His fingers stroked her hand, and they blushed, and scuffed their feet in shared embarrassment. She wondered if he would try to kiss her again before the bus arrived, but he seemed nervous, his eyes focussed on the road beneath them, so she didn’t ask.

And then, she realised she’d forgotten something. What that thing was now, she could barely recall: a pencil-case, her homework, lunch money...it was something small and yet vital, something she would be in trouble for, if she forgot. She let go of his hand.

‘I’ll just run back,’ she’d said.

‘I’ll be five minutes, wait for me,’ she’d said.

She ran up the road, to her house, her bag thumping against her hip heavily, Bobby standing on the pavement, looking into the distance with a small frown on his pale, long face.

She would never hold his hand again.

3.

Thirty years later, Laura was lowering herself carefully down a steep, muddy embankment when her foot rolled, and she fell, heavily, arms flung up uselessly behind her, a wingless bird now, dropping like a stone mid-flight. The impact as she hit the ground at the bottom of the embankment was shattering. All breath left her body. Small sparks of bright crossed her vision, momentarily erasing the code from her sight. There was a sharp, stabbing pain in her ankle.

She lay like that for a little while, trying to suck some air back into her lungs, spread-eagled across a bed of lamb’s tongue and bird’s nest ferns and moss. The skeletal remains of long-dead trees stuck into her, behaving like old, displeased women, poking her with their sharp fingers, and all she could think was this:

If a woman falls in a forest and no one is around to hear...does she make a sound?

The uncaring rain fell, soaked into the soil next to her face. A rich, thick scent filled her nostrils: the forest, gorged on fresh rainwater, belching out a mulchy, potent aroma as the ground bloated, grew treacherous. She lay there, panting, and tried not to panic about the fading light, about the time slipping away, tried not to think about how much slower she would be now that she was injured, and all the while her ankle throbbed with fierce, shrieking pain, and she sensed that something was very, very wrong down there.

Eventually she regained enough strength to reach down with shaking hands and feel for the problem, the source of the pain. It didn’t take long to figure out: instead of flesh, she found a jagged, sharp piece of wood. It was jammed into the soft part of her ankle just above the heel, piercing the gap between her ankle bone and her Achilles tendon, right above her stiff leather boot. Blood, slippery and fresh, flooded down her foot. She wiggled the stick experimentally, and gasped. The pain was incredible, shooting up her entire leg, ricocheting off her back teeth. She knew the piece of wood needed to come out, else she would be crippled and unable to use the leg. And if she was crippled, she wouldn’t get to where she needed to be at the right time. Already the day was fading, the tree trunks around her looked less solid, and the sky sank lower to meet the ground. Her window of opportunity was closing inexorably. Time to act.