After the Correction

At work, my name badge was where I'd left it, clipped to a cardboard box in my locker.

BEA — HAPPY TO HELP.

I considered turning it over.

Lou found me before I reached the shop floor. She took one look at my face and steered me towards the staff room with the gentleness of someone moving a trolley with a bad wheel.

“Two hours,” she said. “No till. You can face up the stationery aisle and check dates in the bakery. If you need to stop, you stop.”

“I can do the till.”

“I'm sure. I'm choosing not to make you.”

She handed me a bottle of water and went back to the office before I could turn gratitude into an argument.

The stationery aisle was almost empty. I straightened notebooks, rehung packets of pens and put a plastic ruler back on the right hook. The work had a beginning, a correct arrangement and a visible end. I found it so comforting that it embarrassed me.

A child came down the aisle with his grandmother and asked whether glitter glue worked on shoes.

“Not well,” I said.

“How well?”

His grandmother gave me a look that asked for solidarity.

“It'll probably fall off and leave marks.”

He considered this. “What if I want marks?”

“Then you're making a different project.”

The grandmother sighed and steered him towards pencils.

For a few seconds I was simply a person at work, answering a question about glue. Then my phone vibrated in my trouser pocket and I remembered the rest.

I ignored it until my break.

In the staff room, Zoe from the evening shift sat at the table eating noodles from a container. She looked up when I came in, then looked down too quickly.

“You can ask,” I said.

“I wasn't going to.”

“All right.”

I sat at the other end of the table.

A poster above the sink reminded us to leave the room as we would wish to find it. Beneath it, someone had left a teaspoon in a puddle of tea. The management of human beings remained an ambitious project.

Zoe pushed her container aside.

“I'm sorry about your friend.”

“Thank you.”

“I didn't know you were close.”

“We weren't. Not recently.”

“Oh.”

I watched her decide what that meant. People liked grief to come with a clear label: best friend, classmate, neighbour, person you had once sat beside on a coach. They wanted to know how much feeling belonged to each category. I had no useful measurement for losing somebody while still owing them an apology they had never agreed to accept.

“Sorry,” Zoe said again.

“You don't have to keep saying it.”

“I know. I just don't know what else.”

“That makes two of us.”

She smiled weakly.

Then she said, “At least your brother's home.”

I looked at her.

Her face changed at once.

“I didn't mean—God. That sounded awful.”

“It did a bit.”

“I'm sorry.”

I nodded. I could have punished her for it. Part of me wanted to, because it would have been a clean little burst of anger with an available target. But she looked genuinely horrified, and I had spent enough of the day hearing how my own words sounded outside my intentions.

“I know what you meant,” I said.

She let out a breath.

We sat quietly for a moment. Then she offered me a biscuit from an open packet, and I took one.

My phone had eleven messages. Most were from people asking whether I was okay. Two were screenshots.

The first showed a post in a local community group. Someone had written that the police were looking into missing video from the fundraiser. Underneath, another person asked whether it was true that the girl who filmed the event had cut out the part showing her brother stealing a camera.

The second was from our college chat. No question mark this time.

She deleted eleven minutes. Let that sink in.

I read the sentence twice.

Let that sink in. As if the work of understanding a thing consisted of giving suspicion a moment to settle.

I wanted to reply with a paragraph about editing. I wanted to explain that a highlights film was not an archive, that the full silent copy still existed, that I had handed it over, that the missing originals were a separate problem. I also wanted to avoid the part where I had lied, because that part did not improve when explained technically.

Lou appeared in the doorway.

“Everything all right?”

I showed her the screen.

She read it, then handed the phone back.

“Do you need to go home?”

“No.”

“Do you need five more minutes?”

“Yes.”

“Take ten.”

When she left, Zoe looked at me.

“People are idiots.”

“Sometimes people are partly right and still horrible.”

She thought about that, then nodded.

I called Mum. She was home, making something for Denise to freeze because feeding people had become the only language in which she felt fluent.

“Don't answer the posts,” she said after I described them. “Send anything threatening to the officer. Let the rest sit.”

“They're saying I destroyed evidence.”

“Did you?”

“No.”

“Then don't make a new mistake trying to explain the old one.”

I pressed my fingers against my eyes.

“I hate that you keep being sensible.”

“I don't enjoy it as much as you'd think.”

I laughed, a little.

She asked whether I wanted collecting. I said I'd walk because it was still light. She made me promise to message when I left, then let me go without extracting another account of how I felt.

I returned to the stationery aisle. The boy with the glitter glue had left a packet of stickers on the floor. I picked it up and put it back.

At six forty, Finn appeared at the end of the aisle carrying a basket with bread, milk and a packet of washing tablets.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hi.”

“I didn't know you were working.”

“Neither did I, until I was.”

He gave a small smile and put the basket down by his feet.

“I saw the posts.”

“So has everyone.”

“I told someone to stop spreading it.”

“Thank you.”

He looked at the pens I was arranging.

“Have you spoken to the police again?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“I told them the truth.”

“That’s good.”

“It doesn't feel good.”

“It will.”

I looked at him. He said it with such easy certainty that I wanted to borrow it and resented him for having it available.

“Will it?”

“I mean eventually.”

“You don't know that.”

Finn's face tightened.

“I'm trying to help, Bea.”

“I know. I'm sorry.”

He picked up the basket, then set it down again.

“Rowan wouldn't want us doing this to ourselves.”

The anger arrived before I could organise it into something polite.

“We don't know what Rowan would want.”

Finn stared at me.

“He might want to be angry. He might want us to stop using his name to finish conversations.”

A woman at the end of the aisle looked up from a packet of envelopes. I lowered my voice.

“Sorry. I just—everybody keeps saying it.”

Finn swallowed.

“You're not the only person who knew him.”

“I didn't say I was.”

“You act like everybody else is getting him wrong.”

The words struck because there was truth in them.

I looked down at the shelf.

“You're right,” I said.

He waited, perhaps expecting an argument after the concession.

“I don't own being sorry about him,” I added.

Finn's shoulders eased a little.

“No.”

We stood among notebooks and glue sticks, two people who had known each other too long to pretend the conversation hadn't hurt.

“Did you find out about the card wallet?” I asked.

He looked away towards the tills.

“Dad's checked the garage. Nothing. Judith's asking everyone who packed up.”

“Martin has the case.”

“I know.”

“The wallet's in the photo I took before closing it.”

Finn nodded slowly.

“Then somebody moved it.”

“Maybe.”

He shifted the basket to his other hand.

“I hope they find it.”

“So do I.”

He left without hugging me. I was grateful. I wasn't sure I could have accepted comfort from him without first deciding whether I owed him another apology, and I was tired of every kindness arriving with work attached.

At seven, I clocked out. Lou checked that I'd eaten, then told me to stop tidying the staff room and go home. Outside, the evening air smelled of warm tarmac and bread from the supermarket vents.

I took the longer route past the recreation ground. Children were still playing football. A man threw a ball for a dog that kept returning it to the wrong person. Nothing about the scene had been arranged to remind me of Rowan, and for that reason it almost did me in.

Halfway home, an email arrived from Ms Delaney.

She had been thinking about my portfolio deadline. The regional foundation course would accept a selection of work rather than one major film. We could discuss alternatives to the documentary if I wanted. She did not mention the investigation, the posts or my statement. She wrote that a portfolio should show what I was able to do now, not trap me inside the best thing I'd done months ago.

I stopped beside the park gate and read it again.

For months I had treated the Rowan film as the thing that would get me out. It had been shortlisted. A judge had praised it. People who knew more than I did had called it promising. I had kept the edited version in my portfolio even after Rowan asked me to take it down from public view, telling myself that a private application was different.

Now I opened the portfolio page and removed the link.

I didn't delete the file. I had learned that much about the difference between removing something from display and making it disappear.

The page looked unfinished afterwards. Three thumbnails remained: the bus station, a short exercise about hands at work, a little animation I'd made with paper shapes on my bedroom floor. None had won anything.

I sent Delaney a reply asking when we could talk.

Then I put the phone away and went home to tell Mum before she could ask.