How had our holiday gone so wrong? We’d arrived at Ekanta Yatra as friends, friends with issues rumbling beneath the smiles and excitement, but ours was a friendship that had outlasted uni and survived relocation, jobs and relationships. Or so I thought. And yet the bonds I’d believed to be so strong were only ever superficial and, like a game of Jenga, all it took was one false move and everything collapsed.

I reach for the water bottle beside my mattress and shake it. Empty. I wriggle out of my sleeping bag and pad across the dorm to the walkway. The water in the shower block isn’t suitable for drinking and I’m thirsty.

I step from the walkway into the hall, the only sound the soft slap of my bare feet on the floorboards and the low rumble of snores emanating from the boys’ dormitory, the only light the soft glow of the candle on the table Al overturned last week. It feels like far, far longer than that. I head for the kitchen and the scent of cumin, cardamom and cinnamon then pause and glance back towards Isaac’s study. The door is wide open, the room deserted. The desk has been pushed back against the window, the rug piled in a crumpled heap beside it. Books, papers and shoes litter the floor, haphazardly framing a dark hole in the ground to the left of the desk.

My breath catches in my throat and I freeze.

The hatch door is open.

I want to look away but I can’t. I can’t do anything other than stare at the black square less than ten feet away from me.

Where’s Frank?

From the state of the room, he either left in a hurry or there was a struggle getting him out. The curtains beyond the hatch billow into the room as a gust of wind from the open window lifts them into the air, and several sheets of paper skid along the floor and settle by the open doorway. Without thinking, I take a step forward and reach out for the one nearest to me. My hands are shaking so much, it takes me two attempts to pick it up.

It’s an email from Leanne to Isaac, dated 15th April, three and a half months before we came out here.

Dear Isaac,

I’ve written this email half a dozen times and then deleted it and started again. This time I’m going to write what I feel and just send it, otherwise I’m never going to reply to you, and I can’t do that, not when it’s taken me so long to find you.

Isaac, I spent my whole childhood feeling lost and unsettled, like a piece of me was missing. Of course, I couldn’t verbalise it like that as a child, I just felt “sad” a lot.