Her name.

Laura, it said, confident, over-familiar. No ‘To,’ or ‘For the attention of,’ or surname.

Just her name.

It felt wrong. The letter felt wrong in her hands. She’d mistaken it for a birthday card, that would make sense, today being that day, but this was thin, and lightweight. It was a letter. A handwritten letter.

Made out to her.

She opened it.

8.

The forest leaned in on the woman that had once been the child, and she limped on stubbornly beneath a canopy of dripping leaves. She knew that walking on her leg was a bad idea. She knew, and carried on anyway. Every step she made pressed her wound painfully against the unresisting leather of her boot, and as early evening gradually became the first, tentative flush of twilight, it became harder for her to find a steady footing on the uneven forest floor. She stumbled repeatedly, root snarls and barbed loops of blackberry bushes lurking everywhere, and wondered why it was that she couldn’t cry, like normal people. Had she in fact died, years ago? Was she now just a ghost, a memory of a girl in pain, drifting, endlessly drifting, towards something indistinct?

There were no answers from the trees, only more roots, more discomfort.

The rain gradually petered out. The air grew quiet, and hung heavy, laden with scent. Colours slowly leached away as she moved, and she found herself hemmed in by shadows, by muted greys and browns, by pockets of dark. Time was running out. A mounting anxiety started to eat away at her resolve.

What if she got lost?

What if she didn’t make it in time?

What if…

Don’t, she told herself, unhooking her trousers from another bramble, feeling the fabric snag and tear like the fabric of a thirteen-year-old girl’s heart.

But what if? This particular question would not be dislodged from her mind, no matter how hard she tried to reason with herself.

What if there was no Bobby at the end of this rainbow?

What if the person she was supposed to meet didn’t show?

She stopped, overwhelmed by a squeezing fist of dread, and doubt.

What if he did?

And what if, because of that, she died out here, alone in the forest?

The trees bowed their heads, whispering gently.

Don’t stop, they said.

She walked.

9.

The letter was written in a heavily angled hand that was hard to read. Laura skimmed each sentence, frowning, and then re-read more slowly, lips moving as she spoke the words out loud, something she only did when trying to solve a hard equation in her maths homework.

As she read, her heart sank to the bottom of her belly, and the words began to rattle around inside her brain. And once they were there, there was no getting them out. She was stuck with them, for life. Little, poisoned words.

Dear Laura,

You don’t know me yet, but I know you. I’ve been watching you. I know you, and I know your friend Bobby.