You never show me anything, Paul.

“How was she?” I said. “Recently, I mean.”

Marie hesitated.

“It’s fine.” I sipped my own coffee. “I want to hear. I already know she was confused a lot of the time.”

“Yes. Sometimes she was.”

Marie put her cup on the counter and looked down at it thoughtfully. We both knew she had told me something in the past that had led to unimaginable consequences, and I could see she was weighing the effect her words might have now.

“Go on,” I said.

“She would ask after you.”

“Me?”

“Yes. There were times when she thought you were still working here. And then other days when she’d be looking for books by you. She kept saying I needed to get some of your books in. She always told me they’d fly off the shelves.”

I didn’t reply.

“I said I’d try, of course.” Marie smiled. “I told her I thought we’d had a couple in before, but they’d already sold. That kind of thing.”

“That must have been … hard to deal with.”

“It was never hard to be kind to your mother, Paul.”

No, I thought. It wouldn’t have been. Because my mother herself had always been kind, not just to me but to everyone. The knowledge brought a burst of sadness. It occurred to me now that I had wasted so many years, and that there was so much I wanted to say to her while there was still time for her to hear.

“She had lots of friends, you know,” Marie said. “She wasn’t unhappy. And she was very proud of you.”

“She had no reason to be.”

“Well, now. I’m sure that’s not true.”

I fell silent.

You’re going to be a writer, I think.

Once upon a time, I had imagined that too. But I remembered a day that year, just before the end of the final term, when I had come downstairs to find an envelope waiting for me. Even from the kitchen doorway, I had recognized my own handwriting on the front, along with the stamp I’d stuck to the corner. In the weeks after sending my short story off to the competition, I’d done my best not to think about it, telling myself the story wasn’t very good, that it wasn’t going to be accepted, and that there was no point in getting my hopes up. But the knowledge it was out there had still created a soft fluttering in my heart, as though a bird were living there. It felt like a part of me had left this place and gone off into the world, and deep down I had allowed myself to imagine it might find a home out there.

When I opened the envelope, the short story was inside, along with a form rejection slip expressing regret that, on this occasion, my submission had not been successful.

I remembered reading it a few times, and how it had felt like whatever had been living in my chest those past few weeks had died.

“I teach a bit of creative writing now,” I confessed to Marie. “That’s one part of what I do. But I don’t actually write anymore.”

“That’s a shame. Why did you stop?”

“Because I knew I would never be good enough.”

But that wasn’t strictly true. The reality was that I’d never worked hard enough to find out, and I should be honest about that.

“After what happened, it felt like there was only one story that would ever matter. And I don’t think I’ve ever had the words to write about that.”

“Perhaps that will change.”

“I don’t think so. It’s not a story that has an ending.”

“Not yet.”

I thought about the people poring over the case online. Complete strangers who were still determined to solve the mystery of Charlie’s disappearance even after all these years.

“There’s been too much water under the bridge,” I said. “It’s ancient history now. All a long way behind me.”

Marie smiled again.

“I don’t think time works that way, Paul. As you get older, it all begins to blur into one. You start to think life was never any kind of straight line. It was always more of a … scribble.”

She laughed quietly: a throwaway comment. But the description struck me. Everywhere I looked in Gritten, I could see traces of the past beneath the details the years had etched on top. Places. People. The past was all still there below the present: not a line, but a scribble. However much you tried to forget it, perhaps without realizing it you were only ever running in place.

I was about to say something else—ask more about my mother, the books she had liked, the things she had said—when my phone buzzed in my pocket.

A call from Sally.

I answered it. And then I listened, and found myself responding in the right places, quietly and formally and almost out of instinct. Marie watched me the whole time, her face full of sympathy. Because she knew.

When the call ended, all the questions I had been intending to ask a minute earlier had deserted me. There was only really a handful of words left to speak, and I did so blankly.

“My mother died,” I said.

* * *

Sally wasn’t at the hospice when I arrived, and a nurse showed me up to the room. She was respectful but professional. I’m so sorry about your mother, she told me in the foyer, and then didn’t speak at all as we walked together. There were no doubt countless formalities and procedures to attend to, but it was clear from her manner that those could come later.

For now, there was simply this.

We stopped outside the door.

“Take as long as you need,” she said.

Twenty-five years, I thought.

It was quiet and peaceful in the room. I closed the door gently, as though I’d walked in on a person waking slowly rather than someone who never would. My mother was lying on the bed, the same as always, but while her head was propped up on the pillow it already looked slightly lost in the cushion of it. I sat down beside the bed, struck by the absence in the room. My mother’s skin was yellow and as thin as tracing paper over the contours of the skull beneath. Her eyes were closed and her mouth slightly open. She was impossibly, inhumanly still. Except not she at all, I thought. Because this was not my mother. Her body was here, but she was not.

There had been occasions during my previous visits when her breath had been so shallow and her body so motionless that I had wondered if she’d passed. Only the soft beep of the machinery by the bedside had convinced me otherwise, and even that had seemed like a trick at times. That machine was silent now, and the difference was completely profound. I’ve never been a religious man, but some spark of animation had so obviously departed this room that it was difficult not to wonder where it could have gone. It didn’t seem possible for it to have disappeared entirely. That didn’t make any sense.

I felt numb. But in a strange way, the silence in the room was so solemn that it seemed ill-suited to emotion. It would come, I knew. Because despite everything, I had loved my mother.

Which I had told her yesterday, when she was asleep.

When she wouldn’t have heard.

I thought about how different things might have been between us if Charlie and Billy hadn’t done what they did. What altered courses my life might have taken, and where my mother and I could have ended up in place of this moment right now.