What am I doing here? She thought blindly, head in her hands. And then, the last words in the last letter, the words that kept her up at night, raced through her mind:

I loved him, you know.

Moments later, she gave in to the realisation that Bobby wasn’t here, after all, and that she was on a wild goose chase, and embarrassment and shame landed heavily on her.

The dog walker shuffled past as she sat there, a picture of misery. He was accompanied by a large black and white collie dog on a lead. He stopped, eyeing her curiously.

‘You alright, miss?’ He said, stooping so that she could better hear him. The man was large, and tall, very tall, and very broad, but Laura didn’t register this, didn’t even look up. If she had, something in her memory might have been triggered.

Instead, she hid her eyes behind her hands and refused to answer, furious at the intrusion.

The man waited, wrestling with himself internally, then spat into the verge.

‘Suit yourself,’ he said, and shuffled off, the dog trotting at his heels obediently. If Laura had been watching, she might have noticed the man’s reluctance to leave. If Laura had been paying attention, she might have seen that he held an envelope in his free hand, a dirty, yellow envelope very similar to the type she received on her birthday, and she might have seen that he wore a strange, excited smirk on his face, too.

But Laura wasn’t paying attention to anything except her own predicament. And eventually, she realised she couldn’t stay out here for the rest of the day, so she retraced her steps, got back on the bus, and arrived home to an empty house with all the lights off. Drifting upstairs, pale, and weary, she collapsed on her bed, and didn’t move from there for three days.

Eventually, Mrs. Scott realised that all was not well with her daughter, realised that she was, in fact, not eating, not drinking, and not going to school. She sat on Laura’s bed on the morning of the fourth day, registered the pallid, drawn face, the thin, ghostly limbs, and the hollow, sunken eyes. She realised with a burgeoning sense of sorrow that this was confirmation of something she had long been trying to ignore: that her daughter, despite all outward appearances of resilience and strength, was really not okay.

She put in a request to reduce her hours at work, and then took Laura to see a Doctor. The Doctor loosely diagnosed her with nervous exhaustion, and wrote a prescription for some pills with a long name that Laura couldn’t remember. Laura took the pills for a week, and then started flushing them down the toilet. If anything, they made her feel even more numb than she already did, coating her thoughts in an unpleasant layer of fuzz.

The silence from X continued.

After a time, Laura learned not to wait for the snap of the letter box in the morning. It became painfully apparent to her that she had been the butt of a particularly cruel joke. She continued to grow, in both height and pain, and the memory of Bobby’s face softened further, until he became like a smudged finger-painting in her mind, and she blamed herself for forgetting him like this, because she considered it her duty to remember him when everyone else was apparently moving on.