PART 1
Finn had been looking at the same bike for months.
Every time we walked past the sports shop on the high street, his eyes went straight to the window. He did not stop. He did not point. He just looked, every single time, for the length of the window, and then looked away.
Matte black. Orange lettering down the frame.
He knew everything about it. The number of gears. What the frame was made of and why that mattered. The exact price, to the pound, and the week it had gone down by twenty.
But he never once asked me to buy it.
That is the kind of boy he had become.
His father died three years ago. Suddenly — a Tuesday, at work, his heart, forty-two years old and nothing wrong with him that anybody knew about.
Finn was ten.
And after that he grew up almost overnight, in the way that children do when they decide somebody needs them to.
He saw me worrying about bills at the kitchen table. He saw me cutting back — the cheaper cereal, the heating going off at nine, the holiday that did not happen.
And somewhere in there he decided that he was not going to ask me for anything that cost money. Not ever. Not even at Christmas, when I asked him directly what he wanted and he said nothing really in a voice that meant he had thought about it for a week.
So when he told me he had found a Saturday job washing up at the diner on the corner, I was not surprised at all.
He said: I’m going to buy the bike myself.
I said: love, you know you don’t have to do that.
He said: I want to.
And I smiled at him, because what else do you do, and I said: all right. But school comes first.
He said: deal.
Every Saturday morning after that, he went out of the back door at half past eight in old jeans and worn trainers.
Every Saturday evening, he came home at about six smelling of washing-up liquid and chip fat and something from the fryer that got into his hair.
His hands went red and dry from the hot water. I bought him a tub of hand cream and he used it without being asked, which is how I knew it hurt.
Whenever I asked about the bike, I got the same answer.
