He wasn’t sure if that carried a question in its inflection, it was a repeat to allow his brain time. He needed some time. Diazepam did that. He couldn’t tell her he had no gun. He had no gun. He couldn’t do that. He made the decision then that he would never tell her that. He would not tell her that.

‘I did it for you Ever because of how I feel about you.’

There was a silence between them.

‘I love you.’

There was another silence.

One that he could not fill with the expected response, not because he didn’t feel anything, it was just rare that people said that to him. And he felt its rarity: its sinking in to his core.

‘I love you Ever. That is all that matters to me and I will take with me, to my God, the horror of what I did and I will face that and take full responsibility for that. I did it because I love you.’

That time of saying, her eyes had opened and the blue from them spread into the room and into his eyes; tears appeared from his ducts at the corner of his eyes, but did not run down his face; he said what he truly felt from the bottom of his heart, and maybe his soul had arrived to lend support.

‘I love you.’

Then the tears ran, at a pace, to escape his eyes: find a freedom in a world that was less painful.

They looked at each other, a smile did not physicalise, it did not need to. It lived deep inside, in another time and place; in a realm of feeling that took them away from the limitations of this existence.

These walls, the building, the town, the desert and the world.

She was on a silver screen with him and they were both in the sky with the stars.

The silence went on without effort, their hands joined with their hearts and their eyes. A tear moved tentatively out of Lomita’s right eye, shyly making its way down her face as if it were the first time it had ever left home.

It was a tear she expelled with a different feeling from all the other tears that had rolled on the same journey.

It was a slow and contemplative tear.

And they sat and sat, they had sat and sat so many times in their lives in modes of contemplation, isolated and alone; now in harmony in the same thought, with contentment and purity of love.

Ever wished their relationship had remained pure and had not been consummated; but then their physical connection had made them one in their understanding of how their lives could have been, it had shaped them to meet and end their days together.

*

Because that is what they’re facing: this is the end of it all.