Imagine that. Imagine if X were dead.

She couldn’t.

On the one hand, she would be free of him.

But on the other, she never would, not as long as she remembered that photo of Bobby. The one painted in red.

X’s silence dragged on, and the nature of it almost broke her. Almost. She spiralled into a hole of work and weed, work and weed, and fretful, broken sleep. She began to lose grip on all sense of what was real, and what wasn’t. Bobby came to her in dreams, his hair long, and matted with blood, and his face was always a blank featureless smudge that shimmered and jittered the longer she looked at it. Her memories were being eaten away, one by one, and it was only through old photographs and notes that they had written to each other at school that she could recall much about him at all. Such childish notes, they were, too, riddled with scribbles and doodles and superlatives. Notes about stupid things like television shows and music and who was on which sports team, notes which held no hint of the things to come for either of them. They made her sad and furious at the same time, and she longed for a time when her mood and her health were not governed by the words scrawled onto a piece of paper, childish or otherwise.

Eventually, Laura’s workplace forced her to take some sick leave, reluctant to let her go because she was a good worker, but unable to deal with her increasingly bizarre and unpredictable behaviour. With so much time on her hands, she crashed further down into despair, getting high and revisiting each and every location from the letters that she had coordinates for, ritually, one by one, in her mind. Even the spot located in the supermarket frozen food aisle. But when she got there, she found that the passage of time had not changed anything about her predicament at all. Bobby was still not there. Bobby was not anywhere. Bobby was dead, his body in pieces. Once again, she thought about burning the letters. Once again, she thought about going to the Police. She did neither. Instead, she longed for release.

One day bled into the next, and the next, and so on, with no word from X, until she looked in the mirror and saw a single grey hair. Years had passed. Five more. She was still living in the same tiny studio flat, still had the same minimum-wage job.

And she still had no new letters.

Instead of being happy about it, she was wretched, held captive by something so complicated she didn’t know how to give it a name.

And then, one day, whilst hoisting a pack of rice up onto a high shelf at work, she met Frank.

And everything changed.

22.

Frank was unlike anyone she’d ever met before. The first thing that struck her was how much he resembled Bobby. Or how much she thought he resembled Bobby given her patchy memory.