Poppy looks at him then at me and she goes limp in my arms as we realise that we can’t say goodbye. She can’t kiss me or tell me that she loves me. I can’t tell her to wait for me, that I’ll find her on New Year’s Eve. All I can do is watch as she takes the few steps towards Charon, her hair roaring red in the moonlight.

‘Am I dead?’ she asks when he reaches for her hand.

He nods.

‘How?’

‘Aneurysm.’

I’ve never heard him speak before. I thought his voice would be as deep as a roll of thunder, but it’s light.

Almost gentle.

She turns and runs back to me and for one mad moment I think that she’s going to refuse to go with him, that she’s going to cling to me and beg to stay. But she stops in front of me and slips the ring from her thumb – the silver one with the red heart-shaped stone with a dagger going through it – and presses it into my palm.

‘You said that you weren’t going anywhere,’ she whispers and I remember the promise I made to her in the back of the cab that afternoon, before the driver kicked us out. ‘And you didn’t.’

Never, I think, curling my hand around her ring.

She smiles at me one last time and I want to tell her, tell her to wait for me, that I’ll find her, but Esen’s right.

It’s not fair to give her hope.

But at least I have enough for the both of us.

That’s when I realise that the rain has stopped and everything is still again as I think about Poppy’s aneurysm. This bright red dot on the limitless cosmic canvas of her brain that we didn’t even know was there until it popped.

She sneaks another look at me as she gets in the boat, and when she sits down, she looks like the woman in that John William Waterhouse painting she likes so much. The Lady of Shalott, I think it was called. She’s sitting in the same way, her back straight and her chin up looking out towards the horizon, her hair quivering in the breeze as Charon gets in and the curved wooden boat begins moving towards the moon.

I watch until she’s gone.

Eleven Months Later