Nothing can prepare you for it. Even in a million years, you'd never know how to react to that terrible moment when you know that it's happened. You can't think, you can't speak, all you can do is remind yourself to breath as you take in that news. Every other possibility runs through your mind, trying to find a loophole, anything to change what you're being told, but nothing fits, and suddenly none of the pieces made sense anymore, let alone fit together.

So maybe that's why Kate Austen suddenly felt like her world was falling apart.

She sat on her bed, tears streaming down her face silently whilst she tried to forget everything that had just happened. Even though she had time to prepare for this moment, nothing could have prepared her for this. Nothing in the world could have helped her deal with this aching pain she felt in her heart right then.

The battle with cancer had been a long and hard fight for her mother, but it had simply gotten too hard for her to carry on fighting once it had spread. After a four year battle, filled with sickness and weakness in which Kate had watched her mother shrivel to a shadow of her former self, her heart had simply given up in the night. She had been very sick for a while, eventually unable to leave the hospital. In those four years, Kate had grown up a lot. She was no longer the twelve-year-old weakling that had broken down completely when she knew that her mother was ill, but instead a sixteen-year-old concrete wall of strength.

But no strength of her own could help her now. There was only one person who could help her now, and although all it would take was for her to pick up the phone, she couldn't bring herself to do it. She didn't want him to see her like this.

He had been her best friend for the better part of ten years. Meeting at primary school when she had moved to the small town, she had quickly become friends with a whole group of students who accepted her as if she had been there all along, but he was always the best. He was always there for her, in the way that a big brother would be, but more than that. It was an unspoken rule that they were best friends, and no one ever came in the way of that. Kate's boyfriend had to go through a whole checklist of vetting from him when she told him that she had found a boyfriend.

But as she reached for the phone, at her wits end and unable to cope, she didn't dial her boyfriends number. Instead, she called the number she had dialled a thousand times. The phone rang for a few minutes, before a male voice answered. Just hearing that voice cause the sobs to escape, and she choked out the name of the one person in the world who could help her.

"Jack."