There’s a quiet elegance to Grimsley’s movements that transcends words, Shauntal thinks, even when performing the most mundane tasks; something that transforms ordinary into extraordinary. He conducts himself with unassailable poise and cynical good humour, maintaining all the while the no doubt well-rehearsed aura of distance and unattainability which brings swooning challengers from far and wide and fills page after page of Shauntal’s journal.

To be sure, the Dark Master is quite a character. And Shauntal is content, by day, to observe quietly from the outside - noting the particular lopsided quirk to his smile or the husky edge to his voice when Caitlin asks him where he goes at night, trying to find words for the way his fingers flutter and trace patterns in the air when he recounts a battle. But when the evening comes he draws her into the narrative, weaving finely-textured layers of fantasy and reality into a work so engaging and lovely, so wonderfully crafted as Shauntal could never have experienced from the outside. When they’re alone, she becomes the central character in a story the two of them write together, and for the first time Shauntal feels beautiful.

Cheren’s words are razor-sharp and loaded with accusation after incensed accusation, and they tear through Wallace like bullets, one after another into the squishier and more vulnerable parts of his chest and his stomach; Wallace finds himself taken aback despite himself that this kind of venom, heretofore unseen in the composed and reasonable Cheren, would only surface for the one he had promised to stand by and look after.

There was never any question in Cheren’s mind and it makes Bianca giggle as she intertwines their fingers aged six, aged sixteen, aged thirty, aged fifty-five and savours the special note in his voice reserved for her.

The knot in the pit of Bianca’s stomach eases day by day as she changes in front of the mirror; it becomes more and more difficult, she finds, to dismiss the image of Cheren’s face as he peeled away her layers one by painstaking one to reveal the naked core, the tenderness, the reverence in his fingertips as he traced her silhouette and told her that she was beautiful.

It’s the umpteenth blow and it sends N reeling, finally, and the back of his head smacks against the cartoonish cloud-patterned wall and he falls to his knees and tastes coppery metallic blood; how many times must you be told, boy, that you do not belong to this world and never will - why do you continue to challenge me - and he closes his eyes and lets the image fill his mind of a brown-haired boy surrounded by Pokémon friends, laughing, hand outstretched to N and for a moment he feels as if he could belong to this world, as if things could get better - but the next blow effectively jolts any such delusion from his mind, replacing it with merciful darkness.

May is left wondering long after the rose withers and dies - as did everything he left in his wake (romanticism and naïveté, the drive to achieve, passion, hope) - how she could have prevented it, what exactly she did wrong, which glaring flaw it was which finally drove him away once and for all.