Ten Thousand Feeds

"I had eleven years of him, and it fitted onto a single page, with room to spare."

The library was still open, and still warm, and all but empty. Mrs Pettifer at the desk lifted her head as the four of us came in, took one look at the shape of us — a teacher and three of her seniors, walking with purpose, well after the buses had gone — and left us to it. She went back to her trolley of returns. We had the place to ourselves.

I had loved that room for years. Half my free periods went in it, in the good chair by the Australian history shelves that nobody else ever wanted, hiding from the staffroom with a book I was not marking. It smelled the way it always had, of old paper and floor polish and the warmth of a lot of machines left running, and it had always been the quietest, safest room in the building. We went down the middle of it to the computers at the back, and I sat down at one of them to put a photograph of my missing husband in front of the whole of Hobart.

Serena took the chair beside me and drew it in, and it was her hand that went to the keyboard, which I did not think anything of at the time — she was the quickest of the three, and I was grateful not to have to. Ruth pulled the spare chair round and sat with her notebook open on her knee. Emma stood behind us with her hands on the backs of our chairs and leaned in over the top.

"Right," Ruth said, pen ready. "The plain facts first. We can make it kind after. When was he last seen?"

"Saturday morning," I said. "He left the house about nine."

"What was he wearing?"

I sat in my own warm library and reached back four days for the sight of my husband getting dressed, and gave it to a seventeen-year-old to write down. The red check shirt, the one gone soft at the collar that I had told him twice to throw out. His work jeans. His work boots. I watched Ruth write red check shirt, jeans, work boots in her round careful hand, and I thought that I had ironed that shirt, and that I would have sworn, a week before, that I could not have named one thing my husband put on on any given morning of our marriage — and here I was giving it in evidence, every thread of it, because it turned out I had seen him after all.

"How tall is he?" Emma asked.

"Six foot two." That came without any effort; I had stood next to it for eleven years, at bus stops and altar rails and kitchen benches. "Big through the shoulders. Brown hair. He'd have had a few days' stubble by the Saturday — he never shaved on a weekend."

"And the car."

"A white Hilux. Twenty-fifteen. Triffett Fencing Solutions on both doors, and a ladder rack on the back." The details came out of me flat and useful, and I hated how useful they were. That ute was where Sammy had been sick on the way to Bruny; it was where Nial took the calls he thought were important, sitting in the driveway with the engine off because the reception was better out there; it had a booster seat in the back that somebody, at some point, was going to have to lift out. It was a white 2015 Hilux with a ladder rack, and that was the part that would help.

"We need a photo," Emma said, gently. "A really clear one. His face."

I got my phone out and woke it, and there he was, because he was still my lock screen and I had not been able to make myself change it. The three of us at Randalls Bay the summer before — Nial in the middle with his head tipped back, laughing at something I had said, and Sammy up on his shoulders with both fists in his father's hair and his mouth wide open with the sheer joy of being that high off the ground.

"That one," Emma breathed. "That's him. You can see exactly who he is."

"Sammy's in it," I said.

It came out harder than I meant it, and the three of them went quiet, because I had said it in the classroom and I said it again now — that my son's face did not go on this, not anywhere. So we did the only thing there was to do. Serena took my phone — I gave it to her, I put my own phone into her hand — and she cropped my son out of the photograph.

She did it carefully, and she did it well, and it took her no time at all. The frame closed in on Nial's laughing face and stopped at the line of his shoulder, at the exact place a small bare leg had been, and Sammy was gone, and what was left was a man laughing up at a child who was no longer in the picture — up at nothing, at the empty air above his own head.

Emma had the words. That was her gift, and she gave it to me now — she took my flat useful facts and my broken half-sentences and made them into something a stranger might stop scrolling to read. A much-loved husband. A father. A builder who worked with his hands. She wrote that he had gone out on the Saturday morning to look at a job and had not come home, and she read it back to me softly, to see whether it was allowed, and I said that it was.

It was Serena who looked up from the screen. "The job," she said. "Do we put down what it was? Or who it was for?" She was not looking at Ruth's notes. She was looking at me. "If he told anyone where he was going, that's the first place a person would look. A name would help. Even part of one."

And there it was again — the still place, opening up in the middle of me.

Because that was the question. That was the exact question, the one I had not answered for a detective across a steel table, the one whose answer was folded into a notebook in my coat pocket at that very moment, two feet from her elbow, underlined twice in my husband's own hand. A name would help. Serena did not know she had asked me for the one thing in the world I was keeping. She could not have known.

She could not have known. I said it to myself the way I had been saying things to myself all week — firmly, to make them true. A clever girl building an appeal for a missing man would of course ask who he had gone to meet; it was the obvious question, the useful one, the one a policeman would have opened with if a policeman had cared enough to open with anything. There was nothing in it. I made myself look at her plain, waiting face and find nothing in it, and I mostly managed.

"He didn't say," I told her — which was the truth, to Serena, and a lie to the notebook. "He never said."

The last thing was where the answers would come back to. Ruth said we needed a place for people to send what they knew — we could not have strangers dropping a sighting of a missing man into the public comments for the whole city to pick over — and Serena already had it open in another tab. She had made an email address for it. findnialtriffett, at gmail. She had set it up, she said, at lunchtime, so that it would be ready.

At lunchtime. Before I had said yes to any of it.

I looked at it on the screen, the little grey empty inbox with my husband's name inside the address, and I thought, quite clearly, I do not have the password to that. Every message from every person in Hobart who thought they had seen Nial would drop into a box a seventeen-year-old had built and I could not open. And then I thought all the things I had trained myself to think — that she was helping, that of course she had set it up, that I could not run an appeal across a whole city as a woman who still typed with two fingers, that I was doing it again, the thing with the script and the sandpit and my own mother on a doorstep in the rain — and I let it go. I was very good, by then, at letting things go.

And then it was done. We read it through one last time, the four of us, in the failing light with the reading lamps coming on by themselves along the shelves, and it said everything it had to say and showed nothing my son's face was in and gave the police nothing to hold against me. Emma had made it kind. Ruth had made it useful. Serena had made it work.

I read it aloud, once, very quietly, the way I read a script to hear whether it breathed. It was the worst thing I had ever read in my life, and it was good, and both of those were true at once.

MISSING — Nial Triffett, 32, of Fern Tree. Last seen on Saturday 28 July, around 9 a.m., leaving home to look at a job, and not seen or heard from since. Nial is six foot two and solidly built, with brown hair and a few days' stubble. He was last seen in a red check shirt, jeans and work boots, and driving a white 2015 Toyota Hilux with a ladder rack and Triffett Fencing Solutions signage on both doors. Nial is a deeply loved husband and father, and this is completely out of character for him. If you have seen Nial, or his ute, anywhere at all since Saturday morning, please get in touch — no detail is too small. Nial, if you see this yourself: please, just let us know that you're safe.

Serena set the cropped photograph in above it — my husband laughing up at nobody — and moved the cursor to the button that would send it out into the world. Then she lifted her hand off the mouse and slid it across the desk to me. "You should be the one," she said.

So I did it. I put my finger on the mouse of a school library computer, in the safest room in the building, with the reading lamps humming on along the shelves and three seventeen-year-olds holding their breath around me, and I clicked the button that took my husband out of our house and our life and my keeping, and handed him to strangers.

For a moment nothing happened at all.

Then the page turned over, and there he was — up at the top of it, out in the open, his own laughing face with the word MISSING standing over it — and under it, in small grey letters, a number that said no one had shared it yet.

Then the number moved. One share, and then three, and then — before I had drawn a full breath, before I could have called it back if I had wanted to — eleven, climbing faster than I could follow it, up out of that quiet warm room and into the dark, where I could not see who was reaching out to catch it.