She has never held a gun before. It is heavier than she had imagined it would be. The pistol’s grip is still warm from his hand. She wonders how easy it would be to pull the trigger, and if this would cause it to fire. In films, characters sometimes flick down the hammer with a firm, confident clack-click before they shoot anyone. She is not sure whether she is supposed to cock the gun like this, or even if the safety catch is still on. In all honesty, she doesn’t know where the safety catch is.

Despite this, she shows nothing. Her brows are locked, eyes unblinking, watching the back of his head. The orange street light turns his hair to amber, to threads of dripping tree sap. If she fired the gun, she imagined that his head would be sticky to the touch, skull broken like a boiled egg. The pavement is wet. He is kneeling, fingers knotted together behind his neck, just as she has instructed. He is shaking. There are words coming out of his mouth, muttered, sobbed, whispered. Perhaps he is praying.

It occurs to her now that it is not a gun at all. It is just her two fingers, held out in the shape of a pistol. Her weapon is mimed. He knows this too, yet perhaps he has forgotten, just as she did.

We play-act. It’s what we do when we take our roles in a scene. There were games we played as children when, just for a moment, the monsters were real, the cupboard actually was a portal to another universe, and if we stepped off the ledge we just might fly. Actors sometimes lose themselves, albeit temporarily, in the characters they play. When a fantasy becomes so vivid that you feel it solidifying around you, like frost forming into patterns on a window, then you know that it must be a good one.

She presses the tips of her loaded fingers into the back of his head and tells him that she loves him.