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minutiae of their youngest daughter’s life when she’d needed them most. Both of them were seemingly oblivious of the changes that a young girl goes through because neither had the energy left after the day-to-day, going through the motions of simply living for that. Annie understood that—she really did—but it didn’t make it any easier to take.
    At first, her grief was too painful too touch and so the eleven-year-old she had been was unable to talk about it; she bottled it up and hid it away from her friends. She didn’t want to share it because how could any of them possibly understand what she was going through? Not when they got to go home each night to their own safe, happy little houses where nothing bad happened. Suddenly the normal teenage interests they’d once shared seemed trite and she found herself having to bite her tongue when they’d whittle on about the latest boy band or who was wearing what to whoever’s party. What did it matter? She no longer cared and she soon found that people’s sympathy only stretched so far for so long.
    She could recall just sitting in her sister’s old bedroom; she stared at that print of Santorini and felt like the world was closing in on her. It was only the knowledge reinforced by that print that it was a big wide world with lots to see that stopped it from doing so. More than anything as she lay curled up on Roz’s bed, she wanted to wake up and get back to a normal life but this void she had found herself thrown into was the new norm and it was up to her to find a way to move through it. The time eventually came for her to sink or swim and somehow she managed to swim.
    The first thing she had done the day she decided to tentatively try to dog paddle was to contact her sister’s old pen pal. She didn’t know as she penned that first letter that she herself would form a lasting bond with the girl on the other side of the world. Of course, when Roz and Kassia had been in touch, email didn’t exist and there had been a wodge of handwritten letters still in Roz’s desk. Their lives at opposite ends of the earth had been brought together via a school pen pal program, with a shared birthday their initial common denominator. The two girls’ exchanges had been an innocent recounting of teenage angst and they’d written back and forth regularly throughout high school and beyond. Until, Kassia relayed later, one day her friend who was getting into a new social scene through her job had just stopped writing and she had never known why. She hadn’t known about the drugs, she didn’t know about any of that but through reading their letters, Annie had been provided with an insight into her sister’s life before. That was the way she thought of her now—the Roz before drugs and the Roz after.
    The year of the firsts passed with all the usual anticipated emotional upheaval around each and every significant date. Then the second year passed, a muted version of the first and then the third until one day Annie realised that her mother laughed occasionally and no longer smoked like a train. Her father, too, stood a bit straighter and began to state his opinion a tad more forcefully. As for herself, well, she found herself unwittingly beginning to look forward and not backwards. And so life went on, because although Roz would always be there in their thoughts and forever in their hearts, time, as they say, is a great healer. It allowed them not to get over her death—that would never happen—but rather to learn to live with it.
    Annie blinked the memories away and the screen came back into focus. The time in the bottom corner of the screen blinked midnight. Crumbs, it was getting late . Jazz stretched languidly on her lap, as though sensing his time for snuggling was nearly up. She’d better start winding her letter up if she was going to be fit for work in the morning.
     
    You can picture it, can’t you, and I don’t need to tell you it wasn’t pretty. Even less so