Google lettering across upper back

You will laugh, but the customs officer at Folkestone spent ten minutes on my passport with a face like a wet Sunday, then asked me what I had been searching for on the internet in Calais. I told him I had not been searching at all, I had been waiting for you to answer my letters. He wrote that down.

The coach to Dunkirk was full of school trips. A boy in a red anorak kept reading the sign over the petrol station aloud, letter by letter, as if it were a hymn. Each evening since you left Hull I have typed your name into that little white box at the library, and each evening it gives me a thousand Nells, none of them yours. Mr Okafor says that is what the box is for: it finds everything except the one thing you want.

Yesterday I walked down to the ferry terminal and found a stall selling painted signs. An old man there drew the word Google for me in heavy blackletter, the way sign-writers used to letter the shopfronts on Anlaby Road, then coloured it with a child's crayons, red fading to violet at the edges. I have pinned it above the kettle. It looks like a shop that has never once shut its doors.

Come home, or tell me where to come. The crossing closes at six, and I will be at the window with the lamp lit. Love, Ada.