The Part After

On Friday, a woman I did not know told me I had been very brave.

She stopped me outside the supermarket while I was holding a bag of milk and toilet paper. I had no idea which version of the story had reached her. She touched my elbow and said the town owed young people like me a great deal.

I looked at her hand until she removed it.

“I don't think you know what happened,” I said.

Her smile faltered.

“I only meant—”

“I know. Sorry. I need to go.”

I walked away before I could turn my discomfort into an explanation she had not earned.

At home, Mum was on the phone with Caroline. There would be more questions, more formal accounts, more decisions about what happened next. Finn was in custody. The police had recovered material from Birch Road. They were not handing the town a complete script of the inquiry, though the town was doing its best to write one without them.

Adebayo called later to ask whether I had remembered anything further from the conversation. I had remembered the sound of traffic stopping near Finn, and the order in which he mentioned the jacket and the cards. I told her those things. I did not improve the call into a cleaner sequence.

“Have you spoken about the details online?” she asked.

“No.”

“Good. Keep any account of the evidence for us and your legal adviser while the case is being dealt with.”

“People are saying I caught him.”

“I know that's being said.”

“I didn't.”

“You gave us information. So did other people. That's the accurate version.”

I wrote the sentence down after we ended the call because I thought I would need it when people offered me something more flattering.

At two, Mum and I went to Denise's. We had asked first. I carried a loaf of the bread Alice liked and felt foolish for having nothing less ordinary to bring.

Denise opened the door in a cardigan with one button fastened in the wrong hole. She looked older than she had a fortnight earlier in a way that frightened me. Not because of lines or grey hair. Because she seemed to have less space around her for anything unexpected.

“They told us,” she said before I could speak.

“I know.”

“Enough. You don't have to repeat it.”

I nodded.

In the kitchen, the button packets had been cleared into boxes. A single yellow one remained beside the fruit bowl. Alice was at school for part of the afternoon, by her own choice and with permission to leave if she needed to. Denise said this as though the arrangement was a fragile piece of furniture nobody should lean on.

Mum put the kettle on.

I sat at the table.

“I keep thinking he came here,” Denise said. “Finn. Sat right there.”

I looked at the chair she indicated. It was the one nearest the back door.

“He helped carry things. Asked whether I'd eaten. I thanked him.”

“You didn't know,” Mum said.

“No. I didn't.”

Denise held the yellow button between finger and thumb.

“I don't want people telling me I should have known. Or that mothers can always tell. I couldn't tell this. I knew the message was wrong. I didn't know why.”

“No one should ask that of you,” Mum said.

Denise put the button down.

“People ask all sorts of things when they don't think they're asking.”

For a while we drank tea. The clock above the fridge was three minutes fast. Rowan used to say it made them the only family in town living slightly in the future. I almost told Denise, then realised she had probably heard the joke more often than I had.

Instead I asked whether she wanted help with the boxes.

She said yes.

We carried them into the front room and stacked them by the wall. There were things to be taken back to the market, things to be returned to suppliers, things Denise had not decided about. Mum wrote labels without choosing for her.

When Alice came home, she stopped in the doorway.

“Are those his?”

“Stock,” Denise said. “Buttons and zips. Not Rowan's things.”

Alice came closer and checked one label anyway.

“Okay.”

She went upstairs, then came back down with her schoolbag still on.

“Someone said they were glad he'd been found,” she said.

Denise closed her eyes.

“Finn?”

“Yes. I knew what they meant. I just didn't want to hear it.”

“Did you tell them?”

“I told them to shut up.”

Mum looked at the floor. I looked at the boxes.

Denise took a breath.

“Did you say anything else?”

“No.”

“All right. We'll talk about a different way to say it later.”

Alice nodded, visibly relieved that later existed.

She sat beside me on the sofa and pulled at the zip of her bag.

“Do you have any videos where he isn't being sad?” she asked.

I turned towards her.

“Yes.”

“Not the one everyone shared.”

“Other things. Some from when we were younger. Your mum probably has more.”

“I want the paper frog,” she said.

Denise looked up from a box.

“The one on your phone?”

“The old phone. He was teaching me to fold it, and it kept jumping backwards.”

I remembered the afternoon. Rowan had become increasingly offended by the frog's refusal to travel in the direction he intended. Alice had named it Trevor and declared it a political protest.

“I might have some of that too,” I said. “I was there.”

Alice looked at Denise.

“Can we watch those instead?”

“Of course.”

“Can Bea put them together? So we don't have to keep finding them in different places.”

The question made me sit very still.

“I can help make a private collection,” I said. “You can choose what goes in. And what doesn't.”

“I don't want music.”

“All right.”

“And not all the slow bits.”

“We can look at it together.”

Denise watched us. For a moment I thought she would say no, and I would have understood.

Then she said, “Not tonight. Tomorrow, perhaps. My sister's coming. Four people is enough.”

I nodded.

On the way home, Mum asked whether I was all right with doing it.

“I think so.”

“You're allowed not to be.”

“I know.”

I did not tell her that part of me was frightened to touch another image of Rowan. That I could already hear the old habits offering me titles, transitions, a shape that would make everything feel deliberate. I would have to keep noticing those habits. There was no single apology that switched them off.

At home, an email from the centre board was waiting in the volunteer list. Judith had been suspended from her role while the use of the restricted fund was investigated. An independent review would establish the amounts and the obligations. The roof repairs still needed paying for. Youth sessions might eventually resume elsewhere, but there was no date yet.

Underneath, someone had replied asking whether Finn's arrest meant Judith was cleared.

Mrs Pemberton answered that the financial matter was separate.

I read the exchange twice. People wanted one bad person to explain everything. It would have been convenient. It would also have let too many other choices disappear.

That evening I drafted a correction about my footage. I explained that the eleven-minute gap had been removed from a highlights edit, not erased from the full silent viewing copy supplied to police. I did not turn that clarification into a claim that all my conduct had been right. I wrote separately about the false information I had given and corrected, then sent the draft to Caroline to review before I posted anything.

At the bottom I put Adebayo's sentence in my own words: I had given information, as other people had. I had not solved the case on a laptop or brought Rowan home.

The last part was the hardest to leave on the page.

I saved it, closed the file and went downstairs to ask Sam whether he wanted a cup of tea.