Arrow and heart on the lower back

I finally made it to the reunion on Saturday, though I stood by the squash-club door for twenty minutes before going in, pretending to check my phone. Mr Pardoe still runs the raffle, and he still looks at everyone as if they owe him a late slip.

I brought the arrow. You'll remember it, the one Gavin Oakes whittled from a bamboo cane in woodwork, the fletching cut from a supermarket carrier bag, the round bead you glued near the nock so it wouldn't slide off. You pushed a paper heart onto the shaft and posted it through my locker with no name, and I spent the whole of Lent pretending I hadn't guessed.

Nobody else knew what it meant, which was the point. I put it on the buffet table between the sausage rolls and the trifle, and waited. You didn't come in until gone eight. When you did, you looked at the table, then at me, and laughed so hard you had to hold on to the radiator.

We walked down to the canal afterwards, our shoes wet from the grass, and I said I'd kept the arrow in a shoebox all these years. You said you'd kept the heart. It turned out to be the same scrap of paper, folded inside the shaft, and neither of us had the nerve to say so until the lock-keeper came out to shout at us.

Write back soon. Tell me if the heart still fits.

Mo