4338.207 · July 26, 2018 AD
A Scheduling Problem
A brief exchange between Thomas and Louise Jeffries over breakfast at Jeffries Manor laid bare the quiet erosion of a twenty-eight-year marriage, as Thomas dismissed a small request to spend time with their son Kain and retreated behind the security concerns that had consumed him since his father's disappearance a decade earlier. Left alone in the kitchen, Louise found herself contending with a second, newer anxiety — her brother Jamie's uncharacteristic silence.
Thomas and Louise Jeffries had been married for twenty-eight years, but the distance between them had been growing since 2008, when Charles Jeffries walked into his study one evening and never emerged. His unexplained disappearance triggered a transformation in Thomas that deepened with each passing year — an escalating vigilance that expressed itself through security consultants, surveillance systems, and an obsessive attentiveness to threats both real and imagined. The man Louise had married gradually retreated behind fortifications she could not scale, and by the winter of 2018 the couple existed in a state of parallel proximity, sharing a household without sharing the interior lives that had once drawn them together.
A small moment in the Jeffries Manor kitchen distilled the state of things. Louise suggested Thomas take their eldest son Kain to the Kingston construction site on his way to the office — not for logistics, but for connection. Thomas treated the request as a scheduling problem, cited the board meeting and Harrison's quarterly security review, and left without recognising what had actually been asked of him. It was a pattern both had enacted so many times it had acquired its own momentum, each repetition wearing the groove a little deeper.
The household around them reflected the same fractures at different scales. Their daughter Rebecca had not spoken to her father in three days following a confrontation about Jeffries Industries' environmental record. Their youngest spent more time with the family's ninety-one-year-old great-grandmother than with either parent. The manor itself — two centuries of Jeffries legacy pressed into sandstone and timber — continued its daily rhythms regardless, a house designed for dynasty carrying on even as the family within it quietly came apart.
Thomas departed for Jeffries Industries that morning convinced his priorities were correctly ordered. Louise remained in the kitchen with a second concern already competing for attention — her brother Jamie Greyson had not responded to her messages in two days. In the decade since his return to Tasmania, Jamie had maintained near-daily contact, and his silence carried a weight that Louise's instincts registered even as her reason assembled explanations. It was not the first time she had felt uneasy about her brother's life in Berriedale, but it was the first time the feeling had arrived without prompting, settling into the quiet of the manor kitchen like something that intended to stay.
