And she couldn’t risk throwing that away, no matter how improbable it seemed.

She grew older, and the questions remained unanswered. The curdled sour-milk abscess in her core split open, and the tough outer skin peeled back, flooded her system with bile, and impotent, slow anger. She swallowed it down and retreated further into herself, aware that the people around her in life did not have the very first clue as to how to talk to her about what she was experiencing.

And the memory of Bobby drifted further, and further away.

Eventually, as she approached her nineteenth year, fatigue won out: she decided that she didn’t want to play, anymore. She decided to cut ties with everything that defined and imprisoned her, and leave home. Bobby wasn’t coming back, that much was obvious, now, and she had finally, finally grown weary of the game, especially after the supermarket prank. Age had given her some resilience when it came to accepting that Bobby was gone for good, and she no longer felt the loss as keenly as she had when she was thirteen. It coloured her life in dull shades, but didn’t blind her completely to the other opportunities there were out there for her, if she could just move on.

And so move on, she did.

Or at least, she tried to.

Before she left, early on the morning of her nineteenth birthday, she woke with the dawn, deliberately. She wanted to be up and about before X had time to slip his noxious little envelope through the letterbox. She sat at her small desk and wrote her own letter on pristine white notepaper, then left it wrapped in a plastic carrier bag behind the bay tree. It was short, and to the point:

Dear X,

Who the fuck are you, anyway? Why are you doing this to me? You don’t know where Bobby is at all. I think you’re a pathetic, dirty old man who is sick in the head.

You are disgusting.

I don’t want to play, anymore.

Leave me alone.

L

Having committed this small, revolutionary act, she used it as fuel to find a place of her own, and find one, she did, that very day- a small studio flat in the centre of town, above a convenience store. It was pokey, and damp in places, but she could afford to pay the deposit and first month’s rent with her meagre savings, and affordability was the main criteria.

And just like that, she flew the nest. She got a job in a supermarket stacking shelves in the dead of night, even, in time, found herself a new boyfriend, although their relationship was extremely loose and casual, because Laura didn't know how to trust, and certainly didn’t know how to let anyone close to her.

Regardless, life became less jagged around the edges. She walked with a straighter back, and her face became softer, more open. Friends soon followed, friends who took her on shopping excursions, and sat on lunch breaks with her in the sun, reading magazines and rolling cigarettes and doing normal, everyday things, things Laura had denied herself for years, so preoccupied as she’d been with finding Bobby. Laura hadn’t made any friends in school after Bobby left, and the extended loneliness she’d experienced made her grateful for every new relationship she now forged. She even made some inroads with her mother, inviting her over for a meal a time or two, although never her father: that road was potholed beyond repair.