He has always felt at home at Francesca’s, his body falling into a level of relaxation that didn’t happen anywhere else, but now it feels different.

It feels wrong.

The cream fabric couch pops with yellow cushions, a light grey carpet swallows each footstep with its deep pile. George tries to imagine Archie in this room, but he can’t.

‘You okay?’ Francesca places a tumbler of water on the glass table in front of him. She doesn’t like hot drinks near the couch. Will it really be so different living with her to living with Leah? Suddenly, it all feels frighteningly real. No longer only the distraction of sex, a loving touch from a gloveless hand, but in a bills-to-pay, meals-to-make kind of way.

‘I got a text from Leah.’

‘What does she say?’ Francesca’s eyes are bright with tears. She’s finding this as difficult as George.

‘I haven’t opened it.’ George knows Leah will have found the goodbye note by the bed, opened his wardrobe to find only empty hangers. He’d taken the coward’s way out and he was ashamed. Leah deserves better than this. Archie deserves better than this. Already he misses them both with a ferocity that hurts. He loves Leah. He loves her so much.

‘I think I’ve made a mistake.’ George begins to cry.

Chapter Sixty-Four

Leah

Now

Oh God, no. Please no.

She’s dead.

I know this with certainty but it doesn’t stop me shaking her shoulders.

‘Wake up,’ I whisper loudly. ‘Please. Wake up.’

She doesn’t.

She can’t.

My fingers stray to her wrist, fumble to find a pulse that isn’t there. My head drops to her chest but there is no thump-thump-thump of her heart.

Yet I still can’t quite accept it.

‘Wake up. Please. You have to.’ I shake her shoulders once more before I sit back on my heels, my eyes trained on her face that still looks beautiful to me.

It’s as though my heart has been ripped from its cavity and I claw it back, clutching it to my chest, not ready to give into the numbness that whispers that it’s hopeless. That everything was always leading up to this. I was too late to save her and I am too late for…

‘Archie!’ I openly scream his name now, picturing him hiding somewhere, eyes screwed up tight the same as when he has a middle-of-the-night nightmare. The lifeless face of his aunt forever etched on his tender young mind. How will he ever recover from this?

‘Archie!’ My arms windmill wildly as I rummage through the rubbish, terrified I’ll feel a limb. A skull. Hair. But there’s nothing. He isn’t here. It is both a relief and a disappointment.

I stand, but I catch sight of her again and my paper-doll legs veer out of control. I sway wildly.

‘I’ll be back,’ I whisper to ears that can no longer hear. Reluctant to tear my gaze away from her glassy eyes that will never again see the beauty in the world.