Earl Grey and Evasions

"My mother said tea fixes most things. She never mentioned what to do when detectives swear in your living room."

The sound of Karl's car reversing down the driveway was abrupt, almost comically so—one moment he was there receiving urgent news from his colleague, the next he was gone, gravel crunching beneath tyres as the unmarked sedan disappeared around the curve of St Georges Terrace with barely a proper goodbye. I stood in the living room doorway, trying to parse what had just happened. The name Luke Smith had provoked something extraordinary in both detectives, that much was clear. But Karl's departure felt less like professional urgency and more like... escape? Avoidance?

Detective Lahey—Sarah, I supposed I should think of her now, given we'd be spending more time together—stood at the front door with the stillness of someone who'd just been abandoned mid-task. There was something almost amusing about it, in a dark sort of way. She looked like she'd been dropped there and forgotten, left behind whilst her partner rushed off to handle whatever he deemed more important.

The tension radiating from her was palpable even from this distance. Not just professional stress—I'd seen enough anxious clients in my salon chair to recognise the difference—but something more personal. She looked exhausted. Not just tired, though that was evident in the shadows beneath her eyes, in the way she held her shoulders as though they carried weight beyond their actual burden. This was the exhaustion of someone running on fumes, held together by will and professional obligation rather than actual energy.

I recognised that look. Had seen it in my salon mirror often enough, back when the girls were infants and I was trying to maintain professional excellence whilst operating on three hours of fractured sleep. Back when perfection felt like the only acceptable standard and anything less felt like failure.

Well. She was stuck with me now, and I was stuck with her. May as well make the best of it.

"I'll put a pot of tea on," I called out, my voice emerging steadier than I felt. Because that's what you did, wasn't it? When detectives arrived to discuss your missing husband. When they swore in your living room and one of them abandoned the other without warning. When the world was fracturing around you like ice over deep water, you offered tea. You performed hospitality even whilst drowning internally.

My mother would have approved. Tea fixes most things, Sharon. Or at least makes them bearable for a little while.

I moved into the kitchen—Adrian's kitchen, really, though I'd never have said so aloud. He'd designed every element, chosen every appliance, specified every measurement. The grey granite benchtops sourced from quarries near Devonport. The commercial-grade gas range he'd insisted we needed despite my protestations that I wasn't a professional chef. The island bench stretching six metres, dominating the space, making the kitchen simultaneously workspace and social hub.

My hands found the kettle, muscle memory taking over whilst my mind spiralled elsewhere. How many times had I made tea in this kitchen? Thousands, surely. For morning wake-ups and afternoon breaks and evening wind-downs. For dinner guests and Adrian's business associates and my salon clients who occasionally became friends. For the girls when they were sick or sad or simply seeking comfort. For myself, countless solitary moments when the house felt too large and too empty despite containing four people and a mischievous ferret.

The kettle was cold, water from this morning's aborted coffee now tepid and stale. I emptied it into the sink—expensive stainless steel, undermount installation, another Adrian specification—and refilled it from the filter tap. The water ran clear and cold, Hobart's mountain-sourced supply one of Tasmania's quiet luxuries.

Behind me, I heard Sarah moving, the soft sound of her boots against Tasmanian oak flooring, the whisper of fabric as she shifted position. I didn't turn around. Couldn't quite bear to see that exhaustion again, that mirror reflection of my own barely suppressed disintegration.

"Thank you, Mrs. Pafistis," Sarah's voice carried as she approached, professional courtesy maintaining itself through whatever crisis she was navigating.

Nodding, I placed the kettle on its base, and pressed the switch. The quiet hiss as heating elements engaged, beginning the transformation of cold water into something that could be steeped and sweetened and served as though normalcy were still possible.

I pulled down the tea service from the cabinet—bone china, part of the set my grandmother Iris had given me when I'd moved to Australia, one of the few things I'd brought from Cornwall that had survived seventeen years and countless interstate relocations. White porcelain with delicate floral patterns rendered in gold leaf, each piece hand-painted, probably worth more now than when Iris had acquired it decades ago.

Special occasions only, she'd told me. Save it for when it matters.

I supposed a police interview about your missing husband qualified as mattering.

Two cups. Two saucers. The matching teapot, still stained faintly inside despite my best efforts at cleaning, the accumulated tannins of a hundred previous uses creating a patina that no amount of scrubbing would fully remove. The sugar bowl. The small jug for milk. I assembled them on a tray—another family heirloom, silver plate worn through to base metal in spots, requiring polishing I never quite found time for—with the movements of someone performing ritual for its own sake rather than for any practical purpose.

"I'm sure your partner won't be too much longer," I said, carrying the tray towards the living room, needing to fill the silence with something, needing to believe that Karl's absence was a temporary inconvenience rather than abandonment. Though from the way Sarah's face tightened at my words, I suspected the latter was closer to truth.

"Just doing his job," she replied, the sharpness in her tone unmistakable despite obvious efforts at control.

I set the tray down on the coffee table—hand-carved Tasmanian blackwood, another Adrian commission, another piece of furniture that would outlive whatever crisis we were currently navigating. The kettle whistled from the kitchen, that particular pitch designed to be just annoying enough to demand immediate attention without being genuinely unpleasant.

"Excuse me a moment," I murmured, returning to retrieve it, pouring water over loose-leaf earl grey I'd measured into the pot. The bergamot released immediately, that particular citrus-floral scent I'd always found simultaneously comforting and melancholic. Tea of my childhood, of my mother's tearoom, of Sunday afternoons in Cornwall when life had been simpler and futures had seemed predictable and secure.

When I returned to the living room, Sarah was staring at her phone, her face a canvas of barely suppressed frustration. She looked up as I approached, and I caught the tail end of whatever emotion she was processing before her professional mask reasserted itself.

"Milk? Sugar?" I asked, settling into the armchair, assuming once again the posture my mother had drilled into me decades ago. Back straight, ankles crossed, hands composed, face pleasant. The performance of gracious hostess even whilst the world dissolved around me.

"Just milk, thank you," Sarah replied, watching as I poured, as I measured out the right ratio of tea to milk, as I handed her the cup with its saucer balanced properly, as I performed the choreography of civilised behaviour as though any of this mattered, as though serving excellent tea might somehow influence whether Adrian came home.

We sat in silence for a moment, both of us holding expensive china, both of us pretending this was normal, was manageable, was anything other than two women stranded together by circumstances neither had chosen.

I watched Sarah take a sip, saw her eyes close briefly in what might have been appreciation or exhaustion or both. She looked so young suddenly, despite the professional attire and the detective's credentials. Mid-thirties perhaps, still believing that hard work and proper procedure could impose order on chaos, still convinced that the world made sense if you just gathered enough evidence.

I'd been that young once. That certain. Before two decades of marriage had taught me that certainty was an illusion, that control was a fiction, that the foundations you built your life upon could dissolve overnight without warning.

"This is excellent," Sarah said, and there was genuine appreciation in her voice, that small recognition that quality mattered even in moments of crisis.

"Thank you," I replied. "My grandmother's blend. Well, not her own creation, obviously. But the particular earl grey she preferred. I still order it from the same supplier in Truro."

The detail felt simultaneously trivial and essential—this thread connecting me to Cornwall, to my mother's tearoom, to Iris's careful instructions about proper tea preparation, to a life that had existed before Tasmania, before Adrian, before any of this.

"You're from Cornwall originally?" Sarah asked, seizing on the conversational opening, probably grateful for topics that didn't involve missing husbands and criminal investigations.

"St Ives," I confirmed. "I moved to Australia in 1998, after Adrian and I married. He was from Melbourne originally—well, his family was. His father emigrated from Greece in the sixties."

The biographical details flowed easily, rehearsed through countless introductions at dinner parties and business functions. The story of how Sharon and Adrian met, how they'd built their life together, how they'd relocated from Melbourne to Hobart, how they'd designed this house, raised their daughters, created the appearance of a successful bicultural marriage.

But even as I spoke, I was aware of editing, of the careful curation I'd practised for seventeen years. The version of our marriage I presented to others versus the more complicated truth I barely admitted to myself. The happy couple from the Bali photograph versus the reality of separate bedrooms some nights, of conversations that felt more like negotiations than communications, of Adrian's increasing preoccupation with projects he wouldn't discuss, of my growing sense that we were performing marriage rather than actually inhabiting it.

"It must have been difficult," Sarah said, "leaving your home, your family, moving to the other side of the world."

"Yes," I acknowledged, because that was true enough. "But it was also exciting. An adventure. I was young, in love, ready to build a new life. Australia felt full of possibility."

And it had been, hadn't it? Those early years in Melbourne, living in the modest Brunswick East weatherboard, both of us working impossible hours to establish ourselves professionally, planning futures that seemed bright and attainable. Before mortgages and school fees and the accumulated weight of adult responsibility. Before the distance that married people create without quite noticing, carving out separate domains and calling it healthy independence rather than gradual estrangement.

Sarah was watching me with those perceptive eyes, and I wondered what she saw. A woman holding herself together through ritual and polish? Or someone on the edge of collapse, maintaining façade through sheer force of will?

Her phone buzzed on the table between us, and she grabbed it quickly, that particular eagerness suggesting she'd been waiting for contact. I watched her expression shift as she read whatever message had arrived—frustration blooming across her features, profanity escaping before she could stop it.

"Oh, for fuck's sake."

The words hung in the air, jarring against the refined setting, against the bone china and the carefully maintained living room and the performance of civilised behaviour we'd been executing. For a moment Sarah looked genuinely stricken, as though she'd committed an unforgivable breach of etiquette.

"I apologise," she said quickly. "That was... inappropriate. I'm sorry."

But I found myself almost grateful for the profanity, for that crack in professional veneer, for evidence that I wasn't the only one struggling to maintain composure. "It's all right, Detective. I suspect we're both feeling rather... frustrated with how things are proceeding."

The understatement was deliberate, a very British tendency to minimise emotional content, to wrap distress in polite language and serve it with tea. Frustrated didn't begin to cover the roiling anxiety and anger and confusion churning through me, but it was the word I could access, the emotion I could safely articulate without completely falling apart.

Sarah looked at me with something that might have been gratitude or recognition or both. "Mrs. Pafistis—" she started, then caught herself. "May I call you Sharon?"

"Of course," I replied, and felt some of the tension ease from my shoulders at the shift towards less formal address. "Please."

"Sharon," she started again, leaning forward slightly, her teacup forgotten. "Can you tell me about Adrian's business? About the clients he typically worked with?"

The question should have been straightforward—simply describe Pafistis Construction, outline Adrian's professional activities, provide context for understanding how he might have connected with Luke Smith. But even as I opened my mouth to answer, I felt resistance, some instinctive hesitation about revealing too much, about admitting how little I actually knew about Adrian's day-to-day operations.

"Adrian ran a construction company," I said, the words emerging with ease. "Pafistis Construction. He specialised in high-end residential projects—custom homes, renovations, heritage restorations. That sort of thing."

All true. All surface-level description that revealed nothing about the complexities beneath, about the financial pressures I'd occasionally glimpsed in Adrian's face when he thought I wasn't watching, about the late-night phone calls he'd take in his study with the door closed, about the careful separation he'd maintained between his business domain and our shared life.

"And he'd worked with Luke Smith before?" Sarah asked, her tone carefully neutral, conversational, as though this were idle curiosity rather than crucial investigation.

"I... I believe so." The hesitation wasn't calculated, it was genuine uncertainty about what I actually knew versus what I'd assumed or overheard or pieced together from fragments. "Adrian mentioned the name a few times. I know he'd done some quotes for renovation work. But Adrian had many clients. I didn't... I didn't involve myself too much in the business side of things."

The admission felt like confession, like acknowledging failure—that I'd been content to remain ignorant about significant aspects of my husband's life, that I'd accepted the boundaries he'd drawn and called it respecting his professional privacy rather than recognising it as exclusion.

"But you would have met clients sometimes?" Sarah pressed gently. "When they came to the house, perhaps? Or at social functions?"

My gaze drifted towards the windows, towards the manicured gardens Adrian and I had landscaped together, towards the physical evidence of our collaboration even as I articulated the ways we'd remained separate. "Sometimes," I acknowledged. "Adrian occasionally had clients here for initial consultations. He liked to show them our home as an example of his work—the renovation, the design elements, the attention to detail. It was... it was effective marketing, I suppose."

And it had been. This house was Adrian's best advertisement, his masterpiece, proof that he could translate vision into reality, that he understood both aesthetics and engineering, that he was worth the premium fees he charged. Clients would walk through these rooms, run their hands along custom joinery, admire the way natural light animated spaces throughout the day, and imagine having something similar for themselves.

"So Luke Smith might have been here?" Sarah asked, watching my face carefully.

"Possibly," I said, brow furrowing as I tried to recall. How many clients had walked through this house over the years? Dozens? Hundreds? They blurred together into a composite impression—wealthy couples, developers, architects, all assessing Adrian's work with varying degrees of sophistication. "I'm sorry, I don't... there were so many clients over the years. The name is familiar, but I can't picture him specifically. Adrian would have his records—his office is upstairs if you'd like to..."

The offer emerged before I'd fully considered its implications. Giving police access to Adrian's private office, to his files and correspondence and financial records, felt like betrayal even as I recognised it might be necessary.

"That's all right," Sarah said, declining with what seemed like relief. "We'll need proper authorisation for that. But thank you."

We sat in silence again, and I found myself pouring more tea neither of us needed, performing the ritual because it gave my hands something to do, because the alternative was sitting perfectly still whilst panic clawed at my throat.

The afternoon light streaming through the floor-to-ceiling windows had shifted, no longer harsh but softer, more forgiving, painting everything in warmer tones that should have been beautiful but instead felt melancholic, elegiac, like light at a funeral.

"Sharon," Sarah said carefully, and something in her tone made me look up, made me recognise that we were approaching something significant. "I have to ask you something, and I need you to be completely honest with me."

The phrasing triggered immediate defensive responses—heart rate accelerating, muscles tensing, mind racing through what she might ask, what I might need to protect or conceal or carefully phrase to avoid revealing too much. "Of course," I said, though the words came out slightly strained.

"Were there any problems in Adrian's business?" Sarah asked directly. "Financial troubles? Disputes with clients or subcontractors? Anything that might have created... difficulties?"

The question landed hard, not because it was unexpected but because it articulated suspicions I'd been suppressing, concerns I'd dismissed as paranoid or disloyal. My jaw tightened involuntarily before I could control the reaction.

"No," I said, but the answer came too quickly, too defensively, revealing more through denial than any admission might have. "Adrian ran a successful company. We were... we're financially comfortable. There were no problems."

Even as I spoke, I heard the tense correction—were becoming are—that same unconscious slip happening again, language betraying what my conscious mind refused to acknowledge. That some part of me had already begun processing Adrian's absence as permanent, had already started conjugating our life in past tense.

"I notice you corrected yourself," Sarah said gently. "From 'were' to 'are.' You did that earlier too, when talking about your marriage."

Heat flooded my face, embarrassment mixing with anger at being caught, at having my defensive mechanisms exposed so casually. "I'm under considerable stress, Detective Lahey. I'm sure I'm not speaking with perfect grammatical precision."

The sharpness in my tone was deliberate, a warning to back off, to respect boundaries, to recognise that there were limits to how much probing I would tolerate. But Sarah didn't retreat.

"Of course," she acknowledged. "I understand. But Sharon, if there's anything—anything at all—that you think might be relevant to finding Adrian, now is the time to tell me. Even if it seems unimportant. Even if it's... uncomfortable."

She looked at me with such earnest concern, such genuine desire to help, that I felt something crack in my defences. This wasn't hostile interrogation. This was one woman trying to help another, trying to navigate impossible circumstances with whatever tools were available.

"We had a good marriage," I said finally, and there was defiance in my tone, argument against unspoken accusations, insistence against doubt. "Adrian was a good man. A good father. He worked hard, he provided for his family, he loved his daughters. Whatever... whatever has happened to him, it wasn't because of problems at home."

But even as I spoke the words, I heard their defensive quality, recognised that I was protesting too much, that genuine confidence wouldn't require such emphatic assertion. And beneath the words, other truths whispered: that I didn't actually know if our marriage was good because I'd stopped examining it too closely years ago, that providing financially wasn't the same as being emotionally present, that loving your daughters didn't preclude having secrets or making terrible decisions.

"I'm not suggesting otherwise," Sarah said carefully. "But sometimes good people get caught up in situations beyond their control. Sometimes they make small compromises that snowball into bigger problems. Sometimes they..."

She trailed off, and I was almost grateful for the incompletion, for not having to hear whatever she'd been about to articulate.

"Adrian kept his business and his family life quite separate," I said, the words emerging slowly, each one carefully chosen. "He didn't... he didn't burden me with work concerns. That was his domain. The salon was mine, the children and home were shared, but his business was... his."

The compartmentalisation I described had seemed entirely reasonable when we'd established those boundaries years ago. Healthy independence, we'd called it. Respecting each other's professional autonomy. Not overwhelming each other with concerns that weren't directly relevant to shared life. But now, articulating it to Sarah, it sounded different—less like healthy boundaries and more like wilful ignorance, less like respect and more like avoidance.

"Did that bother you?" Sarah asked. "The separation?"

I considered lying, considered claiming perfect contentment with our arrangement, considered performing the satisfied wife role I'd been executing for years. But I was so tired of performing, so exhausted by the effort of maintaining surfaces whilst everything underneath dissolved.

"Sometimes," I admitted. "There were occasions when I felt... excluded. When Adrian would be preoccupied with some project or problem, and I'd know something was wrong but he wouldn't discuss it. He'd say he didn't want to worry me, that it was nothing I needed to concern myself with."

The protective framing had always felt slightly patronising, though I'd never quite articulated that to Adrian. As though I were too delicate to handle complexity, too fragile to bear knowledge of difficulties. As though shielding me from problems was the same as caring for me.

"And you accepted that?" Sarah asked, no judgment in her voice but the question itself implying critique.

"I trusted him," I said simply, past tense emerging without conscious decision this time, that grammatical shift revealing what I'd been trying not to acknowledge. My trust had been past tense for a while now, hadn't it? Before the disappearance. Before Luke Smith's name had triggered such dramatic reactions. I'd been trusting Adrian in the way you trust familiar furniture—assuming it would continue functioning as it always had without closely examining whether that assumption remained valid.

"Had?" Sarah echoed, picking up on the verb tense with detective's precision.

And suddenly the composure I'd maintained through thirty-nine hours of escalating crisis finally cracked. "I don't know," I said, and genuine emotion leaked through—confusion and fear and anger all tangled together in ways I couldn't separate. "I don't know what's happening. I don't know where my husband is. I don't know if he's hurt or... or worse. And I don't know if there's something I should have seen, something I should have questioned, some warning sign I missed because I was too busy with my own life to pay proper attention to his."

The guilt poured out, that particular torture I'd been inflicting on myself since Adrian hadn't come home, the retroactive examination of every moment searching for the clue I'd missed, the question I should have asked, the concern I should have voiced.

Had there been signs? Had Adrian been different in the weeks before his disappearance? More distracted? More secretive? Or had he been exactly as he'd always been, and I'd simply grown so accustomed to our patterns that I'd stopped actually seeing him?

"Sharon," Sarah said, and her voice was softer than it had been, more personal than professional. "This isn't your fault. Whatever has happened to Adrian, whatever circumstances led to his disappearance—that's not on you. You're not responsible for protecting a grown man from his own choices or from things beyond anyone's control."

The absolution should have been comforting, should have eased the guilt that was eating me alive. But it didn't, because blame and guilt weren't logical, weren't subject to rational reassurance. They existed independent of actual culpability, feeding on doubt and uncertainty and the fundamental human need to believe that bad things happen for reasons, that we have more control than we actually do.

"But what if I could have stopped it?" I whispered, the question emerging from some deep place I'd been trying not to examine. "What if there was something I could have done, some question I should have asked, and I just... didn't?"

Sarah looked at me with eyes that suggested she understood, that maybe she carried similar guilt about different circumstances, that this particular torture wasn't unique to me. "You can't know that," she said finally. "And torturing yourself with what-ifs isn't going to help find Adrian."

Logically, I knew she was right. Emotionally, it made no difference whatsoever.

We sat in silence again, and I wiped at my eyes with trembling fingers, aware that my mascara was probably running, that my careful makeup was dissolving, that the composed woman who'd greeted them at the door had been replaced by someone more vulnerable, more real, more completely undone.

"The tea is lovely," Sarah said finally, offering something normal to fill the silence. "Thank you for your hospitality under such difficult circumstances."

I managed a weak smile. "My mother owned a tearoom in Cornwall. I grew up learning that tea could fix most problems. Or at least make them more bearable for a little while."

"Your mother sounds wise," Sarah replied.

"She was," I agreed, and felt fresh grief layer over existing distress. "She died three years ago. I miss her terribly. She would have... she would have known what to do in this situation. How to cope."

My mother had had answers for everything—how to run a business, how to maintain standards, how to weather difficulties with grace. She'd been the one I'd called when Sarah had colic, when Adrian and I had our first serious argument, when I'd been struggling with homesickness. Her death had left a void I'd never quite filled, and now, when I needed her wisdom most desperately, she was just another absence, another loss, another proof that the people you relied on eventually disappeared.

"I'm sorry," Sarah said, and the simple acknowledgement felt more genuine than elaborate condolences would have.

Before I could respond, the doorbell rang—the melodic chime echoing through the house with expensive acoustics, announcing arrival with the same pleasant clarity it had announced the detectives hours ago.

Another officer, presumably. Come to collect Sarah, to retrieve her from this strange interlude we'd shared.

I rose to answer it, reassembling composure like armour, smoothing my hair, wiping beneath my eyes, preparing to greet whoever waited beyond the door with appropriate grace despite having just fallen apart in my living room.

The performance resumed. The hostess returned. Sharon Pafistis, poised and gracious even whilst everything internal screamed chaos.

Because that's what you did, wasn't it? You performed. You maintained surfaces. You offered tea and pleasant greetings and the appearance of competence even when you were drowning.

Even when your husband had disappeared and detectives were swearing in your home and everything you'd built over twenty years was dissolving like sugar in hot water.

Even then, you answered the door with a smile.