Dear Laura

Gemma Amor

DEAR

LAURA

GEMMA AMOR

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Dear Laura

First Edition July 2019

Cover Illustration By: Gemma Amor

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

ISBN: 9781797875712

For my readers, who held me up, spurred me on, and changed my life.

other books by gemma amor:

Cruel Works of Nature

TILL THE SCORE IS PAID

grief is a false god

COMING SOON:

WHITE PINES

Find out more about Gemma’s work:

gemmaamorauthor.com

‘A guilty conscience needs to confess.

A work of art is a confession.’

Albert Camus

The woman with brown hair walked through the trees in a straight line, her mind’s eye fixed on a target. She walked, and checked the compass hanging around her neck after every few steps, travelling as the crow flies, feeling as if she herself were a small, tired, worn-out little bird, doggedly flying north. Migrating to a land she couldn’t see yet. It dwelt inside of her, that journey’s end. One fixed point. One reason to keep going.

Reddish-brown hair, now threaded with grey and beaded brightly with drops of rain, fell into her eyes, over and over again. Laura was continually forced to push it back from her face with cold fingers, absent-mindedly at first, and then with anger. Her hairband had broken, three miles since. She considered taking out her pocket-knife, hacking the hair off at the roots. But she could not spare the time. Soon, it would be dark. Soon, she would be walking in the forest at night. The darkness did not frighten her. What frightened her was the thought that she would not reach her destination at the designated time. And so she carried on, wiping the hair from her eyes, placing one foot in front of the other, checking the compass that thumped against her chest with each step. All that mattered to her was what lay at the end of the path. Everything else was an inconvenience, only there to be overcome.

Rain fell steadily as she moved through dense undergrowth, high-stepping over weeping fronds of bracken heavy with moisture, snagging her ankles on brambles, stumbling into tree trunks as tiredness gradually took a firm hold of her body. Water worked its way underneath the collar of her jacket and crept into the tops of her boots. Her toes squelched in sodden socks. She kept one hand free as she walked, for balance, and the other jammed hard into her left coat pocket, curled, claw-like, around something.

In that hand rested a crumpled, soggy letter. One of many she had received over the years. She thought this might be the last of them. It was pappy from rainwater, the writing blurred, ink washed away. Unreadable, now. It didn’t matter. Every word in that letter was etched into her mind, every single expression, punctuation mark, and errant, elaborate flick of pen on paper that the author was so fond of.