Her anxiety increased steadily until she began to experience crippling physical symptoms: panic attacks, vast, insurmountable waves of dread that crashed into her at the most unexpected of moments and rendered her incoherent, unable to breathe, or move, or do anything except sit, frozen in paralysis, until it passed. She was lucky that her job was not a customer-facing role. When the attacks happened to her during a shift, she was largely unobserved, as other night-shifters were few in numbers. She simply stood there, packaged food in hand, rigid, hyperventilating, shaking, mouth hanging open uselessly, until it passed. At home, she developed a reliance on cannabis to help her manage. She took out a loan, and then another, to finance her habit and her dental work.

She moved, planning the operation with military levels of precision so that she left, via taxi, in the middle of the night. She insisted that the taxi driver met her at her door, and escorted her to the next. Leaving the majority of her possessions behind, she took only what she could fit into a large, canvas holdall, and relocated under the cover of the dark. Her new place was a top floor apartment where the windows were too high to climb into, and she made sure that her door had a peep-hole, too.

Laura grew thin, diminished, consumed by her neuroses.

Then, somehow, her birthday arrived. Another one, another day she simultaneously feared and hated, now, for so many reasons. It came, and passed, and not only was there no letter, but she had little in the way of anything, as her mother had been taken ill and wasn’t able to post her card until days later. She sifted through the mail on her doormat and found only bills, junk mail, and a flyer from the local MP, trying to garner votes.

Was she being punished still, she wondered, for going to the Police, or was he just torturing her, because that was how he operated?

She stared at the letterbox for hours, almost hoping to see a large, looming shadow behind the door, but the shadow never came. She pressed her eye to the peephole, looking for the distorted, fish-lens version of him in the hallway, but it remained empty. And no letter came. Not that day, or the next, or the next. Had she done it? Had she really done it, this time? Had she slipped the net?

Time went by, during which it began to dawn on Laura that something might have happened to X. There had been silences before, but this was different. They had unfinished business. He owed her for the tooth, and so far, he’d always paid his dues. He had a strange and warped code of honour like that.

Laura began to tentatively speculate as to what had happened to her pen pal. He’d moved away, or was in prison, or even- and this hurt her more than she could bring herself to understand- maybe, even, he had died.