Irene

You are perhaps the only person in the world who knows Sherlock Holmes is lying, that he is not dead. It is life's strangest game. Maybe this is how you will see each other – in vividly coloured dreams, memories and faked deaths. It is not in Sherlock Holmes' nature to commit suicide, to accept defeat. He never lets a message go unanswered.

For a moment, however, you imagine living in a world without Sherlock Holmes. It would be a far more insipid life. With him alive, you can imagine a hundred scenario's where you will unite. With him dead, all that is left is creating scenarios and breaking them. Over and over.

It has been a long time since you left London. Constructing scenarios is the only way you can retain a link to the one aspect of the past that mattered. Hours, you had spent, building up the perfect circumstances, the perfect dialogues, the coffee shop with just the right ambience and him. Him, with his beautiful, green eyes and cheek bones and banter and your elevated pulses. You had picked out exactly what to wear and how to comb your hair. Just the right amount of make up to enhance your beauty. It was so beautiful, and perfect, that it could never be real.

Just like Sherlock's suicide.

You feel the tingle of the familiar adrenalin course through your veins as you tried to think why Sherlock would fake his death. What had caused him to do this? Who was Richard Brooks?

It is a relaxed Sunday morning. The bakery is closed. You go down to the living room, looking forward to sitting down on your favourite chair and thinking.

Except Sherlock Holmes is sitting on the said chair, exactly as you remember him.