The Service Path

By Thursday, Finn's photograph was on the local site's front page.

It was the one I had taken of him on the rehearsal stage, the same image used in the Harcourt showcase. In the appeal, he was no longer a promising young filmmaker. He was someone police urgently wanted to locate and speak to in connection with their inquiry.

I had made him turn towards the light for that photograph. I remembered saying his shoulders looked stiff. He had asked whether I wanted him to look mysterious, and I had told him to look as if he was waiting for a bus.

Now I could not see the picture without hearing that conversation.

I did not share the appeal with a personal caption. I sent the link where the police had asked for it to be shared and left their words attached. Then I turned off the screen.

Mum was home that morning. Her manager had rearranged the rota again, not indefinitely and not without other people taking the strain. She sat at the kitchen table working out which shifts she could repay over the next fortnight.

“Do you want me to take more hours?” I asked.

“At the supermarket?”

“Yes.”

“Not to pay for this.”

“I could.”

“I know. We're all going to work out what we can do. You're not going to buy your way out of feeling bad.”

I sat opposite her.

“That sounds like something Sam would do.”

She looked at me over the rota.

“Yes.”

I deserved that enough to smile.

I spent the morning reworking the opening of the shoe-repair film. Mr Patel had watched the private copy and sent a voice message through his daughter. He liked it, but he wanted one sentence corrected because he had named the wrong kind of leather while distracted by the heel in his hand.

The correction was simple. I had another answer that covered it accurately. I changed the cut, checked that it still made sense and sent him the revised section.

It felt good to solve a problem that could actually be solved.

At lunchtime, Imani came over with a packet of biscuits and no camera. Mum let her in and immediately asked whether she wanted tea, then looked at me as though she had only just remembered that this might be a situation requiring tact.

“Tea would be good,” Imani said, saving all of us.

We sat in the garden on chairs Sam had rescued from the shed. One tilted slightly. I gave Imani the stable one and put my foot against the leg of mine.

“How are you?” she asked.

“I've become a person who checks whether every bicycle is his.”

“That sounds exhausting.”

“It is.”

She opened the biscuits.

“I don't know how to feel about him being missing,” I said.

“You don't have to choose one thing.”

“I know. I just—part of me wants him found because his mum looks terrible. Part of me wants him found because I want to ask what he did. And part of me doesn't want to see him again.”

She nodded.

“What if he says he didn't do anything?”

“Then the police still have things to look at.”

“What if I believe him?”

Imani considered that longer.

“You might want to. That's not the same as deciding he's right.”

I stared at the biscuit in my hand. I had broken it into four pieces without eating any.

“He was kind to me when other people weren't.”

“I believe you.”

“He used to make it feel less embarrassing when we couldn't afford things.”

“I believe that too.”

I looked up.

“You're not going to say it was all manipulation?”

“No. I wasn't there.”

The relief of that made me lean towards her. She met me halfway, and we kissed with the garden door open and Mum moving dishes in the kitchen. It was not private in the way Friday had been, but it was not a performance either.

When we moved apart, Imani brushed a crumb from my sleeve.

“Eat the biscuit,” she said. “You're making it suffer.”

She left at two because she had a shift helping her aunt at the café. I watched her walk to the end of the road before going inside. Mum pretended not to notice, which was the kindest option available to her.

At three seventeen, my phone rang from an unfamiliar number.

I was standing by the sink rinsing a mug. The first thing I thought was that I had missed a call from the course office. I answered with wet fingers and almost dropped the phone.

“Hello?”

“Bee.”

I turned off the tap.

Finn's voice was quiet. Behind him, wind struck the microphone in uneven bursts.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“Don't hang up.”

“I'm not hanging up. Where are you?”

Mum looked up from the table. I mouthed his name. She stood immediately and reached for her phone.

“I went back,” Finn said.

“To where?”

“The centre.”

Mum moved close enough to hear, and I put the call on speaker. I pointed to the words CENTRE on the grocery list and wrote SERVICE? beneath them with a pen that barely worked.

“Which part?” I asked.

“The path by the teaching pool. I can't get through the gate. They've put a new lock on it.”

Mum stepped into the hall and called for help. She kept the door open so I could see her.

“Stay on the path,” I said. “Don't try to get through.”

“I wasn't going to.”

“Okay.”

“I just wanted to see it.”

His breathing was fast. I could hear traffic in the distance and something rattling near the phone.

“Are you hurt?”

“No.”

“Is anyone with you?”

“No.”

Mum was speaking quietly in the hall, giving the location and Finn's name. I held the phone with both hands.

“You need to talk to the police,” I said.

“I know what you keep saying.”

“Then listen.”

“I am listening. Everyone thinks I'm not listening.”

I took a breath.

“All right. Tell me why you called.”

For a few seconds there was only wind.

“I didn't know the cover was open,” he said.

The kitchen seemed to move further away from me. The mug in the sink, the open biscuit packet, Mum's notebook on the table: all of it remained exactly where it had been, but I could not make myself look at any one thing.

“What cover?”

“The service thing. Where they go down to clear it. I thought there was ground behind him.”

Mum came back into the doorway. I looked at her, and whatever was on my face made her stop.

“Finn,” I said. “What happened?”

He made a sound that might have been a laugh if there had been any breath in it.

“He wouldn't stop talking.”

“Rowan?”

“Yes.”

“What did you do?”

“I just wanted him to stop.”

I gripped the edge of the counter.

“What did you do, Finn?”

This time he answered without finding a different way to say it.

“I pushed him.”