And the last, vital piece fell into place.

Join the dots, he’d said. With trembling hands, she did as she was told, because she always did what X told her to. She began to connect the dots, and gradually, his design became apparent.

She saw concentric rings form beneath her hands, not circles exactly, but rings like those of a tree, closing in around a single point, a small area in the vast expanse of the Old Forest, the size of the tip of her thumb against the map.

In the middle of this space, a clearing was marked, with a thin stream bisecting it. The area was no more than twenty feet wide, she guessed, from the scale on the map, although distance was hard to accurately judge by her eye alone.

Somewhere, in that area, she would find the man who wrote the letters.

Somewhere, in that area, she knew she would also find Bobby.

She made one final, damning mark on the map with jerky, uncooperative fingers. And when she saw what she’d written, she laughed, out loud, because all she could do now was resort to humour, every other emotion in her repertoire having long since been used. ‘X’, it said.

X marks the spot.

25.

The trees sang to her as she walked. Tiny, whispering songs that skittered past her ears and rose and fell with the thin morning breeze. A rabbit froze in the path ahead of her, head rigid, eyes dark and wide, and then it ran, white tail flashing as it bounded away into the undergrowth. Somewhere, a jay called out, harsh, mocking. The compass and the map thump, thump, thumped against her chest. Her hair no longer fell into her eyes, but frizzed out into a cloud around her head, humidity, grease and a night’s rough sleep taking its toll.

She walked, and with every step she took, she felt taller, and colder, and more rigid, as if she were one of the very trees themselves, uprooted, marching to war.

And then, she found it. The place she’d been searching for. Thirty years of her life, spent looking.

She knew it as soon as she saw it: this, after all, was the land in her heart, the Promised Land, the place she had been flying towards, even when she had thought she was not. It had lived inside her for so long that she was afraid she wouldn’t recognise it when she arrived, but here she was, at seven in the morning, earlier than requested, bloodied, bruised, and cold. A little brown bird, exhausted, migrating north to that one, fixed target.

She had come, suddenly, to the clearing in the forest, stumbled upon it before sensing a change in the density of the trees and light overhead. Passing from shade to bright, she looked up and saw a window of pale blue sky. High up there, way up in the air, a tiny white plane flew, arrow-straight, trails of white chasing behind. Laura took a deep breath, and stepped further into the clearing.