Alice reached back into the bag, frantically searching until at last she felt it. His letter. What had he said right at the end …?
Her eyes scanned it anxiously for that one line she knew she’d seen before. YES! There it was.
P.S. Enjoy the puzzles!
The present she’d stuffed away and forgotten about! Alice took a few breaths, closed her eyes and held the book in her hands for a moment.
He made this for me.
This is a part of him in my hands, right here, right now.
She reached for a discarded pen in one of her drawers and opened the first page. A dot-to-dot … of course! She quickly set to work, letting the pen reveal the secrets of the puzzle.
It was the shape of an eye.
Come on, Alfie, you can do better than this.
She turned the next page. Another dot-to-dot.
A very accurately drawn human heart.
OK, this really was random. Although what was she expecting? A hidden message? She laughed to herself and carried on overleaf.
Anotherdot-to-dot.No points for imagination, she thought.
A sheep.
Just as she was about to give up, she noticed a little note at the bottom of the page.
Put those together and what do you get, Alice?
There it was, clear as day on the page.
I. LOVE. YOU.
She felt like she hadn’t taken a breath for an eternity. She turned over to the next puzzle.
I. STILL. LOVE. YOU.
She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Every page she turned to had a similar pattern. There it was: fifteen pages of ‘I love you’, until she reached the very last page.
Her heart must have stopped when she saw it.
Alice, I don’t know if I’ve made it clear enough yet, but I have completely and utterly fallen in love with you. If you feel the tiniest spark of anything towards me, please come and find me. Let’s meet, let’s talk, let’s read Harry Potter together! I will forever be hopeful. Yours, Alfie x
Without thinking, she jumped to her feet. Her entire body vibrated as adrenaline flooded her veins. There was so much energy moving through her that she could barely think, let alone sit still. She needed to go somewhere.
But where?
She smiled, clocking the tiny scrawled address at the bottom of the page.
71
Alfie
Alfie had known physical exertion. He’d played sport his whole life; he’d learnt to walk again, for heaven’s sake, but therapy: now that was a whole new level of tiring.
Five sessions in and he still hadn’t wrapped his head around it. How could the hardest part of his entire recovery process involve sitting in a room for forty-five minutes talking? After every session he’d leave devoid of energy, as though someone had pulled the plug and let the life drain out of him. It required effort to simply keep his eyes open, let alone walk home from the station. But he did it. Because he’d promised he would and because ultimately he knew it was helping.
