Today’s DM on Instagram starts the same as so many others. ‘Hello, beautiful,’ it says.

Except this message is from my father.

I wonder if he even knows it’s me. Twenty years can change a person.

I don’t hesitate to end it the same as the others: delete, block, forget.

Laura Besley writes short fiction and squeezes her writing into the bookends of her day. She has lived in Holland, Germany, and Hong Kong, but now lives in land-locked central England and misses the sea. Her flash fiction collection, The Almost Mothers, was published in March 2020. She tweets at @laurabesley.