It was the sort of day surfers dream about.

I propped my surfboard against the white, waist-high wooden fence that ran along the footpath at the top of Merewether Beach, next to one of the lampposts that stood every fifty metres or so, and braced my hands against its top railing as I leaned forward. From where I stood the surf looked perfect – cleanly breaking waves fed by a brisk offshore breeze that I could feel blowing my ponytail and the lanyard attached to my wetsuit’s zipper around, and hardly anyone out on the water or the sand. There weren’t even any clouds in the bright blue summer sky.

“Hello Taylor.”

The voice, I discovered when I looked back over my shoulder, belonged to a pale, dark-haired, ageless-looking young woman dressed all in black – black jeans, black singlet top and black boots – with a silver ankh on a chain around her neck. I’d been so focused on watching the surf, looking for the right moment to hit the waves, that I hadn’t heard her coming up behind me.

“Hi,” I said once I’d turned to face her, my tone guarded. “I’m sorry, do I know you?”

“No,” she replied, and she gave me a small, almost sad smile. “But I know you quite well. We’ve met a few times over the years.”

As she was speaking she’d started walking toward me, until she was so close that I was almost certain I could see deep into her dark, fathomless eyes and feel her breath on my face. “Normally, it would be time for you to come with me and leave everything behind,” she said, and I finally realised who she was.

“You’re Death,” I said, beginning to feel cold all over.

“I am,” she replied with a small nod. “You can call me Hela if you like.”

“I’m not-” I didn’t finish that sentence, not wanting to give voice to one of my greatest fears, and she shook her head.

“No, not yet,” she said, her tone calm and almost soothing, and I relaxed just a fraction. “But what happens next is entirely up to you.” She held out a hand to me. “Come with me. We have much to discuss.”

For maybe half a second I considered turning my back on her and heading down onto the sand, but something – I wasn’t entirely sure what – stopped me. Instead, I swallowed hard and nodded. “All right,” I said warily, and I reached out to take her hand.

The instant my hand met hers, enveloping her long, slender fingers with my own, the world dissolved around us. It reformed somewhere that looked like a fusion of all the green rooms and backstage spaces I’d ever spent time in, one lit solely by a handful of lamps with round paper shades dotted around the room, complete with a worn but comfortable-looking leather lounge that had a colourful knitted blanket draped over its back and a low wooden coffee table in front. The coffee table had an old-fashioned film projector set up on it, its lens pointed at the bare wall opposite, with another lamp sitting next to it. Set into the room’s rear wall was a wooden door outlined in a warm, yellow light – the existence of which, more than anything else, felt like a threat.

“Have a seat,” Hela said from where she sat on the lounge, next to the left-hand armrest, and she patted the spot next to her. She gave me a quick smile that was almost a smirk. “I don’t bite, I promise.”

“You sounded like my best friend just then,” I commented as I joined Hela on the lounge. My clothes had changed as I’d settled myself – gone was my wetsuit, with my favourite pair of well-worn jeans and a bright red T-shirt in its place.

Hela didn’t say anything in response. Instead, out of the corner of my eye I could see her studying me, almost as if I was an interesting specimen beneath a magnifying glass. It seemed as if an eternity had gone by before she spoke.

“You have an important decision to make,” she said at last. “It will not be easy, and as with any decision the consequences will be yours to bear. And I assure you, whatever you decide, there will be consequences. Are you ready?”

I didn’t answer straight away, choosing instead to consider what Hela had said. “Can I ask a question?” I said.

“You may ask one question,” she replied, her tone brooking no argument on the matter, and I nodded. Whatever question I ended up asking, it was going to have to be a good one.

“You said that there will be consquences,” I began once I’d decided on the question I wanted to ask, and Hela gave me a sharp nod. “What sort of consequences?”

This time, the smile that Hela gave me was almost sympathetic. “That isn’t something I’m able to tell you. But what I can tell you is that however you decide to act, the consequences will be serious. Furthermore, their impacts will be permanent – there will be no going back to the way things used to be. Whether or not that is a good thing will be entirely up to you.”

I let out a breath that almost sounded like a sigh. “That doesn’t exactly make me feel confident about the whole thing, you know.”

“It’s not intended to. Decisions like this are meant to make you feel unbalanced. You’re deciding the course of your future, after all.”

“Right.” I scrubbed a hand over my face before nodding. “Okay. I’m ready.”

Almost at the moment that I’d finished saying this, the film projector on the coffee table shuddered into life, throwing a flickering image onto the bare wall opposite – one that I recognised, and that I remembered happening. Isaac, Zac and I standing onstage at the end of our very first concert after Middle Of Nowhere had been released, taking our bows for an unseen audience.

“I am going to show you a film,” Hela said, her voice clearly audible over the sound of the projector. “It will show you your past and your present, along with two potential futures. Whichever of those futures comes to pass will depend entirely on a decision that I will ask you to make once you have finished watching the film, so I would advise you to pay close attention. Do you understand?”

I nodded again. “I understand.”

The moment those two words left my mouth, all of the lamps except for the one on the coffee table went out, with that last lamp dimming until it was barely lit. At almost the same time, the projector started to play the film that Hela had talked about, and I settled back against the lounge to watch.

It didn’t take me long to figure out that what I was watching was no ordinary movie. For starters it was almost entirely silent, accompanied by a soundtrack of quiet, steady beeping and rhythmic, raspy hissing – the latter of which made me feel like I couldn’t breathe, my throat feeling tight and closed-up. I shook my head a little to try and shift it before refocusing my attention on the movie.

Hela hadn’t been lying when she had said the movie would show me my past and my present. The scenes flickering across the wall were a mix of things I remembered and things I didn’t, with my memory being sparked more often the longer I watched. At the same time the anxiety that had been a constant companion for nearly twenty years was steadily rising, hitting a peak as I watched the worst two and a half years of my life playing out before my eyes. It returned in full force the moment I saw myself collapse onscreen, falling to the floor of the practice space at home like a marionette with its strings cut.

When the film ended, its final scene a splitscreen image of what looked like a funeral on one side and a concert arena on the other, the room’s lights brightened once more and Hela stepped out of the rapidly diminishing shadows. I started a little in surprise when I saw her almost materialise in front of me.

“You now have an important decision to make,” she said, the tone of her voice instinctively making me sit up straighter. “Remember what I told you – once you have made your decision, there will be no turning back. No second chances. You will not be able to change your mind. Understood?”

I nodded. “I understand.”

“Excellent.” She clasped her hands in front of her. “You have two choices. You can come with me, through the door behind you.” She motioned for me to look back over my shoulder at the door set into the room’s rear wall. Just that one glance was enough to make me shiver, goosebumps erupting all over my body. In that moment, I knew that was the last thing I wanted.

“Yeah, I definitely don’t want that,” I said, and I shook my head. “I’ve still got far too much to live for.”

Hela cracked a small smile. “I had a feeling you would say that, which is why I’m giving you a choice.”

“Why make me go through all of that, then, if you were so sure what I was going to do?”

“Because it still needed to be your decision. You could have decided that you were completely done – which, to be fair, nobody would have blamed you for – but that was a choice you needed to make for yourself.”

“I suppose that’s fair.” I let out a quiet sigh and raked my fingers back through my hair. “So what happens now?”

Hela didn’t respond at first. Instead she sat back down next to me, the lounge barely creaking beneath her. I didn’t push her to talk, knowing very well that if I pissed her off enough she could easily change her mind about letting me have a choice.

“It’s entirely up to you,” she said at last. “You do eventually have to go back, but you can stay here for a little while longer if you like. I won’t force you to do anything you’re not ready for.” She gave me a warm smile, one that reached all the way up to her eyes. “Once you decide that it’s time to go back, the door is behind you.”

“It’s not-” I started, breaking off almost right away – I didn’t want to say those words.

“It won’t, I promise – all that will happen is that you’ll go back to the real world, where you belong. All right?”

I swallowed hard against the unseen force that was wrapped tightly around my throat, willing it to loosen even just a little. “All right.”

She gave me one last smile, one that I took to be reassuring, and rose to her feet. “I’ll see you again someday, though I do hope that day isn’t too soon,” she said.

“Thanks, Hela.”

She leaned down a little and put a hand on my left shoulder, and gave it a quick squeeze before vanishing back into the shadows.

I wasn’t ready to go back – wherever, or even whenever back ended up being. I wasn’t sure if I would ever be ready. Going back meant going back to Ruby and to my music, but it also meant facing the consequences that Hela had warned me about – ones that would see my life forever changed, for better or for worse. That she hadn’t been able to tell me exactly what those consequences were…well, that was more than a little worrying.

I scrubbed a hand roughly over my face and let out a sigh. If it had been entirely up to me, I could have stayed in that room forever – it was quiet, there was nobody else around to bother or interrupt me, and there were no immediate demands on me or my time. It was just me and my thoughts.

But I knew it wasn’t up to me, and I knew I couldn’t stay there forever. It wasn’t where I was meant to be. As comfortable as it made me feel, it wasn’t where I belonged.

With that thought firmly in mind, I very reluctantly got back to my feet and headed back to the room’s rear wall, slipping my hands into my pockets as I went. Now that Hela had left, the door was beginning to feel far less threatening – rather, it now felt welcoming, the warm light outlining it no longer causing a spike of anxiety whenever I so much as glanced at it.

It felt like home.

That was all the reason I needed to open the door. I stepped back as it swung inward, closing my eyes against the bright, almost blinding light that spilled out of the doorway. When I opened them again, once the light dimmed to a level that wasn’t intolerable, I saw what lay behind the door – the house in Thirroul that Ruby and I had bought together just a few months earlier, complete with the cane chairs we had set up on the front porch, the windchimes hanging next to the front door, and the All Guests Must Be Approved By The Dog sign that had once had a home on the annexe of Ruby’s old caravan.

I needed my music. I needed my family. I needed Ruby. But more than anything else, I just wanted to go home. And there was only one way that was going to happen.

I took the deepest breath I could, braced myself, and without looking back over my shoulder I stepped forward into the light.

I noticed the pain first.

It was far more than the aches in my joints that I’d started to feel the morning after a particularly intense show or band practice – those usually faded into the background once I’d been up and moving for a while. Not even the nerve pain I’d been plagued with for more than a decade had anything on it.

Both of my hands felt like they were on fire, from the very tips of my fingers right down to my wrists. My left foot was completely numb, and the toes and arch of my right foot felt as if they had been scrubbed red raw. I had a splitting headache, almost like a migraine but without the pounding and pulsing in time with my heartbeat, and I could feel a similar ache at the back of my head and my neck.

But worse than all of that were the nearly identical pains in my back, my ribs and my chest. I was pretty sure I had at least one or two broken ribs – how I’d broken them, I had no idea. The middle of my chest simultaneously felt like it had been cracked open like the shell of one of the macadamia nuts from the tree my grandparents had had in their yard when I was growing up, and like someone was sitting right on top of me. And right above the middle of my back, just below my ribs and directly over my spine, was a searing, tearing ache that radiated out in a tight, constricting band around my waist. If I’d been able to take even just one breath, I would have been screaming in pain.

Because I couldn’t breathe. I could feel myself breathing, and I could hear the unmistakably regular, rhythmic rasping of a ventilator somewhere to my right, but I couldn’t take any breaths for myself. I tried to move, to pull whatever it was that was stopping me from breathing for myself out of my throat, but the pain in my hands and the feeling of something that had been tied around both of my wrists stopped me before I could move them too far.

“Whoa, whoa, easy,” an unfamiliar voice said, its tone gentle. A hand that I thought belonged to the voice’s owner touched my right hand, sending even more pain rocketing along my nerves, and I tried to pull away. “Can you open your eyes for me?”

Some small part of me wanted to ignore them and just slip back into unconsciousness, away from the pain, the machines and the people trying to get me to listen to them. But an even bigger part knew that as much as I wanted to – and in that moment, I badly wanted to – I couldn’t ignore the waking world forever. Never mind that I knew there were people who would be worried about me, and I didn’t want to make that any worse than it potentially was already.

So with a great deal of reluctance, and an immense amount of effort, I slowly managed to work my eyes open.

At first, I couldn’t see much of anything. Entirely aside from the overhead lighting being fairly dim, I was having trouble focusing on anything too far away. Even though it was making my headache worse, and especially as it was slowly sapping what small amount of energy I had, I made myself keep my eyes open as much as I could. Soon enough, the world drifted back into focus, and I found myself face to face with a red-haired nurse wearing dark blue scrubs, a name badge reading Larissa Price, and thin-framed glasses. She gave me a cheerful smile.

“There we go,” she said. “Do you know where you are?” I shook my head at this. “You’re in the cardiothoracic intensive care unit at the Prince of Wales Hospital – you’ve had a couple of pretty major surgeries, about” she paused and frowned a little “a week ago now.”

I must have looked like a rabbit in headlights when Larissa said how long I’d been in hospital, completely unaware of the world around me, because she gave me a sympathetic smile. “It’s a bit of a shock, I know.” She gestured at my wrists, which I could now see had been tied down to my hospital bed. “If you promise not to go pulling at any of your wires or tubes, I can take those restraints off. Do we have a deal?”

This time I nodded, and Larissa quickly made short work of releasing my wrists from their restraints. I let out a silent sigh of relief at being able to move my hands properly again. “I bet that feels much better,” she said, and I nodded again. “Now, you have a tracheotomy, and you’re on a ventilator – it’s why you can’t speak or breathe on your own. I don’t know how much longer you’ll need either, that’s something your doctor will probably talk to you about in the morning.” She gave me another smile. “You should try to get some rest. I know it’s the last thing you want to do right now, but it’s really what you need most. Is there anyone you would like me to get in touch with for you?”

I barely even needed to think about it. Almost as soon as Larissa had finished speaking, I was slowly and carefully tracing out three names on my blankets, ignoring the way my fingers felt like they were still on fire.

Mum. Dad. Ruby.

I followed these names with one word, the one word I hated admitting to more than almost any other.

Pain.

“So your parents,” Larissa said, sounding as if she was making a list, “and Ruby – that’s your wife?”

“Fiancée,” I corrected, mentally cursing my inability to talk at the same time. The sooner I got my voice back, the better. “Not married yet.”

“Oh, of course.” She gave me an apologetic smile. “It’s a little early to be calling them right now, but as soon as it’s a more civilised hour I’ll let them know you’re awake.” She put a hand on my right shoulder and gave it a quick squeeze. “I’ll sort out some pain relief for you in a bit.”

I knew I had to have fallen asleep not long after that, because the next thing I was aware of was the feeling of someone running their fingers through my hair. I cracked an eye open to see Ruby sitting in a visitor’s chair at my bedside, so close that if there had been enough room in my hospital bed for the two of us, I was willing to bet that she would have climbed up beside me. I carefully reached up to catch Ruby’s hand in mine, wincing as my left shoulder protested.

“Hey you,” she said, her voice cracking a little – a sure sign that she’d been crying. Judging from her red eyes and the damp-looking, darkened spots on the sleeves of her T-shirt, it hadn’t been all that long ago. “You scared the shit out of me, Tay.”

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to.”

“I know you didn’t. I know.” She gave me a small smile, one that quickly vanished as the first tears started falling from her eyes. I squeezed her hand as tightly as I could, wishing I wasn’t stuck in bed so that I could give her the hug I knew she needed. “We thought we’d lost you…”

I didn’t respond to this – what could I say? There weren’t enough words in the world. Instead I waited until Ruby had just about cried herself out, running my thumb in small circles over the back of her hand to try and comfort her.

“Has anyone talked to you about what happened?” she asked at last, and I shook my head. “You, um…” She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment and took a shaky breath. “You collapsed after band practice – Zac said you weren’t feeling well, so you were going to go have a lie down. And, well…” Her voice trailed off, and she swiped at her eyes. “Your heart stopped, and you stopped breathing.”

“I died.” It wasn’t a question.

Ruby nodded. “Yeah. A few times, according to Isaac. Ambos brought you back every time, obviously, but your doctor in the ICU at Wollongong wasn’t sure how all of it would affect you when you woke up. She warned us that you might start having seizures again, that you might not be able to talk or sing, that you might end up paralysed. She really couldn’t say for sure.”

Here she let out a breath that almost sounded like a sigh. “You weren’t stable enough to have surgery until a few weeks ago. And even then you had to have two – I guess they thought having the tumour removed and having your damaged valve fixed in the one go might be too much, I don’t know. They’ll probably talk to you about that once you’re out of here.”

For the longest time, Ruby didn’t say a word. I kept tracing circles on the back of her hand with my thumb, the whole time wishing I could do more.

“Don’t you ever do that to me again,” she said at last, and I eyed her quizzically. “I mean it. Don’t you ever die and leave me alone like that ever again.”

“I won’t,” I assured her, and stopped tracing circles just long enough to squeeze her hand again. “I promise.”

A few days later, I was finally well enough to be turned loose from Intensive Care. I’d barely had enough time to get settled when there was a knock on the open door of my hospital room, and two people I didn’t recognise walked in. One was a doctor, judging from the stethoscope hanging around their neck, but I wasn’t entirely sure who the other person was.

“Both of your surgeries went well,” the doctor – a tall, dark-haired woman wearing a name badge that read Dr. Stephanie Bainbridge – said once the two of them had introduced themselves. The other person, it turned out, was a physiotherapist. “I’ve been able to confirm that the myxoma removed from your heart was benign, so you shouldn’t need any further treatment in that area.”

“Do you think it’ll come back?” Ruby asked. I found myself grateful that she’d taken the lead for the moment – my head felt like it had been stuffed full of cotton wool and I couldn’t think straight. It was something I was used to, but it didn’t make it any less irritating.

Dr. Bainbridge shook her head. “It’s highly unlikely to recur. But that being said, as soon as you’ve been discharged I want you to make an appointment to see your GP and your cardiologist. All right?”

I nodded. “Okay,” I managed to rasp out. “What about-” Here I broke off as I started coughing, wincing the entire time. Ruby started rubbing my back almost as soon as the coughing fit started.

“Your damaged heart valve?” Dr. Bainbridge finished once my coughing fit had subsided, and I nodded again. “Unfortunately things did not go quite to plan there – it was too damaged to be repaired, and so it was necessary to replace it with a mechanical valve.”

“And that’s a good thing?” Ruby asked, and Dr. Bainbridge nodded.

“Mechanical valves are pretty durable – most likely, it will last for the rest of your life, so you shouldn’t need more surgery in the future to replace it.” She paused for a breath that, when she released it, sounded like a sigh. “This being said, however, with mechanical valves there’s a higher risk of stroke, so you’ll need to take anticoagulant medication for the rest of your life.”

As much as I wanted to make my usual crack about turning into a walking pharmacy, I held back. “That doesn’t sound too bad,” I commented instead. “So what happens now?”

“We need to get you up and walking,” Dr. Bainbridge replied. “I want you to be walking around the ward as much as possible every day until you’re discharged.” She gave me a smile and stood up. “And for that, I will leave you in Adrienne’s capable hands.”

Once Dr. Bainbridge had left, Adrienne gave me a smile of her own. “We’ll start off small,” she said. “For now, I want you sitting on the edge of your bed facing me.” As I went to reach for my bed’s remote control, she shook her head. “No, not like that. First of all you’re going to cross your arms over your chest, bend your knees, and shift over to the other side of your bed. Not too far though, we don’t want you falling out of bed.”

“Okay. Doesn’t sound too hard.”

Or so I thought.

Crossing my arms over my chest was the easy part. When I went to try and bend my knees as Adrienne had asked me to do, though, both of my feet and my legs refused to move. It was almost as if a switch had been flicked somewhere on the way down from my brain.

“I can’t move,” I said as I uncrossed my arms, finally admitting defeat. “I’ve been trying for the last five minutes and…” I closed my eyes and tipped my head back. “I can’t fucking move.”