“Alice.” She says. “You like Alice?” There is a spreading warmth in Dinah’s belly. It is the growing embers that give her confidence, not the cloudless sky nor the stars that come out from hiding. With her bare leg pressed against the stone of the bench, she is not cold.

The garden maze stretches to their left, laughter and clinking champagne glasses behind them in the gaze of the light. People circle in the foyer, toasting the end of the year. Gold chandeliers, marble arches and winding staircase all iconic of the Bennett family legacy.

Dinah takes his silence as an agreement. She stares at a hole in the hedge and the twigs like shark's teeth. “Nothing lasts. Life and its mysteries are fleeting.”

“But some things last.” He replies confidently.

“Do they?”

“I believe so.”

“Like what?”

“I guess…love.”

In their mind it was an unachievable rose sprouting in the distance.  Neither knew about true love. What did they know about this? In a society always changing, diverging, giving up for something easily attained.

For Peter, it is a memory stretched like elastic. “Stop.” He vomits the word out, till it lies bunched on the gravel, waiting for him to rearrange the pieces. Even now he can feel it, past the fabric of his shirt and out, a radiating heat like static whenever he is close to her. When they are play fighting and he holds her for just a moment too long, neither of them pulling away. Peter tries not to romanticise things. But he isn't doing a good job.

“I just thought-” She tries again, but truthfully what is there to say? Nothing without risk of embarrassing herself in front of the fountain and the sky, and those listening in.

“You think I like her? Dinah. If you don't know how I feel about you...” Peter doesn’t tell her that when she had the flu he walked 2 miles from his house to bring her medicine. He had lied about being around the corner. That the day she had fallen asleep on his hoodie he still hadn’t washed it, because it still smelt like her shampoo- all the things that Peter couldn’t describe. The reason why he had waited so long, was just to hold on to those moments; to make them last. Knowing things would never be the same again. How can he explain how nervous he feels? “But there is something I have to ask you-”

Now is the time.

“Peter! There you are! Why don't you come back in?” Giggles Alice, tripping in heels that sink into the muddy grass, spilling alcohol all over. There is lipstick streaked on her cheekbone.

“Alice, go away-” He is watching Dinah, her gigantic eyes like a bush baby taking in what is happening.

Peter wants to kiss her. She has never looked more beautiful than she does now, with her hair pulled up in curls, and the light from the fountain glittering off her lashes, her lips turned down a little at the corners, unsure. Tonight, she is luminescent.  He wants to pull her close, lean forward and taking her face roughly between his hands, kiss her hard. Just do it.

In her mind, Dinah is rugby tackling Alice to the ground, until she lies, dazed in a drunken happiness; an overturned beetle trying to right itself. At first, she mistakes it for her anger. But no, that noise...the rhythmic beat, the clashing of swords and neighing of horses. Hooves, pounding, metal on stone.

Something is coming.

Hurtling down the path, Alex glowers, his eyes losing focus as the shapes shifted before him, people, hedges, all the same. How much had he drunk exactly?

“Well, what do we have here?” Alex’s face is just visible, snarling, a caged beast ready to leap forward. The fine growth of hair on his upper lip reminds Dinah of a pencil smudge. He steps forward and punches Peter, hard.

Her thoughts shatter. “Stop!” She lurches forward across the gravel, an image of his body lying at the bottom of a river while Alex washes the blood from his finger creases. Tony- where is he?

Alex’s frown is chiselled in stone. It is starting to rain, fat dusty droplets that slide from the bark of the trees like beetles. The steel in Dinah's eyes is unwavering as the gravel embeds in the soft flesh of her knees. Alice, cackling like a maniac –

Something is tugging at her weightless body. Amidst the screams and cries, the signs of a struggle; she is towed through the garden maze. For a moment she wonders if she’s blacked out. A fox pads through the garden, frightened by the battle cries that emit from the humans' thirst for blood, but also with the humans' ingenuity for pain. Time passes.

Dinah finds herself wading through water; however hard she fights, she cannot reach beyond, chest heaving, gasping, the icy water freezing every cell…