You can't tell that the coffin holds the body of a boy.

He wasn't even sixteen but his coffin's the same size as a man's would be.

It's not just that he was young, but because it was so sudden. No one should die the way he did; that's what the faces here say.

I think about him, in there, with all that space, and I want to stop them. I want to open the box and climb in with him. To wrap him up in a duvet. I can't bear the thought of him being cold.

And all the time the same question flails around my head, like a hawkmoth round a light-bulb: Is it possible to keep loving somebody when they kill someone you love?

Author: C.J. Flood