If you sat at the top of the hill overlooking Lake Lima on the 24th of August 2011 and cast your eyes down the steep slope towards the gently lapping water of the tiny bay, you would see the huddled figures of two teenage girls whose bodies were locked together like two pieces of a puzzle.

They were watching the sun setting on the horizon, Brittany Pierce and Santana Lopez, and they were staring over the still waters into the red and orange light like it was some sort of amazing phenomenon, and it didn't happen every night; silent and unmoving. Brittany is stretched out on the stones, her right hand supporting her body weight and thrusting her chest out; her left arm draped over Santana who nuzzles into her side, tears gently running down her cheeks. Brittany strokes her back and she sighs, wrapping her arms around Brittany's waist and sinking so her head rests against the soft pillow of her breast.

"It's okay," you would hear her murmur, idly playing with Santana's long dark hair. "It'll be okay."

"It won't," she whispers back into the fabric of Brittany's t-shirt. "I won't."

"Santana, I'm so sorry –" she begins, before the Latina moans a soft 'no' and Brittany feels the wetness of fresh tears soaking through her top. She doesn't say it very loudly, but Brittany hears and presses her lips tightly together, the sunset filling her eyes as she looks away.

Santana heaves herself up a little straighter so her head leans only on Brittany's shoulder, instinctively clasping her hand and bringing it toward her own chest. "You don't have to be sorry," she says quietly, blinking her eyes free of the tears that blurred her view of the beautiful, beautiful sunset. Brittany stays silent. "It's just life. People leave. Everyone leaves."

If you weren't just a curious stranger perched on a grassy verge watching the interactions of the girls below you, you'd know what they were saying, and if you were either of them, you'd know what Santana was talking about. They were 18 and everything was changing, too much so for her.

"She didn't want to leave, San," Brittany says calmly, and it's true.

"I know that. Everyone keeps saying that. But she did. And there was a whole ceremony about how she left and then we put her in a room and we burnt her, Brittany; and now she's just fucking ashes and I know she's everywhere but she's just ashes, and ashes can't…" her voice trails off as she cries, and Brittany cries a little too. "Why are you crying?" she asks, feeling the wetness on the top of her head from Brittany's cheek.

"Because you're crying,"

"And you're leaving too and now Quinn's leaving and it's not fair," her mouth gapes open with huge, ugly sobs and she gasps for breath, turning her face into Brittany's shoulder.

"I'm sorry," Brittany says simply, trying in vain to focus on the lake in front of her and the light behind it. She imagines swimming through it, right now, feeling the cool water on her skin and washing her tears away and Santana's tears away and the sticky resin of the Lima summer air, and she takes a deep breath to calm down.

"No, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to bring you into this," Santana exhales heavily, and Brittany closes her eyes with relief as she stops sobbing. "And I know my mom didn't want to go anywhere but, but –"

"Cancer's a bitch," Brittany finishes, pulling her best friend closer.

Santana nods, a shaky smile forming on her lips. "I love when you say it… Sounds like it has more meaning…" her sentence drifts away from her as Brittany's own lips crinkle upwards with some small happiness she gains from making Santana feel the tiniest bit better. "But Quinn didn't have to go anywhere." The words burst from her lips faster than she intended, and she's annoyed and ashamed when her cheeks warm and dampen with more angry, different tears.

Brittany pauses before she answers, thinking of what to say next. She could either tell Santana exactly what she thought, which was a garbled mess of 'I know what you're thinking and she shouldn't have left you like that or like this for that matter but you have to understand that it's what she needs to do and if you got in her way you know you'd regret it forever and you shouldn't be that sad because you're the best person I know and you'll find someone else and you can be happy again', or she could present a loosely abridged version to try and get through to Santana and appeal to her sense of rationality. "It's what she needed to do, San. You know that, you know you know, and you know that deep down you want her to go,"

Santana sniffs, the tears driving from her eyes to her cheeks now reaching a steady downpour. "She didn't even say goodbye," her voice breaks and Brittany wants to hold her beautiful face in both her hands and stare her right in the eyes, and tell her that she knows Quinn hates goodbyes and that there's a handwritten letter on the paper that feels expensive between your fingers lying on her bed, and that she'll read it when she gets home and she'll be mad at first, but then she'll really understand why Quinn's going and she'll probably write a letter back and go to sleep with her head heavy from tears and whiskey but then she'll wake up and be on the way to mending. But she can't, because Quinn told her not to say anything when she drove to Brittany's that morning with the letter and a bag of Santana's stuff in her boot, along with her own bags ready for a long haul flight to Oxford.

"She loves you, Santana. She knows you, and she knows that you'll be okay. Life goes on," and Brittany knows that it's only okay to say that because she's Brittany and Santana would never, ever get mad at her.

She's just sad. She's slumped on the ground sadly, her shoulder sagging sadly; her eyes open and staring sadly at Brittany's own. And while such sadness is temporary, it is so consuming and unsurpassable when you're stuck drowning in it that it's all you can do to wave your arms and kick your legs and hope that something tugs you to shore where you can lie panting and grateful, and alive.

"Man, I'm sorry, Britt," Santana brings her forearm to her face and almost angrily wipes it free of tears. Brittany just takes her wrist and holds it, her fingers splaying easily around the jutting bone. "I'm sorry you're stuck here with me – I shouldn't have drunk anything, you know how it gets… You should be at home, packing or something…"

"San, I basically live at yours," Brittany reminds her, still gripping the Latina's wrist. If she didn't she wouldn't have known that Santana was late back from Quinn's, and she wouldn't have known that there was a bottle of her father's whiskey missing from 'the whiskey cupboard' and she wouldn't have known where to find Santana's car keys when she saw that her mother's old Lexus was missing. She still would have known where to find her, though; because she knew everything about her. "And I've been packed since last week, you know that. You're packed too, remember?"

"We're all leaving, Britt." Santana sits up a little straighter, pulling her arm away from Brittany's and pressing her thumbs to her eyes, smudging her makeup to the very edge of her face. "Like, we're all properly leaving. Everything's changing," she says, her voice stronger than it was before but still thick and uncertain.

"We don't have to change," Brittany says, and she means it.

Santana laughs, low and empty. "We don't have to, but we will," she raises her hand when Brittany opens her mouth to protest, continuing in the same sad tone. "Britt, don't look at me like that. It's true."

Brittany shakes her head, slowly, in disbelief. "San, don't be so negative. 16 years is a long time to have the same best friend by your side, and – no, you let me finish – and I don't believe that number means nothing to you. You can't say you're just giving up."

"I'm not giving up. Three thousand is a pretty meaningful number, too. No, two thousand, nine hundred and four point nine because that's roughly how far –"

"Julliard is from Stanford. I know." Brittany hangs her head, muttering her words. She hated when Santana was pessimistic and all one-track minded. It's her nature and Brittany accepts that but it's so tiring, working to convince another person when you're only halfway to convincing yourself. "It doesn't mean we can't carry on."

Santana sighs from the very bottom of her lungs, and the subject is considered closed. If they don't talk about it, it's not real; that's the unspoken mutual agreement they've come to of late. The sun has all but disappeared by now, and the sky is one that's cloud-free and twinkling with the light of an unimaginable amount of stars; so they lie back at the exact same time and take one another's hand while the stars are reflected and shining in their eyes. A silence shrouds them as they stretch serenely on the shore, and neither of them knows how long it is since they've been looking up.

"They're beautiful," Santana says at last, using her free hand to point up at the sky. "Ursa Major, and Ursa Minor. They're like us," she murmurs into the darkness.

"But you hate stars, San."

"I don't hate the stars. I hate how they're so far away that by the time we can see them they're already dead. I hate how not even something that watches over everything and knows everything is able to offer permanence," she replies flatly, lazily pointing out more constellations. "Andromeda, Scutum, Cygnus." Her mother was into stargazing, and they used to lie in the garden on summer nights and she would show them all the different patterns made in the sky. Brittany could never remember them and stopped trying after the third time, instead basking in the glory of the universe, while Santana's tongue poked out from her lips as she concentrated fervently on remembering each and every constellation her mom taught her.

"Is that one Delphinus?" Brittany ventures, pointing to a star to their far north.

Santana smiles and Brittany can hear it in her voice. "Yeah. How did you know?"

"You told me, of course," and Santana shuffles a little closer so they can feel each other's heartbeats.

"There's my legacy," she breathes lightly, squeezing Brittany's hand. "I'm so happy I have you, Britt. This is perfect – well, none of this is perfect," she continues, waving her hand above them for emphasis as she talks. It's a European thing, she would tell Brittany; when she finished a particularly impassioned speech and Brittany was just sat giggling at the bizarre movements of her hands to go with her words. "But this – you and me, our whole thing – this, is perfect."

"I love you," Brittany whispers back, letting out an inadvertent sad little whimper because Santana's talking like it's all ending.

"So here's the thing. I've wanted to ask you for ages, actually…" Brittany waits as Santana takes a deep breath before opening her mouth to speak again. "Would you marry me?"

"I –"

"I know you're not gay, silly. That's not what I'm saying. If neither of us are married by the time we're forty, will you marry me?"

"Can we make it thirty seven?"

Santana knows by now not to ask Brittany why. "Yeah, of course."

"Then yes. Santana Marie Lopez, I will marry you. I'll marry my best friend in twenty years' time and our house can have a designated duck room for our kids."

Santana giggles. "Promise? Pinky promise?"

"All the promises in the world, apart from the ones made by politicians."

Santana laughs again and the sound is so lovely that Brittany joins in, and the little waves lap against the shore like they're laughing too; and the stars twinkle a little brighter like they're laughing; like they know something.

Life happened. It happened for both of them; life in its strange habit of just being there and continuing while you're busy trying your very best to work out what's going on.

For Santana, life was an honour in a law degree from Stanford University and a nervous 22 year old moving to a completely new city alone. San Francisco, she figured, was the perfect place for her. It was a city, sure; and a fucking brilliant one, but it was softer than New York or Los Angeles and she fell in love with it almost instantly. There was something in the air, she concluded one night, sat on her balcony with a glass of red wine and a cigarette. Something in the air she breathed seeped into her blood and beat through her heart and mind and somehow, everything was better.

And so she lived. She lived with her college roommate and best friend, Peter – who she would look at and see a strange mixture of Kurt and Blaine in his love for fashion and flamboyancy and his love too for boxing and tinkering with things around the apartment – for four more years, being young and carefree and successful. Dating a string of women (mainly blondes); mainly lasting about three or four months. She was hot and there were plenty of beautiful women to go around, so why settle down? They were often the best looking people in the hundreds of bars they went to and they had their pick, Santana with her long dark hair and sultry dark eyes and Peter with his cheekbones and classic Greek looks; she'd be lying if she said they didn't mess around.

Quinn loved Peter, and so did Mercedes. Quinn came over at Thanksgiving and Christmas and often over summer, so they would meet in Lima, and then she would spend a lot of her time in California with her new British girlfriend who reminded Santana of a slightly blazed and mellowed Rachel Berry; and at first it stung a little – just a little – when she saw Quinn running toward her in the airport followed by a midget brunette who was carrying her bag for her, but she got over it, and Quinn was her maid of honour six years later. She saw a lot of Mercedes – and by proxy, Sam - who would drive to the beach when she wasn't working, and stop in to see Santana on the way. Perhaps she and Mercedes weren't the closest in high school, but it was like some sort of unspoken agreement was in place so they could gossip and catch one another up on the latest happenings with their old friends. It was nice, and Mercedes was blunt and sassy and made Santana laugh like a malfunctioning drain with her anecdotes about Kurt and Rachel during the time she had spent with them in New York.

It was a case of work hard, play hard. She worked her ass off for all the things she had, like a nice – albeit drunkenly purchased - Porsche with the number plate P3T3 5AN and a nice fucking apartment in downtown San Francisco. Work was good, too. Hard sometimes, but she was ultimately glad she had chosen the right thing for her to do. She was a defence attorney, and it had been said that she was one of the best in the country. Well, state. It was comfortable, and she was happy. And when everything else is going right, the only natural thing to do would be to meet someone, and settle down, and have a family.

So she did. It wasn't deliberate, but some things just creep up on you. Isabella was half Russian, beautiful, a struggling journalist-turned-teacher; a blues singer and pianist on the side. Santana was drunk when they met. Drunk, standing on a table singing Etta James, while Isabella stared at her and missed the big piano bridge because of her legs. That was when she was 26, and Isabella pursued her for about six months, catching her on her 27th Valentine's Day with a candlelit dinner and a moonlit serenade; and in that moment she felt so wanted and so happy she burst into tears. She took Isabella to Lima with her on her 27th Thanksgiving (and her dad said then he knew then it was serious), and around her 28th birthday Peter announced he was moving in with his boyfriend and he had already taken the liberty of inviting Isabella to move in to their apartment in his place. He had a habit of doing things like that, and Santana often wondered how long it would have taken her to ask Isabella herself. It was like she understood, Isabella, and that was why she stuck around for so long. They were crazy similar, Quinn would point out with an unspoken question lingering in her hazel eyes on her annual visit, and Santana would flip her off with a roll of her eyes and remand her for being jealous.

It was Santana who proposed. It wasn't eloquent or calm and it didn't even make much sense. The auditorium shit Finn had pulled with Rachel back in high school always dwelled in the back of her mind as she tossed and turned in bed, and she came to the eventual decision that it was the only thing special enough for Isabella, with whom she was completely in love with. But it ended up a disaster, and Santana could only garble the words as they ran across a park with police sirens blaring in their ears. She didn't even get to sing. But Isabella said yes, and Santana's hands tangled in her blonde hair as they lay side by side in a ditch, kissing like they would never get another chance to.

They both wore lovely white dresses, and Quinn wore a red maid of honour halterneck with Peter wearing a matching red suit. She got the wedding she had always dreamt of. The only factor she hadn't incorporated was the attendance of every single member of the old Glee club (apart from Brittany), who insisted on providing the entertainment for a good half of the night. Secretly, she loved it. Kurt and Rachel performed the song Isabella chose for their first dance; coincidentally, a stripped down version of I Want to Hold Your Hand (Santana cried because her mom would have loved be there) and Blaine played the piano.

Blaine played the piano at the christening of their daughter Evelyn, too. In all ways she was the spitting image of her mami, with the exception of her bright blue eyes which belay the eastern-European ancestry of her mama's family. Santana carried Evelyn when she was 29 with donor sperm from a brother of Isa's who lived out in Colorado and functioned as 'the best uncle'. Santana was happy to accept this, and Isa was happy their child wouldn't be all 'Hispanic and dark broody eyes'. Isa was so busy with work at the time that it simply wasn't practical for her to get pregnant, so Santana gave up her job and focussed instead on balancing soda cans on her growing belly.

It was a huge apartment and two Porsches bought with two sizeable incomes, it was a sparky little girl who amazed Santana more and more every day, it was two gay godfathers and a piano in every room; it was house hunting and tiny booties and sleepless nights. It was stressful. It was hard. It was perfect.

When Santana was 32 and Evie was three and Isa was 30, a thick letter through the post changed everything. Santana had taken up the mantle of the stay-at-home-mom, and loved it, and Isa had taken up the mantle of breadwinner, and loved it. But it meant that Isa was able to progress and discover and change in ways Santana simply couldn't, and it meant that Isa was offered a permanent gig in New York City at the Smoke jazz and blues club having applied in secret and created her own compositions on the piano that Santana paid for.

'How was I supposed to know it would come to anything?' she would say as they lay not speaking following terse discussion after terse discussion about a potential move, reaching no viable conclusions every time.

'You went behind my back,' Santana would reply, keeping her voice low as not to wake Evie up. 'I can't understand why you'd do something like that.'

'I'm not asking you for anything, Santana. You know I love you and Eve more than I can possibly articulate, and you know if you said the word I'd drop everything altogether.'

'And you know I'd never do that to you. You know I'd never be so selfish.'

So it was utterly miserable for three years of marriage, with Isa spending only three cumulative months at home – a month in spring, the odd week in summer or winter, the odd surprise weekend – in a year. Evelyn rushed into a blonde stranger's arms at San Francisco airport after Isa had been in New York for a particularly long stretch of time. It was sort of ambivalent, in the end. It was just the hand they'd been dealt, and perhaps it was fate; who knows? They were in love, and then they weren't. Shit happens, Santana told Quinn (who had married her little half-assed Rachel Berry) and Kurt (who had settled with Blaine in New York with adoption plans after years of ghosting around one another) and Peter (who lived two blocks away with Edward, his long-term boyfriend) and anyone else who asked. Shit happens, and life goes on. 'Y así va' was tattooed on her wrist the year after their divorce, and she reminded herself and Evelyn of it every day. And so it goes.

Isa visited about as often as she had in the time they had spent married and apart, and it was okay. It would be a lie if Santana were to say she coped perfectly well all of the time, and it would be a lie if she said she had never called Peter in the middle of the night in hysterics to tell him just how afraid she was of being alone and it would be a lie if she was to say she hadn't leant heavily on a six year old in the first few months after being plunged into single parenthood. She got her act together, though; packed up Isa's old stuff and went back to work and enrolled Evie in the best private school in San Francisco. It was okay from then on in; not perfect, but okay. She had brilliant friends and a brilliant job and a brilliant, brilliant daughter, but still. There was something missing.

She's two months older than Brittany.

For Brittany, life was trying to make the best of the pathetically small amount of time you actually had to live. And this meant travelling, and a fuckload of it at that. It was New York that did it for her; she was amazed how one city could be so big and have so many stories bursting at its seams and so she found herself endlessly intrigued and hopelessly in love with the wider world around her.

She graduated Julliard a year early, and did a year of teaching dozens of dance classes a week all over the city to amass enough money for her first flight out of America and a few years of cheap living after that. She didn't exactly have herself a plan, but what did that matter? Just being was enough, and so it was enough. In the year after university she spent in the Empire State she lived in an apartment in Greenwich with five other broke graduates, talking about their dreams and their lives and their wishes and all the big questions – what's the real meaning of life? is no man truly an island, or can he exist with no relationships? if there is such thing as the placebo effect, what's the point of the real thing? – drinking a lot of shroom tea and swallowing a lot of acid tabs. There were three men; Sam (blonde, potential long-lost brother), Joe (the only white guy in the entire world to pull off dreadlocks, spiritual), and Alex (dark, dropped out of Columbia, in desperate search of himself); and two women, Brittany, and Marisa (curly haired and Italian, mysterious, sort of sad) and they all lived together and disembarked the plane together when it landed in India a year later, on Brittany's 22nd birthday.

It was a blur. Everything went so fast and so slow at the same time that Brittany struggled to keep up with it, and it felt a lot like she was trying so hard to live that her actual life passed her by a little.

It was a rather unique routine she lived by. While her friends all returned home one by one she stayed out in Asia, backpacking from India to Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, to Thailand. She stayed in northern Thailand for a few months, working at a Chiang Mai bakery to make a little extra money for her travel expenses; sleeper trains, ordinary commuter trains (not an experience she would relive in a hurry), the occasional car hire, the occasional short hop flight. Places she liked, she would stay a little longer and get a job to sustain her already cheap living. She was 23 and a half when she landed back home at JFK with a tan and a pattern of mosquito bites over her back, and 24 when she left again. Brazil, this time; starting in Rio and moving around the country with the ease of a woman who had nowhere else to be.

All her friends kind of found themselves, in the end. Eventually. Sure, Brittany met people on her travels and had possibly the biggest email contact list of anyone in the whole world, but it was her insatiable need for constant stimulation and discovery that meant that she never really settled down. Work for six months in New York (it turns out there's a never-ending need for dance teachers), travel for six months, meet amazing people and see amazing things and then come home and make obligatory visits to her family and friends, and do it all over again. It's not really that tiring, and Brittany would choose no other life.

India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Laos, Myanmar, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia. China and Japan. The Federated States of Micronesia, a personal favourite of hers. Australia, and New Zealand, and Tasmania. Tanzania, Mozambique, South Africa, Madagascar. Costa Rica, Panama, Brazil, Peru, Chile, Argentina. Ireland, Britain, Portugal, Spain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Serbia, Italy, Finland, Sweden, Norway… They were her life; her friends, her lovers, her enemies.

No strings attached, and that was the way she liked it. It was the Netherlands which captured her heart, and when she was 31 she took out a five year lease on an apartment in Jordaan, east Amsterdam, where she was surrounded by yuppies and creative types and the sort of people who would listen to her when she was telling a story about her time as a 'tea expert' in southern China. And she met Daniel. 32 and Dutch, captivating, a man with same wants and dreams and love of travel as Brittany; but a man who felt obliged and suffocated into a marriage with his high school lover.

There never was a plan, but Brittany figured if there was, it would not involve her as the 'other woman'. The phrase itself even seemed wrong to her, because with Daniel it was so intense and beautiful that she never felt there was anyone else threatening to halve his attention. They met in a bar, him drinking away the last fight he had with his wife; and her drinking in celebration of a close Dutch friend's engagement. Their eyes met across the room and they stayed long after it was emptying, only moving close together at the very end of the night. Brittany was a little drunk then, and she cried in a stranger's arms about how she didn't know whether or not she was happy for her friend, or sad and bitter and jealous because she had never even had a serious relationship; and Daniel cried because he felt like his wife didn't love him anymore and he had nobody to turn to. He said the word lonely, and Brittany suddenly sobbed uncontrollably into her drink because it was the word she was most afraid of. She thought she wasn't lonely, not really; she had dozens of friends from all over the world and plenty of opportunities to take up offers for relationships with men and women, but deep down she knew that when she was lying awake at three in the morning, there was nobody around.

Daniel was gorgeous; chestnut hair bouncing just above his shoulders, chestnut stubble adorning his cheeks, big, strong arms from a past of playing rugby (what even was rugby?), slightly calloused hands and a striking pair of green eyes. In the first year of their knowing one another, Brittany finally understood the term emotional affair; and on the anniversary of their meeting, Daniel turned up to her apartment and things became really, really physical. She knew he was married and she was so, so wrong, but it just felt so right.

He travelled a lot for work (as an actuary) and so there were no questions asked when he went abroad for weeks at a time, only now he had company.

'Fuck London,' he said, and Brittany agreed as they lay in bed and booked tickets on Thai Airways departing the next day from Amsterdam International.

It was a complex and bittersweet world of lies. Brittany didn't know whether Daniel's wife was stupid or just stupidly staying quiet. He was careful, though. He would get up in the middle of the night to email her from wherever they were at the time it would be in London, he would make sure he had pound coins and British notes and British business cards in his wallet if she ever were to check, he kept his passport in a safe in his office and shredded his flight details after he used them, he even skyped her wearing a suit and a black scarf from a sweltering hotel room with no air-con. Brittany shrugged it off as best she could, because being with Daniel made her so ridiculously happy it was easy to forget everything that was wrong with their relationship. She took him to the mountains in northern Thailand, on a sleeper boat down the Mekong River, to temple after temple in Macau. He showed her his favourite places in Europe, and as Brittany lay on Daniel's chest on the side of a glorious mountain in Croatia with her legs covered by a tartan blanket watching the sun go down over a glorious lake, she felt so alive and wonderful that she could pretend everything was really okay.

She was 32 when they returned to Amsterdam and picked their lives up again. Daniel spent much of his time at Brittany's, and they would travel whenever they could to wherever they could, as long as they were together. Little voices in Brittany's head whispered intermittently about their own apartment and travelling without it being a secret and maybe their own marriage and possibly children (it was perfect, so perfect); but she shushed them when it became clear Daniel was not prepared to leave his wife, for whatever reason. Their affair continued until one day about a month after Brittany's 35th birthday, when his wife's father passed away from a long battle with pneumonia. She knew something was wrong when he arrived at her apartment with red-rimmed eyes and his head bowed low, and she struggled to work out what it was.

'I can't do this anymore,' he said, and that was it.

Brittany left Amsterdam soon after that. She didn't want to stay any longer, there was nothing tying her to the place; she felt nothing walking the cobbled streets and under the hanging baskets, just cold and alone swinging her legs over the Prinsengacht, and just incomprehensibly sad when she walked past their old favourite coffee shop. Daniel paid for her flight to New York and she wondered if it was his way of coming to terms with their affair in his head – I sent her away; he'd be able to think. I did the right thing in the end.

And so she was sat on her apartment balcony with Sam and Marisa (even they were married now. Brittany cried for two hours) on her 37th birthday, holding a tumbler of whiskey in her left hand and toasting herself for still being alive. The light catches on her ring finger as if it's mocking her, and all of a sudden, she remembers.

She doesn't even know if Santana's still married, doesn't even have her address or current mobile number, so she rushes into her apartment and pulls out her laptop.

I'm in if you're in.

B x

Shit. What was she doing? She wasn't even that drunk. Sam comes in behind her, and peers over her shoulder as Brittany stares at the screen, her finger hovering over the send button. She just wishes that Santana was here, now; that they could be drinking and laughing together on the balcony. It could be perfect.

"What are you doing?" he asks, confusion spreading over his face.

She explains. It's a long story.

Santana was right, in the end. It wasn't the same. It did change, and it didn't 'carry on', as Brittany had hoped. It was quite good while they were both still at college and returning home for Thanksgiving and Christmas, so they could see each other at least twice a year; sometimes at summer too. It was like they picked up right where they had left off every single time, so perhaps they became complacent in the upholding of their relationship in their early twenties. They both just assumed it would be okay. But Santana started to work and got a new best friend and surrounded herself with new people, and Brittany herself started to spend less and less time actually in the country. They met up for a weekend while Santana was in New York with work and Brittany was on one of her stretches at home earning money, but it was painfully obvious they had neglected their relationship and the silences became longer and the common ground became less. They were 25 then, and it was the first time they'd seen one another in well over a year. A week after Santana returned home she realised just how sad it was to lose something that had once been so utterly brilliant, and called Brittany to arrange another meeting date. Brittany was in Costa Rica. She called again a few weeks later, and again after that, and a few more times over the next few months, eventually giving up. Her messages were deleted automatically before Brittany got back.

They were still friends, though, and remained friends until Brittany didn't even RSVP to Santana's wedding. She was in Madagascar and had been touring Africa for around a year and Santana had insisted on posting the invites proper old-fashioned like, so the first she knew of the event was in an internet café in Cape Town, looking at an email from Quinn with dozens of attached photos. She almost burst into tears, and again when she read the message underneath.

'Hope you're doing well… Santana's wedding was a few weeks ago, lovely girl… she was a little upset at your absence, and I'm just pissed off because you couldn't even RSVP… she had a place set for you on her table because she thought you might just have forgotten… scratch little upset, she was really upset… I really think you should get in touch and offer her a pretty good explanation… I don't think she's that angry, just disappointed…'

Brittany knew she probably was angry, and so she didn't get in touch with her. At the time, there was no good reason to. She told Quinn to inform her of Brittany's change of residence three years later, and received an email from Santana with a few attached photographs a few months after.

'Britt, I hope everything's okay over there and Europe isn't too cold. I miss you. Evelyn wants to meet her auntie Brittany. When are you next over? X'

'I don't think I'll be over for a while. Sorry I keep letting you down. I want to meet Evelyn too, she's beautiful. I'll be in touch soon. Brittany x'

That was their last exchange; Brittany explained as Sam nodded slowly, processing all the information she had laid on him in the past hour.

"So you really, really miss her?"

"Yeah. I do."

"Do you think this could come to anything?"

"I don't think so. We were just kids, like so much has changed, I don't even think she's single –"

"But what's the harm in trying, right? Send it," Sam says, a hand gently placed on Brittany's shoulder. "What have you really got to lose?"

So Brittany sent it, and stayed awake all night, tossing and turning under her sheets because there was something, just something, in the back of her mind that would not let it lie. The time difference meant she received her reply at four in the morning, just as she was dropping off.

I'm coming to New York tomorrow. We have a lot of talking to do.

I'm in, by the way.

S x

All of a sudden, the idea of sleep was laughable.

magda, this is for you. just pondering some logistics. i love you, ciągle.