Chasing Picket Fences

How do you compete with the dead? It seemed all too easy for Kayla, grandads new lady, back after my nanny past. But when you're twenty, and the man you love still longs for the girl he lost when he was eighteen, how can you compete? You never get to do the bitchy hatred, because she never screwed him over. She was the love of his life and deep down you know he'll never love you the same. He chose to be with her for life, and her life was cut so drastically short that they never came close. They were engaged. He still wears her ring on a chain around his neck.
I read the reports from that day. It wasn't some self centred masochistic thing, we were all from the same area, and her death rocked the city. I read the article when it first came out, I was there when it was on the telly and my mom sat down a little to quickly muttering "oh God, her poor parents". And the news as sensationalist as ever used the picture of him clinging to her body in the street, tears running down his face, the silent scream forever captured for the archives.
I can't compete with that. Every time his face falls its all I can see, burned into my memory. When we make love I can't get passed the image of him clinging to her. When he cries in his sleep I hear him wishing he could have done something, anything to save her. I don't begrudge her, I really don't, but I regret getting myself into this, not because I don't love him, but because he doesn't love me. It hurts too much knowing that hers is a shadow I can never escape.