She can feel it slipping, the grip she has on this reality. It's like trying to hold onto fine grains of sand but she can't keep her fingers close enough together, the minuscule granules falling through the cracks as the water laps at their bodies. The only part of her that feels like it belongs to her is the warmth that burrows at her back. The heat of his breath pressing through her shirt as the lake beyond moves out of focus. She doesn't need to see it to have the image pressing in on her. Elena's hair billowing around her as she sinks to the bottom. Her eyes open without seeing. The hands that reach for somebody to help, but nobody comes.

Her body seems to shrink in on itself, as if she can minimise the hurt by taking up less space, Rose desperate to hold back the storm of emotion that she’s sure will rip her apart. The gentle rock of her body continues, sending ripples across the water and though she feels the tremble of limbs set in, she doesn’t fully register the shaking is coming from her.

“Don’t…” It’s soft, almost like a plea but it comes too late, his words echoing in her head and filling up all the space between the shadows. She knows it. Perhaps she’s known it from the moment she’d set off running, had known that wanting and wishing for something to be so, wouldn’t actually make it happen. It’s not that she wants him to lie, to give her mind something to cling to, but more that she’s not ready to accept the truth yet, to feel another part of herself get cut away when it feels like she’s already missing too much

“Please.” Her lip trembling as she manages to squeeze out that word. A word that has almost never passed her lips, because Rose has almost never asked anyone for anything.