I wanted to go to Molly, but every time I pushed forward, I was dragged back by someone. I became surrounded by murmurs, and shouts, and the room filled further and further. Then someone attempted to empty everyone out, and that was when Eleanor had tugged on me and urged me to leave. I did not. Then Alfie had appeared, and his face was inches from mine, and he’d locked eyes with me. “Rosie,” he said. “We have to go. Now.”

I didn’t know, then, exactly what was going on. But my brain had formed one clear understanding. Molly was terrified, and Molly was almost within my reach, and I wasn’t leaving without her. So I grabbed the doorframe and gripped it with white knuckles until my friends stopped trying to pry me off. Alfie disappeared then. Eleanor did not.

The room wasn’t dark anymore by that point. I can remember walking toward the bed, and Molly grabbing me, using me to keep herself standing. I remember how badly her hand was shaking. And I remember Oscar’s eyes. They should’ve been looking at me, but there was nothing there.

“We watched him die,” I whisper to Molly.

She looks at me sharply. “Yeah.”

We watched it. He was alive, and then he wasn’t. And there was nothing we could do. Not by the time we found him. One moment he was everything, alive, and smiling, full of worries and hopes and a future. And then he was nothing. Like a lamp switch.

On, then off.

I wanted another chance. I wanted to do it differently, all of it, because it didn’t feel possible that the worst thing, the worst possible thing, could have happened in the span of only a few minutes. It didn’t seem fair, and therefore, it didn’t seem real.

Hasn’t seemed real.

But it is real.

Oscar doesn’t get a life anymore. He’s gone, and I will never speak to him again. Nor will Molly. We will never run into him at a gathering. We can’t send him a message and ask to see him.

There is no him.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t … I can’t … I’m sorry, Molly. I just didn’t … I couldn’t, but, I should have…”

It happened, didn’t it? I watched someone die. Not someone. Oscar. I watched as Molly screamed for him. I stared at his body, only flesh and bone, still warm from the blood that was pumping through it until it wasn’t.

And Molly. God, Molly.

“Then I left you,” I say. “I wouldn’t leave you while it was happening, then I left you after that night anyway.”

“Rose…”

“I just couldn’t think about it,” I say. “I know I needed to, but I couldn’t.”

“I know,” Molly says.