Dear Laura

by Gemma Amor

The first letter arrived on Laura’s fourteenth birthday, exactly one year and a day after Bobby disappeared.

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.

She learned to approach everything else in life this way: quid pro quo, I’ll do this, if you do that.

Laura kept wrapping little, intimate parts of herself up in plastic, and leaving them outside her front door, like donations to a perverted god.

Frank was unlike anyone she’d ever met before. The first thing that struck her was how much he resembled Bobby.

But now you have someone else. I’m not sure I can allow it.

If you don’t, I will come after your boy, and I will take him like I took Bobby.

Frank was the sort of person who would die to keep you afloat.