimacy of this scene reveals how pregnancy loss becomes a shared physical and emotional experience that transforms both partners. When she finally carries a pregnancy to term, her joy remains tempered by awareness of the world's dangers. At thirty-six weeks, she reflects on "the mares and foals I saw in a documentary. The licking and saying hello at birth, this ritual indicating you are mine, you are mine." This primal image of maternal claiming foreshadows her own fierce protection of Bijou after birth. The arrival of Bijou brings both exhaustion and transcendence. She describes the "suckling sounds. The pursing of plump, shiny lips. The bundle of her diapered bottom on my forearm. Her wet belly in the bath, like a seal." These sensory details capture the physicality of early motherhood, the way it reshapes both body and identity. At a store, when a cashier comments, "You had your baby," she responds with the unfamiliar but increasingly comfortable words: "These are for my daughter." Perhaps most significantly, motherhood helps her reconcile with her past. When she visits Noah's mother Cynthia while nursing Bijou, their connection transcends boundaries. Cynthia takes her picture, saying, "You understand loss, you feel it. You aren't responsible, but you feel it." This recognition—that motherhood encompasses both joy and grief, protection and vulnerability—completes her transformation. Through the protagonist's evolution, we see motherhood not as an instinctive embrace but as a complex journey of resistance, loss, and ultimately conscious choice. Her experience reminds us that becoming a mother involves not just physical creation but a profound reshaping of identity and relationship to the world.

Chapter 6: Photography as Witness: Documenting Life's Brutal Truths

Throughout the narrative, photography serves as both profession and metaphor for the protagonist. As a photographer, she uses her camera to capture, process, and make meaning from life's most brutal truths. During a protest for Noah, she stands amid chaos "clicking, clicking, clicking the camera" while others flee. This act of witnessing becomes her way of engaging with trauma rather than escaping it. Photography allows her to document what others might look away from. During the protest, she captures a woman "on hands and knees, retching and blinded by gas, gripping the gravel, screaming for help" as a police officer kicks her in the jaw. Later, this image haunts her: "I see it every time I step outside." Her camera becomes an extension of her consciousness, recording what society often erases or denies. The protagonist also teaches photography to youth in a mobile darkroom, including Noah before his shooting. She recalls how Noah once showed her a photo he'd taken of a little girl jumping rope on an empty sidewalk. "When you're alone, you can be anything you want," he told her, revealing photography's power to capture not just reality but possibility. After his death, she finds this same photo in his bedroom—a connection between them that transcends his loss. Her most intimate photographic project documents her stillborn daughter Ellis. "I wanted to remember our daughter, and every moment that I was a mother," she explains to her sister while showing these images. Through photography, she validates experiences society often silences, insisting on their reality despite their brevity. Similarly, after losing her parents and sister, she photographs discarded pennies throughout the city, creating a visual elegy that transforms ordinary objects into symbols of absence. The narrative culminates in her documentary project about mothers who have lost children to police violence. When interviewing Noah's mother Cynthia, the camera becomes a vehicle for connection rather than exploitation. Cynthia takes the protagonist's camera and photographs her nursing Bijou, saying, "You understand loss, you feel it." This exchange transforms both women from subjects to creators, from passive victims to active witnesses. Photography in this story functions as a form of testimony that refuses to look away from pain while insisting on beauty's persistence alongside it. The protagonist's evolution as a photographer parallels her journey through grief—learning to frame and focus on what matters most, to develop what remains hidden, and to share what might otherwise remain invisible.

Chapter 7: Healing Through Art: The Documentary Project

After witnessing Noah's shooting and experiencing her own losses, the protagonist channels her grief into creating a documentary about mothers whose children have been victims of police violence. This creative undertaking becomes not just professional work but a pathway toward personal healing. "I call the writer and tell her I'm ready to start again. Yes, I still need money. I will find it. I will," she resolves, demonstrating how art requires both emotional commitment and practical persistence. The documentary faces numerous obstacles. When the protagonist's friend Jameson initially offers financial support, his wife Erika discovers old photos revealing their past relationship, causing him to withdraw funding. The protagonist tells her writer to "hold off," yet refuses to abandon the project. Later, Viola provides unexpected financial support, and Erika connects her with additional investors, showing how community can sustain creative work when individual resources falter. Most significantly, the documentary creates a connection with Noah's mother, Cynthia. Initially reluctant to be interviewed, Cynthia eventually welcomes the protagonist into her home. During their conversation, Cynthia recognizes her as Noah's photography teacher rather than the "cousin" who had been visiting him in the hospital. Instead of anger, she offers understanding: "I hate that what you're doing—this film you're making—has to be done. But I'm grateful that it's you who's doing it... You understand loss, you feel it." The documentary becomes a form of witness that honors both individual stories and collective trauma. When Cynthia explains Noah's daily routine caring for his sister, she adds, "I don't speak about how wonderful Noah was—which he was, by the way—to create some tale of a humble boy... He could have had the worst grades, spit in his sister's milk, been on the corner doing God knows what, and he still wouldn't have deserved what happened to him." This testimony transforms Noah from symbol back to human, insisting on his value beyond narratives of exceptional Black youth. For the protagonist, the project creates purpose from her intersecting griefs—the losses of her parents and sister, her miscarriages, and her connection to Noah. It allows her to use her privilege as an artist to amplify stories society often silences. When she changes the working title from "TBD" to "Love in the Present Tense," we see her evolution from documenting absence to affirming presence, from witnessing death to celebrating life alongside grief. Through this creative process, the protagonist demonstrates how art can transform personal pain into collective meaning. Her documentary becomes a form of resistance that refuses both forgetting and exploitation, insisting instead on bearing witness to difficult truths while honoring the humanity of those who live them.

Summary

Between memory and hope lies the blue hour of grief—that liminal space where we are neither who we once were nor who we will become. The protagonist's journey through pregnancy loss, racial violence, and fractured family bonds reveals how healing rarely follows a linear path. Instead, it spirals back through our wounds, requiring us to revisit pain while gradually integrating it into a new understanding of ourselves. Her evolution from a woman who feels "dismembered" to one who can declare "I deserve her... I deserve a family" demonstrates how self-forgiveness becomes possible when we stop running from our emotions and instead allow them to transform us. The most profound insight emerges through the protagonist's parallel journeys of motherhood and artmaking. Both require vulnerability, perseverance through failure, and faith in an uncertain future. As she tells her therapist, "I know your life's worth is something you've never had to consider, but our child will." This awareness—that loving others means accepting our inability to fully protect them—applies equally to bringing children into the world and creating art that witnesses its brutality. Through her documentary project and her relationship with Bijou, she discovers that meaningful creation always involves risk: the risk of loss, the risk of imperfection, the risk of seeing and being seen in our most vulnerable states. Yet within these risks lies the possibility of connection across differences, of beauty amid destruction, and of hope within grief—a blue hour that contains both endings and beginnings.

About Author

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Vicki Righettini

Originally from Los Angeles, Vicki Righettini lived in Oregon for over twenty years, where she developed an abiding love of the land and the Oregon way of life. She is an award-winning, nationally produced playwright, as well as a retired singer-actress. She currently lives in San Diego with her husband and the world's shyest cat. The Blue Hour is her first novel.

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