The Police. This all needed to go to the Police. X was an old man, now. He would not be waiting to knock her down this time if she strode into town with a handbag full of evidence. She should take this letter, and all the others, to the Police, and tell them what she knew. They would not dismiss her now. She was a respectable age, a Mother, a well-liked person in the community. She came with added gravitas.

And yet…

And yet.

She was in her forties, a mother, a wife, an administrator of a local victim support charity alongside Frank, an advocate for mental health and a child safety awareness campaigner. All of the pain and loss and confusion had been scooped up, and poured into better, worthier pastimes than trying to piece together the demented clues that X had left, uninvited, on her doormat as a young girl.

Laura was beyond all of that, now, wasn’t she? This was a matter, at last, for the authorities. X was old, now, and sick, he said it himself. What reprisals would there be, if she handed everything in?

And yet.

I will come after your boy, and I will take him like I took Bobby.

The threat dangled in the air before her, and try as she might, she couldn’t ignore it. The dissonant chords of long repressed memory jangled in her mind, and scenes flashed in front of her eyes: a van, idling on the curb. A boy, blonde hair hanging in soft curtains around his face, climbing in through the open door. A shadow, lurking behind the frosted glass of her parent’s front door. A fist, slamming into her face. A tooth, lying in a puddle of gore in the palm of her hand. Envelopes, on the doormat. A photo, filled with red. He might be old, but he was practised. Motivated. And he’d been in prison, so he might know people. People who could help him hurt her, help him take her little boy.

He was dangerous.

And she believed him. She believed he could do it. He had done it before, and he wanted to do it again.

How could she ignore that? Worse, trust the Police with this information?

And besides all of this, despite coming to terms with not wanting to know Bobby’s fate, the question of where his remains had been all these years still gaped open, like a wound. Imagine if she could find him, after all. Imagine if she could bring him back to his family for a proper goodbye.

Because the knife still twisted, in rare quiet moments where she found herself without a task. All these years later, it twisted, and she felt the ghost of Bobby’s hand upon hers. Her lips tingled beneath his kiss, breathy and hesitant. So young. They had both been so young.

Laura looked at her worn, dog-eared map. She saw deliberate red splotches across contour-lines: the coordinates from all the other letters, marks that she had made in permanent ink. Her fingers twitched with the memory of scribbling forcefully on that detailed and intricate surface. Carefully, her heart climbing slowly back up into her throat like it used to when she was younger, she studied his last letter, and the list of numbers he’d provided at the end. Then, with a marker pen she found on Frank’s writing desk, she tentatively marked the final coordinates on the map.