Finding Petra

They knew where she would be.

There was a disused railway bridge on the eastern edge of town that the three of them had discovered when they were eight and nine and ten and had claimed as their own particular place, the place they went when other places were too full of other people. It was high enough to see the whole town from and sheltered enough to sit in even when it rained, which had always struck Zara as funny and which was considerably less funny now.

Petra was sitting on the wide stone ledge on the eastern side, her back against the bridge wall, her knees pulled up, looking out at the town. The sky above Millfield was a uniform flat grey that ended in a sharp line about two hundred metres to the east, where the sun was shining on the fields beyond the town boundary as if nothing was wrong.

Zara climbed up and sat beside her. Kofi sat on her other side.

Nobody said anything for a moment.

"I saw the posters," Petra said.

"We know," Zara said.

"I was trying to stop it," Petra said. Her voice was flat in the way that meant she had been crying recently and had decided to stop. "I was on the roof because from up high I can sometimes pull it back in. The photo makes it look like I was making it worse."

"I know," Zara said.

"Nobody is going to believe that," Petra said.

"We believe it," Kofi said.

Petra looked at him. He was eleven years old and he said things like that with a straightforwardness that always caught people slightly off guard because they expected children to be uncertain and he usually was not.

"You were not there," Petra said. Not unkindly.

"No," Kofi said. "But I know you. And you standing on a roof with your arms up in a storm looks like someone trying to fix something, not someone making it worse. Anyone who knows you would see that."

Petra looked back at the town. Below the bridge the old railway line ran through a cut in the hill, overgrown now, buddleia growing through the tracks. A pigeon walked along one of the rails with enormous self-importance.

"What happened?" Zara asked. "Three days ago. What set it off?"

Petra was quiet for a long moment. The flat grey cloud above the town shifted slightly, darker at the edges.

"My mum and dad told me we are moving," Petra said. "At the end of term. Dad got a job somewhere else. We are going."

The cloud thickened. Zara felt the air pressure change, that pre-rain heaviness settling on her shoulders.

"Petra," she said gently.

"I know," Petra said. She pressed her palms flat against the stone ledge. The cloud lightened slightly. She was doing it consciously now, Zara realised, working against herself, holding back the weather the way you hold back tears in a situation that does not allow for them. "I have been practising," Petra said. "Keeping it in. It is harder when I am not expecting something."

"You have been trying to control it alone," Kofi said. "This whole time."

"Who else was I going to ask for help?" Petra said, and for the first time her voice broke slightly at the edges.

Zara moved closer to her on the ledge. "Us," she said. "Obviously us."