Small red heart and semicolon on an ankle

The fair pulled into Cromer on Tuesday with the big wheel folded up like a dropped umbrella, and Mr Pryce has finally let me paint the board for the dodgems. You'll laugh. I spent a whole evening on the ladder with a pot of red lead and the finest brush from the caravan, doing a semicolon above the entrance, because Mr Pryce said the lettering looked like it was running out of breath. You'll say a semicolon is a stop, not a breath. That's what I told him too, and he said a full stop is the end of a thing, but a semicolon is where you keep going and just need a moment. Then he sent me back up the ladder to add a heart beside it.

The Waltzer cars were still rocking when I walked the lot on Wednesday night, the generator coughing twice before it settled. Nobody on the rides looked up at the sign. The lads from the coconut shy were arguing about a dropped fiver, and a little girl in a yellow mac kept pressing her palm flat against the glass of the hook-a-duck tank. I kept thinking about your letter from Hull, the one that stopped halfway down the page with no full stop, only a dash and then nothing at all. I didn't write back straight away. I wanted to be sure of what I'd say.

So here it is, plain. I'm not finished with you, and I don't think you're finished with us. I've enclosed the ticket stub from the night you won me that bear on the dodgems, the one with one eye missing, which I still keep on the shelf above my bunk.

Come down when the paint's dry. The heart is the same red as the lead, and it's the only thing on this whole lot that doesn't need touching up.

Love, Ada