‘Hey Anna, honey?’ she said.

I looked up. ‘Yeah?’

‘Look out for yourself while you’re here, okay? Promise me?’

‘Um, okay?’

Leonie looked at me for a moment longer, and then she turned and was gone.

I stood at the still-open kitchen window and watched Leonie’s car tear out of the driveway and speed off down the road. Bette still snored behind me. I pulled my hood up on my head, picked up my phone and stepped into the cold wind of outside. I could make a new plan. Of course I could. No doubt it would be disconcerting: any change would introduce new uncertainties, which was never a good thing as far as I was concerned, but my original plan simply hadn’t factored in a place like this. My original plan had been perfect, and now, because of this place, it wasn’t. There would be a clinic in Melbourne I could book into. I’d need to research hostels. It would be expensive, but maybe that couldn’t be helped. And, of course, when I found reception to do those things I would communicate with Nassim too. I wouldn’t just leave it like that. I wasn’t that sort of person. I couldn’t just vanish on him. That would be cruel.

I should have written a note. I should have ended it properly yesterday, before I left.

The gravel sounded like pulses of static under my feet as I walked across it. I held my phone out in front of me. Nothing. No bars. Through the fence the ground turned squishy and uneven, pockmarked by a thousand sheep’s hooves. I waved my phone about above my head. For a moment one tiny bar flickered, and then disappeared, not to be lured out of hiding again.

No reception. Nothing but me and here.

And I just really didn’t know whether that was a reprieve or a sentence.

10

Yesterday. Only yesterday. Only one day between here and then.

Only yesterday, in the early dark, that I had physically untangled myself from Nassim’s sleeping body and crept downstairs to where my case and backpack were already packed and stowed away in the hall cupboard, my clothes for the day of travel folded on top of them.

Only yesterday that I had lain next to him before getting up, basking in the warm, near bulk of him, listening to his restful breathing – a rhythm I rode like something elemental, like the pulsing of waves on a beach.

Only the night before that, with both my parents away, that I had agreed to him staying over, perhaps wondering if in fact I might tell him everything.

Only yesterday that I had failed to wake him up and tell him anything at all.

One of Nassim’s arms was underneath me, the other curled over the top. He had snored, despite promising not to. I was lying awake in the dark, looking at my memento mori where it was hanging above my desk, gleaming in the light from the streetlamp, Nassim’s handwriting just visible in the bottom right corner, a quote from our favourite song. Let’s love now before the flesh leaves our bones.