My voice is small as I call quietly into the darkness.

“Jon?”

The silence is so loud the emptiness is almost like a reply.

“Jon?”

The beam from the lighthouse is approaching. I’m terrified of what it might reveal, terrified of it showing me Jon bloodied and unmoving, his eyes open, forever gripped by the shock of his death. The light tracks across sharp black rocks, their surfaces pockmarked with barnacles and drenched in seaweed. I see the sand around him first, splattered red with blood from where he fell. The human bulk of him in this hard place makes me cry out, a sound I haven’t heard before, and I run towards him. I kneel in the wet sand but I can’t touch him. Not yet. He’s as still as the hard rocks underneath him. One of his legs is bent at the knee, kicking up towards his hip at the front, the wrong way. His arms look like they’ve been stretched away from his body and then flung back; they sag around him, making his clothes look empty. I can’t see where the blood is coming from. His eyes are closed, thank God, but his face is strangely empty, as though he’s already left his body. My hand shakes as I stroke it against the cold skin on the back of his hand.

“Jon,” I whisper again and again, as though trying to call him back from wherever he’s gone. My tears fall and wet his face. Without warning his cheek twitches as one of my tears splashes just below his eye. But it’s dark so I can’t be sure. Another falls and again he seems to wince, as though my tear is adding to his pain. He makes a low gargling sound, like the breath itself is trying to decide whether it should stay with him or move on. Blood trickles from the side of his mouth as the gargle becomes a word.

“Grace,” he says. His eyelids ripple, he tries to cough against the blood in his mouth. “It was Grace.”

I wipe my own tears from his face, say his name again, but Jon doesn’t respond.

26

Jon

Six months later

The trees tracing the edge of the football pitch glow orange in the winter sun and the ref’s whistle blows as Ruth helps me out of the car.

“It’s started!” I say, wanting her to hurry, but she’s fussing with my laces. I wish she wouldn’t. It’s not like I notice whether they’re done up or not. Ruth senses my impatience.

“Don’t rush me!” she says. Without looking up she taps my knee and I smile down at her blond head. It’s good, this gentle teasing, it feels like a milestone. Ruth was the first person I saw when I came out of my coma; she barely left my side for two weeks. Whenever I tried to talk about us, apologize for being a twat, she’d kiss my forehead and tell me to shush.