Between the Cracks
Duncan Flack has built his entire life around one principle: protect the people around you. It started the day his brother died and he wasn't watching closely enough. It drove him into uniform, onto the streets of northern Tasmania, into two decades of standing between his community and whatever threatened it. But protection has a blind spot. The more he gives to strangers, the more he loses at home — and the life he's spent holding together for everyone else is quietly falling apart beneath his feet.
A four-year-old boy appoints himself his baby brother's guardian. Stands watch by the crib. Alerts his parents to every cry. When that brother dies of meningococcal disease, something locks into place that never unlocks — a conviction that he should have been watching closer, that vigilance is the debt you pay for the people you love.
Duncan Flack carries that debt into everything. Into the police academy. Into the floods and the fires and the eighteen-hour pandemic shifts. Into communities where mechanics and labourers trust him because he's Thomas Flack's son and he knows what work looks like. Into photographs of Tasmania's disappearing places, preserving what others let go. Into a body built by relentless discipline — coastal trails, mountain roads, pre-dawn runs — that draws attention he never quite learns how to handle.
But vigilance directed outward has a cost. The family that needs him doesn't get the version of him that strangers do. The relationships that should anchor him buckle under the weight of everything he won't say. And somewhere along the way, the protector starts to realise that the life he's been holding together for everyone else is the one he's been neglecting all along.
