Between Theft and Gift

"Some things don’t belong to you, but carrying them feels like the only way to keep someone else standing."

I stepped through the Portal, and the colours collapsed in on themselves with their usual, brutal neatness. One second a kaleidoscope of impossible light, the next—nothing. Just the flat, emptied air of Clivilius, as though nothing extraordinary had taken place at all. The desert accepted me back without ceremony, its silence absolute.

I didn’t move. I just stood there, my boots rooted in the grit, staring at nothing in particular. The photograph was still wedged inside my jacket, the frame pressing against my ribs, a stiff, awkward weight that seemed to radiate heat. Too present. Too accusing. As though if I lingered long enough it might scorch right through, branding me with the question I didn’t want to face: what exactly was I doing? Stealing a family photo from a house that wasn’t mine, from lives I couldn’t begin to untangle, dragging it across worlds like contraband?

Part of me wanted to turn straight back. To reopen the shimmer, slip the frame onto the sideboard where it belonged, smooth the surface with my palm as though nothing had ever been disturbed. Pretend the impulse had never happened. Pretend I hadn’t crossed a line.

But another voice whispered—low, inevitable—that it was already too late. Once you ferried something across the divide, the act fixed itself. Permanent. Irrevocable. A theft, no matter how sentimental, no matter how well-meaning. No way to pretend the air hadn’t changed shape around it.

I was still caught in that spiral, trapped between the urge to undo and the fact of having done, when Paul’s voice cut through the silence.

“Beatrix!”

I turned, startled. He was striding towards me across the dust, his face cracked open with relief so sharp it made my stomach twist. For a moment I almost didn’t recognise him—his expression was unguarded, raw, as though he’d been standing at the Portal’s edge for hours, tethered there by nothing but will, trying to summon me back into existence. And here I was—frame pressed hard against my ribs, carrying a truth I wasn’t ready to admit.

“You’re here,” he said, voice buoyant, almost giddy, as though the air itself had lifted off his chest. “Did you—? Were you—?”

I cut him off before he could drown himself in unfinished questions. “I went to your house.”

The words landed flatter than I’d meant them to, more confession than report, weighted down with the dust of what I’d seen.

His expression shifted almost immediately, the brightness in his face dimming, hope flickering into something tighter, something guarded. “And?”

“It’s… quiet. Too quiet. Claire and the kids—” I shook my head, unable to dress it up. “They’ve been gone a while. Curtains drawn, beds unmade, wardrobes half-empty. It looks like they left in a hurry.”

Paul’s shoulders sagged under the weight of it. For a moment, he seemed to shrink, as if the relief of seeing me had curdled in his chest and hardened into something heavier. The lines of his face pinched inwards, but his eyes stayed locked on mine, searching, relentless, as though he thought I might still be holding something back.

“And Charlie?”

I hesitated, the pause itself a betrayal, then gave him the closest thing to truth I could manage. “She wasn’t there. Neighbour reckons the police took her. Sounded convinced of it.”

He flinched—quick, involuntary, so small it could have been missed if I hadn’t been watching him like a hawk. Then, almost immediately, he tried to bury it, covering the fracture with a brisk, mechanical nod

“Right. Right. That makes sense.”

His voice carried steadiness, but his hands betrayed him, fingers clenching, releasing, clenching again, restless fists that wouldn’t settle. As though, if he just squeezed hard enough, he could wring composure from his own bones.

I reached into my jacket before I could talk myself out of it, fingers brushing against the hard edges of the frame. The glass was cool through the fabric, the weight of it awkward, guilty, but steady. I drew it out and held it towards him.

“I did take this. Couldn’t seem to leave it behind.”

For a moment he didn’t move. He just stared, eyes fixed, as though the object in my hands had arrived from another lifetime—too much, too fragile, too impossible. Then, with care I’d never seen from him before, he reached out. His fingers closed around the frame gently, reverently, like it might splinter under the wrong pressure. His thumb traced across the glass in a slow line, brushing over their faces as though touch alone might collapse the distance: Claire, Mack, Rose. His lips parted, but no sound followed.

The silence that settled wasn’t like the heavy, stale hush of his house. This was sharper. Closer. The kind of silence that wedges itself between two people and waits, demanding to be acknowledged. It was intimate in a way that was unbearable.

I filled it the only way I knew—badly. “Thought it might, you know, brighten the place up. Everyone needs a bit of tatty décor.”

The words dropped into the stillness like a brick hurled into a pond, the ripples awkward, spreading too far, too loud. Paul’s eyes lifted, caught mine, and for half a second something raw flickered across his face—stricken, vulnerable. Then, against all odds, it softened into a smile. Small, genuine, unforced.

“Thank you,” he said simply. “It means more than you know.”

I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, suddenly unsteady beneath the weight of his sincerity. Distance would have been safer—distance kept things tidy, held feelings at arm’s length where they couldn’t spill. “Don’t thank me yet. I might start charging removal fees.”

That coaxed a chuckle out of him—quiet, but real. Optimism in spite of everything. Always optimism.

He tucked the photograph close, holding it against him with the instinctive protectiveness of someone clutching a shield they hadn’t realised they needed. “You’ve brought me a piece of home. That’s… that’s enough.”

I looked at him, then away, my eyes scanning the barren stretch of Clivilius as though the horizon might offer answers the photograph couldn’t.

“It doesn’t feel like enough,” I muttered, low enough that the words stayed mine alone.

Paul, undeterred, pressed on. “You’ll go back again?”

“Yes.” The word slipped out sharper than I intended, too brittle to pass for reassurance. I softened it, barely. “I can check what’s left. Bring anything useful.”

His face lit with a brightness that felt misplaced against the dust and desolation. Too much light for too little promise, as though I’d offered him the world instead of scraps ferried across dimensions. “Good. That’s good. Thank you, Beatrix.”

I gave a shrug, the closest I could get to acceptance without actually stepping into it. “Don’t thank me too much. I’m not exactly running a charity service. And if I keep raiding your house, sooner or later the neighbours will start a petition.”

He grinned, unshaken, clutching the photograph to him like a talisman. “Then we’ll just have to hope they’re as understanding as Gertrude.”

The name landed between us, absurd and heavy in equal measure. I let out a short, incredulous laugh. “God help us if she’s the standard.”

Paul’s smile lingered, but I could see the fracture beneath it—the ache stretching taut across his face, the weight of absence pressed sharp against his ribs. He looked back down at the photo, shoulders squaring, as though bracing himself against a tide that would never really ease.

After a long silence, he said quietly, “I doubt she’s coming back.”

I raised an eyebrow, but his eyes stayed fixed on the photograph, thumb tracing the curve of Claire’s face as if memorising her features for the hundredth time.

“Our marriage…” He sighed, the sound thin, almost apologetic, as though confessing something no one had asked to hear. “It’s been cracking for years. We held on for the kids. That’s what people always say, isn’t it? But cracks don’t close up. They just spread. I think… I think she’s gone to her sister’s in Brisbane. That’s where she always said she’d go if things fell apart.”

I let the silence breathe, weighing whether to say anything at all. He didn’t look crushed, not exactly—more like a man who had rehearsed this inevitability so many times it had lost its power to shock him.

“Maybe she just needed space,” I said, though even I didn’t believe it.

Paul shook his head, a wry smile tugging faintly at the corner of his lips.
“No. Claire never needed space. She needed stability. And I couldn’t give her that.”

He gave a soft laugh then, though it was stripped bare of humour, just sound filling air. “So she packed the kids, probably drove all night, and now… well, Brisbane’s a long way away. And I’m stuck here.”

I studied him, the photograph still cupped in his hands like some fragile relic, and felt that uncomfortable twist in my chest cinch tighter. Optimism clung to him stubbornly, like a second skin he refused to shed, but the truth had already cut through it. He’d lost them. Not just for now, but for good—or at least long enough for the absence to feel permanent.

Which meant the scraps I ferried across—clothes, photographs, a dog if I could somehow prise her back from police custody—weren’t just tokens. They were lifelines.

“Then I suppose I’d better make sure you’ve got something of theirs here,” I said, dry enough to keep it from tipping into confession. “Wouldn’t want you to forget what they look like.”

It came out sharper than I’d intended, barbed against the quiet. Paul flinched, just slightly, like the words had grazed him. But then he smiled again—small, gentle, as though he was choosing to let me off the hook. “I could never forget.”

He tucked the photograph close, protective, as though it might splinter in his grip if angled wrong. “But if you are willing to bring more—anything, really—it’d mean a lot. Even just the ordinary things. A jumper. The kids’ books. Anything useful.”

“Right,” I said, exhaling. “So, you want me to raid your family home, load up with contraband, and smuggle it into another dimension. Got it.”

My tone was bone-dry, but he chuckled anyway, as if I’d just agreed to pick up groceries rather than risk arrest. “I’d call it self-survival,” he said. “But yes. That.”

I nodded, more to myself than to him. He looked so damned hopeful, clutching that frame like it could keep him warm through the night, and I couldn’t quite bring myself to puncture it.

“Fine,” I said, with the deliberate casualness of someone agreeing to buy milk on their way home. “Jumpers, books, whatever else doesn’t scream burglary when the police inevitably nose around. I’ll see what I can manage.”

Paul’s smile widened, relief softening the harsh edges of his face. But just for a moment, I caught it—the flicker beneath, the slip he couldn’t fully hide. A tightness around the eyes, gone almost before it appeared.

He knew. He knew exactly what that meant.

Charlie wasn’t just missing; she was in custody.

I turned away, scanning the wide, merciless horizon of Clivilius as though it might have answers etched into its dunes. Of course, it didn’t. The land here never surrendered anything freely. It only took—heat, breath, time. Still, the shape of my next steps was already forming, stubborn as footprints pressed into shifting sand.

I’d go back. Again. I’d sift through the detritus of a house that wasn’t mine—drawers left gaping, cupboards half-stripped, shelves punctuated by absences. I’d gather what scraps I could: socks, jumpers, toys. The overlooked, the ordinary. Small anchors to trick this barren wasteland into something resembling home, if only for him.

And Charlie. That damn dog. If Gertrude’s account had any truth to it, then finding her meant orbiting closer to the police than I’d like. Hardly my pastime of choice. Yet the thought didn’t tighten my chest with impossibility—it simply settled there, heavy but solid. Difficult, yes. Risky, absolutely. But not unthinkable.

A sliver of me—the part that still believed survival was best served with caution—whispered that it was foolhardy. That I should keep my distance, let the pieces of Paul’s fractured world remain where they’d fallen. But another part—the restless, ungovernable part that had never been able to turn away from a challenge, especially when it came with four legs and a wagging tail—was already sketching the outline of how it might be done.

The thought steadied me in a way I hadn’t expected. Unnerving as it was to ferry fragments of one reality into another, at least it was something to grip. A task. A direction. A purpose that went beyond fumbling through silence and unanswered questions.

I looked back at Paul. He was still bent over the photograph, shoulders hunched, fingers curled around the frame like it was the last rope tethering him to the world he’d lost. He didn’t notice me watching. He didn’t see the way I pressed my nails into my palms, carving crescents into skin, trying to hammer my resolve into something harder, less prone to splintering.

In a sea of losses, this—at least—was something I could do.

Reluctantly.