Turning on the tap, water cascades over my fingers until the temperature is cool enough to drink. I replace my fingers with the jug, watching it swill and fill up to the top. I wonder when her parents died. How she felt, suddenly on her own, how she feels. Has she adjusted? Can you ever? Maybe I’m overthinking it. It must have been loneliness. In that house with her ageing parents, what life could she have had? She’d said once it was her duty to stay at home, to care for them. Why? Now that her ‘duty’ was finished, was her life worth ending when effectively it had just begun? When Dad left, it was me, Mum and our David. The three of us. When I moved out, it was sort of inevitable David would stay. An unspoken agreement. He was younger than me; he didn’t feel the urge to cut the apron strings like I had. Even when he got together with Michelle, he made no move to leave. He just seemed better at home. Secure. It’s funny – now I think back, I remember seeing him chat to Susan. He’d shown her a photo, something on his phone, and she’d quietly laughed. I remember now, in that moment, thinking that maybe he’d turned a corner. That maybe it was okay he stayed at home. That Susan was okay, however quiet she seemed. But if she did try to end things, she couldn’t have been happy. And neither could he.

What drives someone to opt out like that?

I splash brain-freezingly cold water across my face, armour up and fight the wandering thoughts away. Jug full, I head back to Susan. We couldn’t help David in the end. But that doesn’t mean it’s always a lost cause, does it?

Chapter Eight

SUSAN

‘Pass us your cup,’ he says, his arm outstretched. The water ripples just slightly in the jug. He hands the cup back, gingerly, over full. Water spills as I take it, so desperate am I not to touch him.

‘Sorry,’ he says, his voice more certain than before he disappeared. ‘The shakes and overfill, bad combo.’ He quickly brushes my sheet then wipes and dries his hand on his overalls. I let out a long-held breath to take a sip.

Ice cold trickles from mouth, to tonsils, to throat and then belly. The cold makes me shiver but I drink and drain the lot, holding it up for more. I feel wet around the edges of my mouth; Rhys wipes his own as if he has the ice-water moustache.

‘Thirsty!’ He grins, showing me a tiny sign of the boy he might once have been. ‘Here.’

He pours less this time, passing it back as he reaches to place the jug on my table. I hold the cup in my hands, focusing on the contents until I sip, stop and he takes it from me. ‘There.’ He puts it by the jug, reorganising what little is on my table. I want to reach out and tell him to stop, because, suddenly, his presence is overwhelming. But I can’t, I can’t tell him anything. Well, I could. But I won’t. If I start talking, I make all of this real. I give them a chance to change my mind.