Don't Leave Me Again

"She called me Jane. A ninety-one-year-old woman I'd never met looked me in the eye and said my grandmother's name like it was a wound she'd been carrying for decades." — Detective Sarah Lahey

The front door thudded shut behind them and the world outside ceased to exist.

Sarah kept moving. She steered Louise through the entrance hall — high ceilings, sweeping staircase, a tall case clock ticking with maddening indifference — and into the first room on the left, a sitting room with tall sash windows that looked out over the drive. Deep sofas, stone fireplace, family photographs crowding the mantelpiece in a jumble of silver and wooden frames. A lived-in room. A family room. The kind of room where people argued over the remote and left mugs with cold tea rings on the coffee table, and right now, a room with far too many windows.

Louise was unravelling. The savage energy that had fuelled her outside — the knife, the triumph, the primal ferocity of a woman who had trapped the man she held responsible for her family's destruction — had burned itself out on the gravel, and what remained was something hollowed and shaking. Her bare feet left faint impressions on the rug as she paced, arms wrapped around her torso, fingers clawing into the wool of her jumper, her mouth producing sounds that had degraded past language into something more primitive — a low, arrhythmic keening that rose and fell without pattern, the noise a body makes when the mind has surrendered its capacity to form words.

Sarah moved to the nearest window and pulled the blind down. The fabric descended with a whisper, cutting off the view of the drive and the shed and everything that was happening out there. The room dimmed by one degree.

"Is there anybody else in the house?" she asked, turning back to Louise.

Louise continued to pace, her trajectory tight and erratic, bare feet tracing circles on the rug that followed no discernible logic. Her hands clutched at the air in front of her, grasping at things that weren't there, and her eyes darted from corner to corner with the unfocused desperation of a trapped animal looking for an exit that didn't exist.

"Louise." Sarah stepped into her path. Took both of her hands. The trembling transmitted through the point of contact like current through a wire — not the steady shaking of cold but the deep, systemic vibration of a body running on cortisol and terror and nothing else. "Louise, look at me."

For several seconds, Louise continued to squirm against Sarah's grip, her gaze skittering across the walls, the windows, the shadows gathering in the corners of the room. Her breathing came in short, ragged gasps that sounded more like sobs than respiration, each exhale carrying that thin, keening sound that set Sarah's teeth on edge.

Then her eyes found Sarah's, and something behind them flickered — not calm, nothing close to calm, but recognition. A momentary pause in the spiral. The briefest acknowledgement that another human being was present and holding her hands and asking her to stay in the room.

"Is there anyone else in the house?" Sarah asked again. Slowly. Clearly. Giving each word the space it needed to travel through the fog of Louise's panic and find something solid to land on.

Louise's lips moved twice before sound came out. "Yes," she managed. Her voice was a whisper stripped of everything that usually gave it shape — the composure, the breeding, the carefully maintained veneer of a woman who had spent forty-seven years presenting a polished surface to the world. "Thelma."

"Where is she?"

"Upstairs. In her room." The words came in staccato bursts, each one seeming to cost Louise something she couldn't afford. "She's Thomas's grandmother. She's ninety-one. She can't — she won't know what's happening. She —"

"All right." Sarah squeezed Louise's hands, cutting off the spiral before it could rebuild momentum. "I need to go and check on her. And I need you to do something for me while I'm upstairs."

Louise's eyes widened, a flash of panic at the prospect of being left alone, but Sarah held her gaze and didn't let go.

"I need you to get every blind down on this floor and make sure every door is locked. Can you do that?"

It was busywork, and Sarah knew it. Blinds and locks wouldn't stop anyone who was determined to get inside a house with this many windows and this many entry points. A well-placed shoulder or a brick through the conservatory glass and the whole exercise became meaningless. But that wasn't the point. The point was to give Louise's hands something to do and her mind something to focus on besides the black hole of fear that was threatening to swallow her entirely. People needed purpose in a crisis. It gave them something to hold onto besides themselves.

Louise's breathing steadied — not by much, but enough. Her chin lifted by a fraction. Something sparked behind her eyes that hadn't been there moments before: not courage, exactly, but its closest available substitute. The recognition that she had been given a task, and that completing it was within her power, and that the woman asking her to do it believed she was capable of it.

"Yes," she said. "I can do that."

"Good." Sarah released her hands. "I'll be right back."

She turned towards the entrance hall and the staircase beyond it. Behind her, she heard Louise move towards the next window — the soft pad of bare feet on the rug, then the whisper of fabric as a blind was drawn. Then another. Each small sound a tiny act of reclamation, a woman putting barriers between herself and the thing she feared, even if the barriers were made of nothing more than cloth and brass fittings.

Sarah didn't look back. She crossed the entrance hall, her boots sharp against the oak, and began to climb.

The staircase curved upward beneath her, each tread worn smooth at its centre by two centuries of feet following the same path. Sarah took the stairs quickly, keeping to the outer edge where the wood was firmest and her footfalls quietest, one hand on the banister, the other drawing the Glock from its holster with the fluid ease of something her body knew how to do without consulting her mind.

Karl's instruction echoed — no gun, not yet — and she dismissed it as firmly as she'd wanted to dismiss it outside. Karl wasn't here. Karl was out there, alone, approaching a shed that contained a man connected to at least three disappearances, and Sarah was in here, climbing stairs, unarmed by his order while he walked into God knew what. She wasn't going to clear an unfamiliar house without her weapon drawn. Whatever deference she owed Karl's judgment, it had limits, and those limits began at the threshold of a building she'd never been inside before with an unknown number of rooms and an unknown number of occupants, regardless of what Louise might claim.

The portraits watched her ascend. She didn't look at them.

The first-floor landing opened onto a wide corridor that ran the length of the house, doors set at regular intervals on both sides. Daylight reached it through a window at the far end, but the light was thin and failing, and the corridor felt cooler than the ground floor, as though the warmth of the lamps Louise was switching on downstairs couldn't climb this high.

Sarah moved to the first door on the left. Turned the handle with her free hand, pushed it open.

"Thelma?"

The room beyond was a bedroom — neatly kept, the bed made with crisp hospital corners, a desk beneath the window stacked with legal journals and manila folders. A Harvard pennant hung on the wall above a bookshelf crammed with titles on human rights law and constitutional advocacy, their spines cracked and bristling with colour-coded tabs. A framed photograph on the bedside table showed a younger Louise with her arm around a girl in graduation robes, both of them squinting into the sun. Rebecca's room. The eldest. Twenty-seven years old and sleeping in the same bedroom she'd had since childhood, though the posters of teenage obsessions had long since given way to the working materials of a woman who had turned her inheritance of privilege into a weapon for other people's fights.

Empty.

Sarah pulled the door shut and moved on.

Second door. Right side.

This one stopped her whisper in her throat.

It was a young couple's room — unmistakably shared, the space carrying the layered evidence of two lives pressed close together. A double bed, the covers pulled up but not neatly made, one pillow still bearing the faint impression of a head. The walls held a mix of things that didn't quite match — a framed construction site photograph beside a print of a watercolour landscape, a Hurricanes cap hooked over the corner of a mirror where a necklace also hung. His work boots sat beneath the window, thick-soled and scuffed with dried mud. Her slippers — soft, pale pink — were tucked beside the bed on the near side.

On the bedside table closest to the door: a phone charger with no phone, a dog-eared paperback, and a bottle of prenatal vitamins with the cap off. A single tablet rested in the upturned lid, as though someone had been about to take it and been interrupted mid-gesture.

Kain and Brianne's room. His things still everywhere — the boots, the cap, a construction magazine on the floor beside the bed — because he'd only been gone a week and nobody had moved them, nobody had been able to bring themselves to tidy away the evidence that he'd been here, that he was coming back, that this absence was temporary. And Brianne's things woven through his — her moisturiser beside his deodorant on the dresser, her cardigan draped over the foot of the bed, her vitamin sitting in its cap, untaken.

Two lives interrupted. One a week ago. One an hour ago.

Sarah checked beneath the bed. Clear. Wardrobe. Clear.

She pulled the door shut and kept moving.

"Thelma?"

Third door. Left side.

A bathroom. White tiles, claw-foot tub, a towel folded on the rail. The shower curtain was drawn across the bath and Sarah's pulse spiked before she swept it back in a single motion. Empty. Nothing but enamel and a drain and the faint smell of soap.

Fourth door. Right side.

The master suite. King-sized bed, neatly made, the covers on one side pulled marginally tighter than the other in the unconscious asymmetry of a bed shared by two people with different sleeping habits. His-and-hers bedside tables: a novel face-down on one side, its spine cracked to hold a page; on the other, a reading lamp, a tube of hand cream, and a framed photograph of four children squinting into summer sunshine — younger versions of the adults whose rooms Sarah was now clearing, captured in a moment when this family was still whole. Thomas and Louise's room.

Under the bed. Clear. En suite. Clear. Walk-in wardrobe — Sarah swept the hanging clothes aside, checked the corners. Nothing.

She was moving faster now, the disciplined room-by-room approach giving way to something more urgent as the silence of the upper floor pressed in around her and the weight of time spent away from the ground floor — away from Louise, away from the front door, away from whatever was happening outside — grew heavier with each empty room she cleared.

"Thelma?"

Fifth door. Left side.

Emily's room. Sarah recognised it instantly as belonging to someone whose mind ran in orderly, exacting lines — the bookshelves organised by subject, the desk bare except for a laptop and a row of scientific journals aligned with geometric precision, a periodic table pinned to the wall beside a whiteboard covered in molecular diagrams drawn in fine-tipped marker. The bed was made so tightly a coin would have bounced off it. The only concession to anything beyond function was a small watercolour of the Derwent River propped on the windowsill, its brushstrokes loose and gentle in a way that nothing else in the room was.

Clear.

Sixth door. Right side.

Katie's room. The youngest, and the one whose space most clearly contained the archaeological layers of a person who had grown up within these walls. A writer's desk dominated the window — not the clinical surface of Emily's workspace but a landscape of notebooks and loose pages and paperback novels stacked in precarious towers, a fountain pen resting in the valley between two open journals. The bookshelves were crammed and disordered, fiction and poetry jumbled together without regard for alphabetisation or genre. A battered stuffed rabbit sat on the pillow — threadbare, one ear stitched back on with mismatched thread, a survivor from an earlier version of the woman who slept here, kept not from childishness but from the kind of sentiment that refuses to let go of the things that got you through. On the wall above the desk, a framed quotation in careful calligraphy that Sarah didn't pause long enough to read.

Clear.

Seventh door. Left side.

A linen cupboard. The scent of lavender sachets hit her as the door opened, startlingly domestic, and for a disorienting half-second it transported her to her grandmother's unit at Vaucluse — to Jane's cupboard with its stacked sheets and dried flowers — before she shut the association down and pulled the door closed.

One door remained.

It stood at the far end of the corridor, set into the left-hand wall exactly where Louise had said it would be. Closed. And from beneath it, a thin line of amber light — warm, steady, the glow of a lamp in a room where someone was awake and waiting.

Sarah paused outside. Listened. The house creaked around her — the settling sounds of old timber, the faint tick of something contracting in the cold — but from behind the door, nothing. No voice. No movement. Just the light, bleeding softly across the floorboards.

She holstered the Glock. Whatever was behind this door, it wasn't a tactical situation. It was a ninety-one-year-old woman in bed, and Sarah wasn't going to stand in her doorway with a weapon raised.

She reached for the handle. Turned it. Pushed the door open.

"Thelma?"

"Hello, dear."

The voice arrived from the warm, amber interior like something carried on a current — thin, papery, barely louder than the breath that shaped it, but carrying a gentleness so completely at odds with everything Sarah had encountered in the past ten minutes that it stopped her in the doorway.

The room was warm. After the cool, grey corridor, the sensation was immediate and enveloping — not stale heat but something tended, maintained, as though the temperature itself had been arranged for the comfort of the person within. A single lamp sat on the bedside table, its aged silk shade casting a honeyed glow that softened every surface it touched. The walls were papered in pale roses, faded to watercolour softness. Heavy curtains in dusky pink damask were drawn against the failing afternoon, and the effect was of a room that had gently detached itself from the rest of the house — from the rest of the world — and was drifting in its own pocket of time, insulated and unhurried.

A four-poster bed dominated the space, its dark timber frame carved with a delicacy that belonged to another century. The bedding was layered — quilts and blankets and a crocheted throw in cream wool — arranged with the particular care of someone who felt the cold deeply and had long since stopped pretending otherwise.

And in the centre of it, propped against a bank of pillows, lay a woman so small and so still that Sarah's chest tightened before her training could intervene.

Thelma Jeffries. Ninety-one years old. Skin translucent at the temples where the veins showed through in faint blue tributaries. Silver hair, fine as cobweb, spread across the pillow. Her hands rested on the quilt in front of her, fingers curled loosely inward, the knuckles swollen with arthritis. She was barely substantial enough to dent the mattress beneath her, and yet her eyes — hazel, still startlingly bright beneath the milky softening of age — were open and watching Sarah with an expression that held no alarm, no confusion, but something that looked remarkably like recognition.

Sarah moved to the bedside. Every instinct pulled her towards speed — towards checking on Thelma, confirming she was safe, instructing her to stay put, and getting back downstairs and outside where Karl was alone and the clock was ticking. But the room resisted urgency. The lamplight resisted it. The old woman in the bed, with her trembling hands and her steady gaze, resisted it in a way that Sarah couldn't simply override without becoming someone she didn't want to be.

"It's so good to see you," Thelma murmured. One hand lifted from the quilt — the effort visible in the tremor that ran from shoulder to fingertip — and reached towards Sarah with a tenderness that felt shockingly intimate. "I wasn't sure if you would come."

Sarah took the offered hand. The bones shifted beneath skin that weighed almost nothing, the fingers closing around hers with a grip that was gentle but deliberate. "We haven't met," she said, keeping her voice as soft as the room seemed to demand. "I'm a detective. Are you okay?"

"No, dear," Thelma replied. The words drifted, untethered from the question Sarah had asked, carrying a weight that seemed to belong to a much larger answer — years of answers, decades of them, compressed into two small syllables.

"Are you hurt?"

Thelma's free hand rose and found Sarah's neck, patting it with a tenderness that was disarming in its specificity — not the vague, grasping touch of confusion but the precise, familiar gesture of someone greeting a face they knew well. Her fingers were cool and dry against Sarah's skin.

"I can't find the key," Thelma said. Her expression shifted — a crease of worry deepening between her brows, her gaze dropping to the quilt as though the answer might be hidden somewhere in its folds. "I've looked and looked. It's simply not where it should be."

"What key, Thelma?"

But the old woman had already moved on. Her eyes drifted back to Sarah's face, and the worry dissolved into something sadder and more tender — a look of such aching, specific recognition that Sarah felt it land in the centre of her chest like a palm pressed flat against her sternum.

"You look so much like her," Thelma whispered. "Around the eyes especially."

Sarah didn't have time for this. She knew she didn't have time for this. Karl was outside. The shed. Luke. Every second she spent in this lamp-lit room was a second the situation beyond these walls could be changing in ways she couldn't see or influence or prevent. She needed to secure Thelma and go.

"Thelma, I have to get back downstairs. Louise is down there, and she needs me. I'm going to close this door, and I need you to stay in bed. Don't open it for anyone. Do you understand?"

Thelma nodded. A small, careful motion.

Sarah freed her hand from the old woman's grip. Straightened. Turned towards the door. Her hand found the brass handle.

"Jane, dear, don't go!"

The voice that had been breath and whisper a moment ago now carried a force that seemed impossible from the body it belonged to — not volume but intensity, the sound of something that had been held back for years breaking through whatever dam had contained it.

Sarah froze.

The name hung in the room. It didn't settle. It vibrated — in the warm air, in the lamplight, in some frequency that bypassed Sarah's ears and found something deeper, something she couldn't name but could feel resonating beneath her ribs.

She turned back.

Thelma's face had crumpled. Not with the wild, fracturing distortion of Louise's grief, but with the slow, quiet collapse of someone revisiting a wound so old it had become part of her. Tears had gathered along her lower lashes, catching the lamplight, and her lips trembled around words that seemed to cost her something physical.

"Don't leave me again."

Jane.

Her grandmother's name.

The recognition didn't dawn — it detonated. Jane Lahey. The woman who had raised Sarah from the age of nine, who had held her through nightmares about helicopter wreckage and alpine snow, who had taught her to cook and to fight and to read people and to survive. Jane, who had mentioned recently — just mentioned, in passing, in that way she had of introducing enormous things as though they were small — that she'd known the Jeffries family once. A conversation they hadn't finished. A thread left dangling because there had been no time, because there was never enough time, because Sarah had been consumed by the case and the body beneath the stairs and Karl's unravelling and her own complicity in all of it.

And now here was Thelma Jeffries, ninety-one years old, looking at Sarah with tears on her lashes and calling her Jane and begging her not to leave again — and the again was the word that caught, the word that snagged like a hook in fabric, because again meant there had been a first time, and a first time meant a history, and a history between her grandmother and this woman was something Sarah had never understood existed.

She couldn't process it. Not here. Not now. Not with Karl outside and the clock ticking and the house sealed around her and Louise alone downstairs. She took the knowledge and placed it carefully on the shelf in her mind that held all the things she couldn't afford to examine yet — a shelf that was bowing under the weight of everything she'd placed on it in the past forty-eight hours, a shelf that would eventually collapse under the accumulated mass of secrets and unanswered questions, but not yet. Not today. Today it held.

"I'm sorry," Sarah said. Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "I have to go."

She pulled the door closed. The latch caught with a soft click, and Thelma's lamplight vanished, and the corridor was dim and cool and ordinary around her.

Three seconds. She stood still for three seconds. Breathed.

Then, from somewhere below — muffled by sandstone and curtains and the thick, insulating silence of a house built to keep the world at bay — she heard it.

An engine. High-pitched. Raw. Rising in a sharp whine before cutting out with an abruptness that didn't sound like someone turning a key. It sounded like something being severed.

"Karl!"

The name left her mouth before the thought had fully formed — not a call but an expulsion, involuntary, the sound of something breaking loose inside her.

She was running before the echo faded.

Down the corridor. Past the closed doors, past the portraits that watched her flight with their painted, patient eyes. Her boots hit the floorboards without any attempt at stealth — no point now, no reason for quiet, the sound of that engine still ringing in her ears like a bell struck once and left to vibrate.

She reached the staircase and took the treads two at a time, left hand on the banister, the Glock already back in her right, drawn without conscious decision. The entrance hall rose up to meet her — the high ceiling, the William Morris wallpaper, the tall case clock still ticking with its maddening, metronome indifference, measuring out the seconds as though this one cost no more than any other.

Louise stood at the foot of the stairs, pale and rigid, her head turned towards the front of the house. She'd heard it too. The fragile composure that the task of closing blinds had given her had shattered again, and what remained was something raw and animal — a woman standing barefoot on oak floorboards with her arms wrapped around herself and her eyes wide and white-rimmed and fixed on the front door as though something might come through it at any moment.

"Get down," Sarah said. The command came out harder than she intended, sharpened by the adrenaline that was flooding her system and stripping away the careful professional modulation she'd been maintaining since they'd arrived. There was no time for gentleness now. No time for tasks and reassurance and the slow, steady anchoring that had kept Louise functional for the past fifteen minutes.

Louise didn't move. She stood frozen, her gaze locked on the door, her lips parted around a question she couldn't form.

"Louise. Get away from the door. Get down and stay down."

Something in Sarah's voice — the raw urgency of it, the edge of fear that she couldn't entirely disguise — cut through Louise's paralysis. The older woman's legs folded beneath her and she sank into the alcove beneath the staircase, pressing her back against the wall, drawing her bare feet up beneath her as though she could make herself small enough to disappear. Her hands found each other and clasped against her chest, knuckles white, fingers interlocked like a person in prayer.

Sarah crossed the entrance hall. Six strides. Her boots were sharp against the oak, each footfall carrying further than it should in the muffled silence of the sealed house, bouncing off the plasterwork ceiling and returning as hollow echoes that sounded like someone following her.

The front door stood ahead. Heavy. Solid. The same door she'd pulled shut behind them — how long ago? It felt like hours. It felt like seconds. The thin line of grey light between the door and its frame had dimmed further since she'd last seen it, the afternoon wearing itself out beyond the walls, and the brass handle caught the glow of the hallway lamp and held it in a dull, cold gleam.

She could feel Louise's eyes on her back. Could feel the question the woman didn't ask — what's happening, what did you hear, where is he, what's wrong — pressing against the silence like a hand against glass.

Sarah didn't turn around. Didn't answer what hadn't been spoken. There was nothing she could say that would help, nothing that would reassure, because she didn't know the answer to any of it — didn't know what that sound had been, didn't know what had happened outside while she'd been upstairs in a lamp-lit room holding an old woman's hand and hearing her grandmother's name spoken by a stranger.

She reached the door. Her left hand closed around the brass handle. Cold. Solid. Real.

Beyond this door: the gravel drive, the parked cars, the shed, the tree line darkening as the afternoon failed. Whatever had made that sound. Whatever it meant.

And Karl. Wherever Karl was.

Sarah drew a breath. Steadied the Glock in her right hand. Felt her weight settle into the balls of her feet, her body arranging itself into the stance that seven years of training had made as natural as breathing — weapon up, shoulders square, centre of gravity low.

She pulled the door open.

Cold air flooded the entrance hall — sharp, damp, carrying the smell of eucalyptus and river water and the mineral tang of approaching rain. It hit her face like a hand, and after the sealed warmth of the house, the sudden exposure felt like stepping from one world into another.

The gravel drive stretched before her. The two cars sat where they'd left them — the Commodore, Louise's Audi — their windscreens beaded with the fine moisture that preceded winter rain. The formal gardens lay still and dark beyond the drive, the clipped hedges and bare rose canes holding their shapes against the overcast sky. And beyond everything, the bush — the eucalyptus and blackwood pressing close on three sides, the ridgeline already dissolving into the low cloud that was rolling in from the west.

The grounds were empty.

No movement. No sound. Nothing but the wind pushing through the bare elms and the faint, distant murmur of the river somewhere below the tree line.

The shed door hung open.