Overheard

"By the fourth day I would have taken help from anyone who offered it. Three of my own girls offered."

By Tuesday I had stopped expecting the phone to ring and started dreading that it might.

That was what four days had done to me. On Saturday, every sound in the house had been Nial coming home; by the Tuesday afternoon a call could only be a stranger's voice telling me where they had found him, and I had begun to flinch at my own handbag. I had got through the day the way I had got through Monday — one lesson at a time, on the face and the voice and the twenty years of practice — and now it was gone half four, and the last of the girls were on the buses, and I was doing the thing I had done the evening before, which was to find reasons not to leave a room I did not want to leave, because leaving it meant the car, and the mountain, and the house.

I had my phone in my hand. I had it in my hand most of the time now — I went to it the way I used to get up in the night and put my hand near Sammy's mouth in his cot, just for the breath — and there was nothing on it, and I put it face down on the desk and did not put it away, and I stood in the middle of my own classroom in the last of the light and did not know what to do with my body.

That was when I saw them in the doorway.

Three of them — Ruth and Emma and Serena — standing just inside it in a row, close together, and I knew before a word was said that they had settled something between themselves out in the corridor and come in to see it through.

My first feeling was not warmth. My first feeling — and I was not proud of it — was that I had been caught. Caught out, in my own room, with my face off and my phone lying there and my eyes doing whatever they had been doing when the three of them appeared. I got my shoulders back and my chin up out of reflex, the way I did when the Head put her head round the door mid-lesson, and I said, "Girls — what can I do for you?" and heard how thin it came out.

Ruth went first. She was the tallest of them and the least frightened of adults, a big-boned, red-headed girl who had said exactly what she meant since Year Seven, and she did not waste any of it now. "Mrs Triffett, we don't want to be rude. But you're not okay, and we've all been talking, and we want to help."

"We're not going to make you talk about it," Emma put in — Emma, who never used one word where five would do, and who had plainly been handed the softening job and was doing it beautifully. "We just couldn't not say anything. It didn't feel right, going home."

And then Serena.

She had not said anything yet. She had let the other two go in front, which I noticed, because it was what I would have done myself — put the two warm open faces at the front and hold the real thing back until the room was ready for it — and then she took the smallest step forward and said, quite gently, "We heard you and Mr Chalmers. Yesterday, after school."

"We didn't mean to," Emma said quickly. "We were waiting for Ruth by the stairs, and you — you sounded so upset. We couldn't help it."

"We heard that Mr Triffett went out on Saturday to look at a job," Serena said, over the top of her, and set the words down in the room carefully, the way she set a prop down on a stage so that it made no sound, "and that he didn't come back. And that the police aren't really looking."

And something in me went very still.

Because in the corridor, at the end, I had not been quiet. I had gone after Rufus and called his name the length of the lockers and stood there and begged him, out loud, with my voice all over the place, not to tell anyone — and anybody within thirty feet of that had it, and three girls waiting on a friend by the stairs would have had every word.

But he went out on Saturday to look at a job — that I had said inside. Behind the door. Low, to one man, in the two quiet minutes before my voice cracked and the whole of it came apart. I had said that to Rufus and to nobody else in the world, and I was almost sure I had said it with the door pushed to.

Almost. And there it was — the word that had been coming for me for four days. Because I could not swear to it. I could not swear to the order of my own Saturday morning, or to what I had said down a telephone to my own mother, or to whether my husband's shirts had been on the rail when I dressed in that room at six o'clock — my memory had been coming apart in my hands since Sunday, and I had sat in a police interview room and watched it do it. I was not about to hang anything on the difference between one side of a door and the other.

So I let it go. I made myself let it go. I thought of Sammy's face in the sandpit in the dark, when I had run a detective's questions over a three-year-old; I thought of the green script I had turned over the day before, hunting a mark that was never in it; and I made myself stop, and I looked at Serena's plain, worried face, and I let the whole thing go.

"That's—" I started, and had to stop, and go again. "That's a very grown-up thing to have been carrying round all day. I'm sorry you heard it like that."

"We don't think you should be doing this on your own," Ruth said. "That's the whole of it, really."

Then Serena told me what they wanted to do.

She had it all ready. That was the thing — and I marked that too, and I let it go too. She did not say maybe we could, or what if we tried. She laid it out whole and in order, the way I had watched her pitch a set design to the committee the spring before, already built: a page, with his photograph, and the plain facts of him — where, and when, and what he had been wearing, and the ute — and a line asking people to share it, and somewhere for word to come back to. Facebook, she said. It was 2018, and half of Hobart was on it, and a good post could be in ten thousand feeds by the morning. She had clearly been turning it over for a while.

I stood there and felt two things at once, both of them very large.

The first was that it might work. That was the awful, hopeful pull of it — that somewhere out past the library windows was a person who had seen a white Hilux on a back road on the Saturday, or a man at the petrol station out at Sorell who had not looked right, and that a photograph in ten thousand feeds might reach that one person, and that by Thursday I might know something. After four days of a police force that had put my family in a drawer and slid it shut, the girls were holding out the one thing nobody else had: the chance that somebody, somewhere, might simply tell me.

The second thing was fear, and it was worse than the hope, and it came up from underneath the hope, cold. Because since Saturday I had been certain of one thing I had told nobody at all: that something had been done to my husband. That the notebook in my coat pocket, the names in it, the hand getting frightened over weeks, the shape going out through my locked back door in the dark, the photograph left face up on my step — that none of it was a man who had simply walked out. And if that was true, then somewhere in Hobart was a person who knew exactly where Nial was. And the girls were proposing that we stand up in the middle of the city and shout, straight at that person, in ten thousand feeds: we are looking, and here is his wife, and here is his little boy, and here is where you will find us.

"I don't know," I said. "If — if whoever—" I could not finish it in front of them. I could not say if whoever took him sees three schoolgirls and a photograph of my son, I have no idea what I am inviting. They were seventeen. They believed they were helping me look for a lost man. They did not know that I believed I was looking for a man who had been taken, and I was not going to put that into three young heads on a Tuesday afternoon. "The police," I tried instead. "I don't want to be cutting across whatever the police are—"

"The police aren't doing anything." Serena said it flatly, without heat, as a thing the two of us already had between us. "You said so yourself. To Mr Chalmers."

She was right, which was the trouble. She was seventeen, and she was right, and I had no argument left that was not really the true one — the one I could not give her.

I looked at the three of them. Ruth with her notebook already half out of her bag, because of course it was. Emma with her whole open face turned up at me, ready to love me through the thing if I would only let her. And Serena, quiet, who had said the one sentence that could not be argued with, and now simply waited.

"Alright," I said.

The word was out of me before I had finished deciding on it — the way Nial's gone had come out of me at Rufus the day before, the way the true things and the large things kept getting out of me now, ahead of the part of me whose whole job had once been to stop them. "Alright. We can try it. But carefully. Sammy's face doesn't go on it — nowhere, not once. And nothing about the police, nothing that says they've got it wrong, I can't have that. We do it carefully."

Ruth was already up. Emma was already talking, fast, about photographs and wording and who had the most followers. Serena picked up my bag from the desk and held it out to me — my own bag, held out to me across my own classroom — and said, "The library's open till five. We've got time, if we go now."

And I took my bag from a seventeen-year-old, and I turned off my own lamp, and I went out of my room and down the corridor after the three of them — and it was somewhere near the top of the stairs that I understood I was following Serena, and had been since I stood up.