Seeing Max had been harder than he’d anticipated, dredging up feelings and memories he didn’t want. Friendship-boyhood-adventure-fishing-drinking-weddings – Hanna.

Hanna. Always her.

He closed his eyes and she filled his head again. Flash of blonde. Pale skin. Blue eyes. Blackness. The last thing he saw and the first thing he saw. Blue eyes crying. Pale skin. Blonde . . .

His mind stopped, automatically rewound. Flash of blonde. Pale skin. Blue eyes crying. The last thing he saw. Blue eyes crying . . .

He stared at the ceiling, feeling his heart pound like it was going to burst from his chest, his body held captive to his mind, pain spearing through him as he lay rigid on the mattress while the memories played on and on in a loop – successive, continual. Stuck. Blue eyes crying. Blackness. The last thing he saw.

Blue eyes crying. Blackness.

Blue eyes crying. Black.

Blue eyes crying. Black.

Blue eyes crying.

. . .

Black car.

Ingarso, Stockholm archipelago, 25 June 2012 – midnight

She lay in his arms, both of them watching the full moon drift slowly above, framed by the almost perfect circle. The crater walls were ragged and frilled like a jellyfish, the dark water glimmering darkly just a few metres from their feet, hissing into the sand in rhythmic breaths.

She had already been in the water when he’d arrived, her skin so pale she could have been a mermaid. They had swum, they had chased and they had succumbed, over and over. Those years of abstinence, of doing the right thing, had done nothing to dull their appetite for one another; on the contrary, they had heightened it and he understood what a half-life he had walked through till now, thinking it could be enough to inhabit the periphery of her world.

They watched the sky brighten with every breath and he felt a spasm of panic. The sun was winning the fight, painting up the day and drawing her back. Away from him.

‘I want to freeze time,’ she whispered, holding him more tightly again, reading his mind. ‘I want to make this the day and not the night.’

He kissed her lips, knowing wishes didn’t come true. He was a realist. He knew that she could never be his, not truly. It was an unwinnable fight. ‘So do I.’

She looked up at him with self-reproach. ‘. . . I left it too late, didn’t I?’

He bit his lip. They had both been too late, permanently behind the clock from the start. ‘You tried to do the right thing. We both did.’

She looked up at him, knowing what he was saying. For all her fighting talk about leaving, she was trapped. They both knew she had too much to lose now. ‘I will tell him one day. When it feels . . . safe. It won’t always be like this, I promise.’

‘No, I want you to promise it will be,’ he said, stirring and shifting on top of her again. ‘I want you to promise it will always be like this.’