And then Bobby’s mother came, with her angry fists against the frosted glass of the front door, and before Laura knew what was happening, the distraught, furious woman was inside the house, and through the hall, and into the lounge, and had her hands on Laura’s shoulders, and then she was shaking her, hard. Laura’s head whipped back and forth, and Bobby’s mother, whom she had always politely called Mrs. Eveleigh, despite her insistence that she call her Tara, began screaming at her with a cracked, hoarse voice that belied how many hours of the past few weeks she’d spent crying. She shook Laura like a ragdoll and screamed, and at one point, the slight thirteen-year-old girl thought she might faint.

‘How could you let him go like that?’ Mrs. Eveleigh shrieked, over and over again. ‘You were supposed to be his friend!’

Laura bore the assault silently, too shocked to anything else, until her mother raced across the room and wrestled Mrs. Eveleigh away.

‘Tara! What are you doing?’ Mrs. Scott shouted as she held the other woman back, body braced tight as a bow-string against the wind-milling arms and reaching hands that clutched at missing answers. ‘What are you doing? She’s only a child! Look at her! Look at her!’

Don’t look at me, Laura thought.

Please don’t look at me.

And Mrs. Eveleigh stopped, and burst into tears, sagging into her neighbour’s arms.

‘He’s gone, Melanie,’ she sobbed, ‘my boy, oh, my boy!’ Mrs. Scott did her best to soothe her friend whilst keeping her away from her own child.

And Laura lay, discarded on the couch, stunned, head pounding from the motion, and thinking the same thing, over and over, a persistent, nasty thought that echoed like a struck bell:

It’s all my fault.

7.

After he was taken, after the fight with Bobby’s mother, Laura would wake, each morning, and lie in bed, running the fingers of her left hand along the back of her right hand, mimicking that last moment she’d had with Bobby before he left, trying to recall his face, trying, and always failing. His features had blurred in the year that had passed since that day, and the details bled around the edges like ink on wet writing paper. The knife would twist, and the pain would spread throughout her body.

On the morning of her fourteenth birthday, the day of the first letter, she lay in this fashion, sunlight slicing through her curtains and across the room, motes of dust darting about lazily in the bright, illuminated air. Her fingers caressed the back of her right hand, but the act bought less and less comfort, and so she stopped, and simply held her hands up against the sunlight, studying the outline of her fingers, painted bright gold by the sun. It was while she lay like this that she heard the letterbox snap. She thought no more of it for a moment or two, but then the doorbell rang.

‘Go away,’ she whispered. The doorbell rang again, and then again, and again, insistent, impossible to ignore. Laura’s heart began to thump with irregularity in her chest. She was alone in the house. She often was, despite everything. Her parents drifted across each other’s paths like clouds, one arriving home with slumped shoulders and huge, deep circles beneath their eyes just as the other one was heading out to the car. They worked hard to maintain the life they’d built around themselves, forgetting, in the process, what that life was really supposed to be about. It was a lonely way to live, for Laura, but it had always been like that. She’d told herself over the years that it was fine, that she had something her peers did not: as much freedom as she liked. She’d told herself she didn’t need her parents hanging around all the time, because she had Bobby.