She is forty years old.
She no longer lives in London, or the United Kingdom, or even Europe. Instead, she's rooted herself in sunny southern California, close to the Mexican border. Here, the heat is constant, sweltering, sometimes suffocating and oppressive, but she likes it. She likes the feeling of being almost bleached out by the sun, teetering on the edge of reality.
She lives in a small, sleepy beach town where everybody knows each other and the population is in the double digits. Her home, an old bungalow built in the 1920s and in need of constant maintenance, is just a stone's throw away from the beach.
The irony isn't lost on her – for a long time, beaches only served as reminders of a very raw pain. She had been away from the coast for so long that she began to fear it, until she stood on this Californian beach ten years ago. She stood there, feet deep in the cold sand, waves swirling about her calves, and she laughed.
Rose Tyler stopped running.