"I’m sorry," she whispers to the chipped and discoloured tombstones. They don’t answer back, they never do; stripped of their voices, Elena waits in the wings, desperate to hear their voices again, for their laughter, their condemnation. Her heart is in her throat, her clasped hands pressed to the burning skin of her collarbones; grief pools in her gut warmly, heating up, burning her from the inside out. She stares at the row of headstones and feels a long lost ache in her chest where her ability to cry once was.