X watched her, and she watched X. Overhead, the plane disappeared from view, its twin streams breaking up into foamy clouds, then dissipating. The quiet thickened. It seemed, after being so talkative in his letters, that X was not as forthcoming in person, content to let the silence between them stretch out further and further. Laura knew this instinctively to be a power play, knew that whoever broke the standoff first would lose somehow, but she was beyond caring, beyond playing games.

‘Where is he?’ She asked, blood ringing in her ears. ‘Where is Bobby?’

X propped himself up slowly on one arm, and then painfully, awkwardly heaved himself upright on the couch.

‘Do you want to see my scars?’ He said, lifting his shirt up and showing off his pigeon chest. His gut protruded out from beneath it like a swollen, ridiculous tumour. She saw pale, shiny marks criss-crossing the skin between his nipples, and then she realised the scars were arranged in the form of letters, a crude inscription that someone had carved onto his body: PAEDO, it read.

‘They don’t like people like me in prison,’ he said, by way of explanation, and then coughed, his belly wobbling and convulsing as he hacked and spat. Laura had never been so repulsed by anything in her life.

‘Where is Bobby?’ She repeated, and X lapsed back into silence, breathing hard through his mouth, his face and eyes red, and raw. Laura’s nerve was failing. The impetus she’d felt when she’d received his final letter had petered out, and now that the journey was complete, the constant act of moving forward no longer the thing keeping her sane, the fear and doubt surrounding her bizarre situation began crashing in, like water through a burst dam.

‘Your hair is going grey,’ he said, at last, and Laura couldn’t contain it anymore. He didn’t know where Bobby was, he never had. He was still playing the game, and the game wouldn’t be done until she was broken, because that was what he had decided to make his life about. There was no Bobby, there was no end, only him, and her, until he died, and let her be, and even then she would dream of this moment, she knew it. She would wake in the night, breath stuck tight in her throat, and see only one thing: X, reclining in his throne, scrutinising her, criticising her temerity for letting herself age.

And she realised, in that moment, how angry X was with her for not being a thirteen-year-old girl anymore. How angry he had always been.

Having never once cried in her entire adult life, the tears that had solidified like resin about her heart suddenly liquefied, and ran free, and Laura burst into tears, gun wobbling about as her whole body shook with the force of her distress.

And X sat, on his couch, hands resting loosely by his sides, and watched, a small, triumphant smile upon his lips.

Then, he reached into the collar of his shirt, and brought something out. Something small, and white, the colour of bone.