It had always been the words that saved her. They gave her something to hold onto when she felt too little and too weak to go on. But they can’t save her now, nothing can. The violent contractions stopped a long while ago, and the blood, too. She is empty again, emptier than ever before.

She runs through everything in her mind, but her mind doesn’t work the way it usually does, there are vast chunks of nothingness, like black holes thoughts get sucked into and disappear. Is that what it feels like for Kristina? It makes sense that the brain would simply erase what it can’t bear to contain. Supernova. Yes. The big star and the little one, locked together in destruction. The beauty of them burning each other out.

She wants everyone to see these fires. She wants them to watch her burn.

Since the baby went, since she realized what the blatantly obvious answer to everything was, she has read back through everything, all the way up to the end of Supernova, and only the silent blackness of the night ahead remains. It’s time. She’ll send Supernova to Kristina and then she will go to the lake.

Supernova, back to Supernova, she needs to be quick, now. But how? There is no reception, though she has very occasionally been able to catch a faint signal in this newer part of the cabin. She composes the email, using all her remaining strength to sound vaguely coherent. But the document won’t attach, even when she moves around the room, painfully slowly, holding the phone up in the hope of a single bar of reception. By the lake, there’s a patch of occasional reception near the jetty, which is anchored to the surface now by ice. She’ll bring the phone, send the email, then take it with her into the lake.

Just one more thing to write, to be read by whoever comes to Bekkebu next and finds her gone. She starts writing, but keeps stopping, erasing, trying again; the words don’t come out right. Some words she crosses out because she doesn’t mean them.

I’m sorry.

She imagines the dark water of the lake closing over her head like the velvet blackness of the night sky and maybe when she really gives in to the lake and death, the glimmer of stars will reach her all the way down at its bottom. Maybe it will be like a supernova, when death itself is more beautiful than anything in life. She doesn’t want to die, she wants to live, but not this life, the life that can now never be separated from that other life, the lost life.