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Nicole’s despondency at not finding Cassie at their mother’s grave turns to a sense of alarming panic when she gets back to the Savoy to see lights turning the air blue. There’s no sound of sirens—as if it’s already too late—just a crowd of hysterical teenagers tearfully screaming, “We want Ben!” and “Secret Oktober forever!” Girls lean on one another for support, fearing that if they let go, their grief will see them fall to the floor.

Nicole catches sight of a young girl sitting on the curb with her head on her knees, her shoulders convulsing as she laments the end of the world as she knows it. She looks up, her face stained with tears, as the crowd start up an impromptu rendition of “Souls,” one of the band’s few ballads. It makes her cry even more, the words of lovers passing in the night, evoking the trauma of two people who were once soulmates and now can’t bear to be in the same room together.

“What’s going on?” Nicole asks her, looking at the line of police barricading the front entrance. There’s no way she’s going to be able to get back in there now.

“They’re saying there’s been an accident,” sobs the girl.

Nicole’s brain scrambles as she remembers leaving Ben and Michael at each other’s throats. She’s probably jumping to ridiculous conclusions, letting her overactive imagination get the better of her.

“What’s happened?” she asks, forcing herself to stay calm.

“It sounds really serious—someone said they heard Ben screaming and shouting. There was a girl…”

Cassie.

A burning heat envelopes Nicole’s ears, shutting out the noise and commotion. She knows it’s hearsay at its worst, but she has to know what’s going on. Her whole world might be inside that hotel.

“I need to get in there,” she says, going up to a policeman standing guard.

He smirks, as if she’s a teenage fan chancing her arm. “That won’t be happening,” he says.

“I’m with Ben Edwards,” she says, not only because it’s the truth, but because she wants to test his reaction. A flicker of something crosses his features, as if he momentarily wonders whether she should be apprehended, but it’s gone in a flash.

“So is every other girl here, apparently,” he says with an air of smug superiority.

A siren sounds in the distance, the piercing wail getting closer with every passing second. There’s a collective intake of breath as an ambulance appears at the end of Savoy Place, slowing as it contemplates turning in, but suddenly the accelerator goes down and it continues straight on.

Nicole looks at the four police cars parked at jaunty angles across the front of the hotel and can’t help but feel buoyed by the fact that if there had been an accident, of any kind, then there would most definitely be an ambulance already in attendance—though her op timism is all too quickly extinguished when she realizes that there’s no way they can bring anyone out of this entrance.

With burning lungs, she sprints around the block to the back of the hotel and is horrified to find two ambulances parked up with their blue lights flashing and sirens silenced.

“No!” she gasps, racing toward them.

A policeman sees her coming and holds his hands out in an attempt to stop her from crossing the invisible barrier he’s trying to maintain.

“I need to see,” she shrieks as she pushes past him.

“Now, now, young lady…” he says patronizingly, trying to get hold of the sleeve of her top. “You’ll not be going any farther.”

“Get off me!” she yells, breaking away from him and making a run toward the ambulance that a stretcher is being loaded into.

She stops dead as a robust man with graying temples is huddled out of the back door of the hotel. His face is ashen white and he’s trembling so violently that he can’t keep the blanket on his shoulders. The shock of seeing someone she knows so well in this unfamiliar context takes her brain a second to process.

“Oh my god— Dad! ” gasps Nicole, struggling for breath. “What’s happened?”

She stumbles in a state of confusion, unable to comprehend what he could possibly have done to warrant the handcuffs around his wrists.

It’s only when she rights herself and looks at the stretcher again that she gets her answer. It’s not a casualty being taken to hospital. It’s a body bag being taken to the morgue.