Like I said, there’s something about that moment. Everything – all those things you did and didn’t do and said and didn’t say – falls away and you see everything with absolute, startling clarity. People go their whole lives waiting for that moment. They climb mountains and swim seas and read books hoping to find it. A lucky few do, but most of us – people like me and Alice Anderson and all the ones who went before us and all the ones that will follow – don’t until it’s too late and, God, it’s cruel, isn’t it? How, when there’s no time left, you suddenly know exactly what you should have done with it.

When Alice lifts her chin to look me in the eye for the first time since she found me standing here, I wait and wonder if this is it. She knows and it will come out in a rush. All the things she should have done. The lies she told and secrets she kept. She can’t take it with her, so she’ll leave it with me. Everything she wished for when she blew out her birthday candles. I’m there and this is it, her last chance to say I’m sorry or I love you or Forgive me.

All the times she should have jumped and didn’t. All the people she should have kissed and didn’t. All that time she wasted being too careful or too polite or too scared when, in the end, nothing is as scary as watching your whole life narrow to a single moment that’s about to pass, whether you’re ready for it to or not.

Maybe I’ll see it then – the regret – burning off her, right through her clothes, and she’ll never look so alive. She’ll laugh and cry and scream, exhaust every emotion until there’s nothing left and it will be like watching a light bulb flare then burn out.

Alice doesn’t do any of that, though. She doesn’t tell me her secrets, doesn’t tell me about her dog, Chester, who sleeps at the bottom of her bed at night. Or about the lipstick she stole from Boots last year, the red one that wouldn’t come off, even when she scrubbed it so hard her mouth felt bruised for days.