I'm leaving now, the message said. It was the last recording of Anika's father's voice. She always imagined him driving onto the causeway immediately afterward, carrying the certainty of that sentence into the fog.
While sorting his papers, she found a café receipt timestamped forty minutes later. The café was on the departure side. She wondered whether the recording's time was wrong, or whether he had concealed a stop. The café owner remembered him waiting for a delivery before setting off.
He had meant leaving the office, not leaving Palewater. The package contained a replacement part for his sister's heater. The stop was mundane, but it moved the final journey away from the abrupt sequence Anika had replayed for years.
She kept the recording and added nothing to it. On paper, she wrote the two departures separately. The voice still ended with the same words, but there was now room after them for a cup of tea, a delayed parcel and a conversation she would never hear. His last morning became longer than the message that survived it.