1 - Goodbye Came First
The city glittered beneath Sienna from thirty floors up making London look almost gentle. The Thames curved lazily through the skyline, catching the pale morning sun in fractured ribbons of light. Red buses moved like toy models across distant bridges. The hum of traffic was reduced to a soft, indistinct murmur behind the thick glass of the office windows.
Inside, the world was all chrome and glass and muted ambition. Keyboards clacked. Phones rang in polite, well-bred bursts. The scent of expensive coffee lingered in the air. Conversations hummed in low, measured tones about deadlines, deliverables, and quarterly forecasts.
Sienna barely noticed any of it.
She sat at her desk, laptop open, an article draft pulled up on the screen. Her job was to write and edit features for a large digital publication. Lifestyle pieces, interviews, cultural commentary, that sort of thing. The kind of work that required polish and pace rather than passion. It paid well enough to keep her afloat in London, to justify the long hours and the constant pressure to stay relevant.
Her fingers moved swiftly across the keyboard, her reflection faintly mirrored in the sleek screen. Brown hair twisted into a neat low bun. Smart blouse. Composed expression. The version of herself she had carefully constructed over the years.
She was good at this. Efficient. Reliable. Focused.
She reached for her coffee without looking, took a measured sip, and kept typing. Around her, colleagues moved between desks, heels clicking against polished flooring. Someone laughed near the printers. A manager strode past with purposeful urgency.
Life continued at its usual pace.
And then her phone rang.
It wasn’t the desk phone, that sound was sharp and professional.
This was softer. Personal. The vibrations against the wood of her desk felt louder than it should have.
She frowned.
No one called her mid-morning unless it was important.
Her eyes dropped to the screen.
Unknown caller.
Her stomach dropped with it.
There was no logical reason for the cold rush that flooded her veins. No reason for the way her fingers suddenly felt numb. But something inside her tightened, a deep, instinctive pull… like the moment before a storm breaks, when the air shifts and birds fall silent.
She knew.
She didn’t know how, or why, but she knew.
The world around her kept moving. Chairs scraping. Printers whirring. Someone asking about lunch plans.
But everything felt slightly further away.
She stared at the screen for one heartbeat too long.
Then she answered.
“Hello?”
Her voice sounded distant to her own ears.
There was static on the line. A breath. A voice she vaguely recognised – Dr John Hart, from the village she grew up in. Soft. Professional.
“Hi, is this Sienna Cartwright?”
Her pulse roared in her eyes. “Yes…”
“I – I’m so sorry to be the one telling you…”
The words blurred. They came in pieces, detached and floating.
“This morning…”
“Peacefully…”
“She didn’t suffer…”
“Your grandmother…”
Her brain rejected them. Pushed them away as if they were in a foreign language.
“I spoke to her last night,” Sienna heard herself say. Her voice was thin. Childlike. “She was fine. She was telling me about the hydrangeas. She said the fox had been back in the garden.”
There was a pause on the other end. The kind of pause that confirms everything.
“I am sorry, Sienna, she passed in her sleep…”
Passed.
Such a small word. So polite. So neat.
Dead would have been easier. Dead was solid. Dead was real.
Passed sounded like she’d stepped into another room and forgotten to come back.
Sienna’s grip tightened on the phone.
“No,” she whispered.
The office lights felt too bright. The room too sharp.
“She was fine.”
Her vision blurred. Not with tears yet… but the edges of the world were smudging.
“…the coroner would need to come and investigate… It was quick… She wouldn’t have known…”
Quick.
Wouldn’t have known.
Sienna couldn’t comprehend any of it.
Her chest had gone tight. Too tight. As if something invisible had wrapped around her ribs and was pulling.
The voice on the other end kept speaking. Arrangements. Calling back later. Not being alone.
But the words stopped making sense.
They floated past her like scraps of paper in the wind.
Her nanna.
Gone.
It didn’t fit inside her head.
She had spoken to her last night.
She could see it so clearly… her nanna in her armchair by the window, cardigan buttoned wrong as always, laughing softly about something on the television. Telling Sienna not to work too hard. Asking when she’d come to visit.
“You sound tired, my girl,” she had said.
And Sienna had laughed.
“I’m fine, Nanna.”
Fine.
The phone suddenly felt impossibly heavy in her hand. As if gravity had doubled, tripled. Her fingers trembled.
“I’m so sorry,” the voice repeated.
Sorry.
Sorry meant it was real.
Her hand opened.
The phone slipped from her grip and hit the desk with a dull crack before sliding to the floor.
The sound seemed to echo.
Someone nearby glanced over.
Sienna didn’t notice.
Her chest constricted violently. Air wouldn’t come in. She tried to inhale but it snagged halfway, like breathing through wet cloth.
Her heart pounded too fast. Her head spun.
This can’t be happening.
Not her.
Not Nanna.
She pressed a hand to her sternum as if she could physically hold herself together.
Her only family.
Her last living relative.
Gone.
The word echoed now. Louder. Clearer.
Gone.
The office continued as if nothing had shifted. Phones rang. Someone cursed at a printer jam. A chair rolled across the floor.
How could everything still be moving?
Didn’t the world understand that it had just ended?
Her vision shimmered. Tears gathered, hot and blinding.
She blinked hard.
No.
No, no, no.
Her throat tightened so fiercely it hurt. A strangled sound escaped her – not quite a sob, not yet a cry.
She tried again to breathe.
Nothing.
Panic surged, sharp and electric. Her fingers dug into the edge of her desk. The city skyline outside the window tilted slightly, as though it might fall.
She was alone.
Truly alone.
There would be no more Sunday calls. No more knitted scarves in colours she didn’t like but wore anyway. No more soft reassurances that everything would be alright.
No one left who belonged to her.
The thought cracked something inside her.
And then the breath came.
It tore into her lungs like it had claws.
With it came the sound – raw, broken, animal.
A wail ripped from her chest before she could stop it.
Heads turned.
Chairs scraped.
But Sienna didn’t see them.
She folded forward over her desk as the grief hit in full force – violent, unstoppable and all consuming. Her shoulders shook. Her hands clawed at empty air.
It wasn’t dignified and it wasn’t quiet.
It was the sound of something irreplaceable being torn away.
The London skyline glittered indifferently beyond the glass. Buses continued crossing bridges…
…the river kept flowing…
…and thirty floors above it all, Sienna cried like the world had ended.
Because for her, it had.
