Laura didn’t go to Mrs. Eveleigh’s funeral, not out of anger, or spite, but out of a desire not to upset the family any more than they already had been. Seeing Laura might remind the Eveleighs of just how much they had lost. The chance to watch him wed, the chance to hold a grandchild. And the memories of Bobby’s service still clung to her. Candles, and prayers, and meaningless, insincere words floating up into the vaulted ceiling spaces.

And Tara Eveleigh’s eyes, staring her out of the church.

Laura kept her secrets. Time passed over her, and she folded all the parts of herself that related to Bobby and X and the letters into a neat, compact package, and mentally filed it away. She finally allowed herself, as she approached middle age, to admit that X was gone. He had finished with her. Maybe the tooth had been enough, after all. Maybe he had found a new obsession. Maybe he had died. This thought no longer scared her like it used to. She was a parent now, and X was a threat to her family, a threat she couldn’t afford. She had her own path, her own responsibilities, her own Bobby. She had purpose, and identity. X belonged in the past, along with her youth.

And then, when she was forty-four, on the morning of her birthday, it happened.

She got another envelope.

Laura, it said on the front of the dingy yellow packet. The word was written in a familiar hand, shakier, but instantly recognisable.

The world fell away from her. Or was it she who was falling? Endlessly, through a dark space, the ground continually threatening to surge up from beneath and smash her to pieces, only it never seemed to get there, somehow. She just kept falling.

Inside the envelope were two things. A letter, with a string of coordinates. This was par for the course, with X.

And a cloth badge, which was not. On it was embroidered a school insignia. The thread was worn and furry, the colours bleached, but she knew instantly what it was. It was her old school insignia. There was a shield, with a tree growing behind, and two rabbits entwined around the base. The badge had been cut from a dark green woollen sweater. The same type of sweater that both she and Bobby had been wearing on the day he climbed into the van.

The badge was also spattered with a dark, rusty brown substance that she knew, without question, was blood.

Bobby’s blood.

Laura saw this, and still could not cry.

Instead, she just kept falling.

23.

Dear Laura

By now, you are forty-four years old. I remember that age. I was near that age when I first met Bobby, and first saw you. Now I am an old man, and time has not been good to me.

I am sorry I didn’t write before. I was put away for something I did. Locked up like an animal, by people who don’t understand what real feelings are. People don’t know love, not the way I do. Society judges me instead. I couldn’t write from prison. I couldn’t risk them finding out about Bobby. He is our secret, isn’t he? So I stopped writing, for his sake. It was agony for me. But I thought about you every day, Laura. Every single day.