The counting began before the sun had fully risen. Her fingers moved across the banknotes like a concert pianist’s — precise, desperate, disbelieving. Each stack was verified, each note held up to the dim light as if it might reveal the truth through some alchemy of touch and sight. But the numbers refused to cooperate. Two thousand pounds. Gone. Evaporated into the cold morning air like breath on a windowpane.

“How many times are you going to count it?” the man asked, his voice frayed at the edges like old rope. “I need to be sure.”

So she counted again. Her lips moved silently, forming figures that made her stomach drop each time. Two thousand. Missing.

“We won’t be too ground down by this, will we?” he muttered, the worry bleeding through every syllable. The question wasn’t really about money anymore. It was about the ground shifting beneath their feet. “How’d you lose two thousand quid?”

The confession came slow and bitter, dragged out of her like a splinter. She’d left the safe open the night before. And worse — so much worse — she’d left Shawn alone in the room with it. The safe gaping wide like a hungry mouth, and Shawn, quiet Shawn, dependable Shawn, left to his own devices in a room full of temptation.

The man bristled instantly. “Now, hang on a minute. Shawn’s worked here for donkey’s years. There’s no way he’d do something like that.”

Loyalty. It came roaring out of him like a protective father. Shawn was family. Shawn was trust incarnate. Shawn was the last person on earth who’d dip his hands into someone else’s till.

“What?” she said, her voice cracking.

And then it came — the confession beneath the confession. She’d had a row with him the night before. A golden, blazing row. Her words, not his. Over what? Over nothing, really — the kind of nothing that somehow becomes everything when tempers flare. She admitted she’d been out of order. Out of line. Cruel, even. And now the question hung between them like smoke curling from a fire that hadn’t yet been put out: did he get his own back? Did he settle the score by emptying the safe while she slept?

“And you think he got his own back by robbing the safe?” the man asked, rubbing his temples as if he could massage the headache away. “I need caffeine.”

“Well, babe,” she said, her voice eerily flat — the flatness of someone who’s already accepted a terrible possibility — “somebody’s robbed it.”

The silence that followed was thick enough to drown in.

She shifted gears, the way people do when reality becomes too heavy to hold. Distraction. Escape. “Are you still good to take me to the station later? The train’s at 3:15.”

He blinked. His mind was still circling that open safe like a shark. “What? Yeah. Sorry. Train.”

The word came out hollow. A ghost of a word. Train. As if trains mattered when two thousand pounds had walked out the door under cover of darkness.

They turned to the boy. The man crouched slightly, softening his voice, gentling his posture so as not to frighten him. “Son, you didn’t see anybody last night by the safe, did you?”

“No.”

The answer came quick. Too quick? Maybe. Maybe not. The boy’s face was unreadable — the kind of blank that children wear when they know more than they’re letting on, or when they know nothing at all.

“How are you feeling about going to your mum’s?”

“Yeah, I’m… I’m looking forward to it.” The boy’s voice was steady, but something flickered behind his eyes — a shadow passing behind a curtain, there and gone before you could name it.

“I’ll give you a lift to school,” the man said, patting his shoulder with a hand that trembled almost imperceptibly.

She pulled her partner aside, her voice dropping to a whisper. “Come on, babe. Don’t worry. He’ll be back.”

But the man’s jaw was set like concrete. “I’ll go talk to Shawn.”

Her hand shot out like a barrier, fingers splayed. “No, you won’t. I will talk to Shawn.”

The line had been drawn. She would face him — face the man she’d wronged, the man she’d accused, the man who might or might not have taken what wasn’t his. She would carry that weight alone.

Later,