Leo was smiling.

Not as much as Caroline, but then Caroline was smart enough to hide it, and Leo was too focused on her chest to care anyway. His face had flushed red beneath his tawny-brown freckles, red as the sky Marie had looked up at that morning as she willed herself up above the cold earth she stood on and above even the yellow sun she had once found beautiful. Marie couldn't remember when she'd let the sky go – it was so long ago now she wondered whether Leo had taken it away.

Caroline looked beautiful, and that was perhaps what sat in the back of Marie's mind and made her hate her the most, hated the dark chignon that sat so perfectly at the nape of her pearly-white neck and the bow-like lips that curved up into a knowing smile until it was all Marie could do to run a tentative hand through her own mousy curls.

Now the sky too was white, and it was white that surrounded her then and it was white that surrounded her now, but a different kind of white that was suffocating and large and made her feel more like she was dying beneath it. It was the white hand of Caroline that she felt rest against her knees, burning through the cotton in her tights and against her tired skin. She felt her heart fall again, but this time she couldn't blame it on the doctors, because Caroline was very real, and it was so beautifully easy to pretend cancer wasn't real if she squeezed her eyes shut and pretended. Still the hand remained, and hot tears formed beneath Marie's eyelashes as Leo's deep chuckles pierced the room and she realised her fingers were shaking beneath the hem of her dress, every ounce of her being beginning to hate.

It was then the burning stopped, and it was then she heard the sweetly accented voice of Caroline in her ear.

"I am thinking, Oscar, it is time to leave."