Grey Tick

"Twenty-eight years of marriage teaches you to read the rhythm of footsteps on the stairs. Some mornings, you already know the conversation is over before it begins."

The moment I heard Thomas's footsteps on the stairs, I positioned myself between the kitchen island and the doorway. It was a strategy I'd perfected over twenty-eight years of marriage — intercepting him before he could gather enough momentum to sweep past me and out the door without a word. This morning, like most mornings lately, I could tell from the rhythm of his descent that he was already mentally elsewhere, his mind three steps ahead of his body, calculating routes and risks and whatever else consumed him these days.

He appeared in the doorway wearing the charcoal suit I'd had dry-cleaned on Monday, his tie not quite straight, his hair still damp from the shower. At forty-seven, Thomas remained a handsome man — the strong jaw, the intelligent eyes that had first caught my attention across the university library all those years ago. But there was a tightness to his features now, a permanent furrow between his brows that hadn't been there five years ago, or even two. Since his father's disappearance, something had shifted in him, some internal mechanism wound too tight and never released.

"I was thinking," I said, keeping my voice light. Casual. The tone I used when I wanted something to sound like a suggestion rather than a request. "You could take Kain with you this morning. Drop him at the Kingston site on your way in."

Thomas's gaze flicked to me, then to the coffee pot, then to his watch. "Kingston? That's completely out of my way. I'd be adding an hour to my morning, easily."

"Forty-five minutes," I said, though I knew even as I said it that I was being optimistic. "If you take the Southern Outlet and the traffic's moving."

"The traffic's never moving at this hour, and you know it." He moved toward the coffee pot, poured the dregs into a travel mug without checking whether I'd wanted any. I watched his hands — steady enough, but there was a tremor of impatience in the way he screwed on the lid, the slight spillage he didn't bother to wipe from the rim. "I'd have to drive all the way through the city, past my own office, down to Kingston, then double back again. The board meeting's at nine."

"I just thought it might be nice." I heard the shift in my own voice, the careful neutrality giving way to something more exposed. "For you and Kain. Some time together."

Thomas paused, coffee mug halfway to his lips. For a moment I thought I saw something flicker across his face — recognition, perhaps, or guilt — but it passed so quickly I couldn't be certain it had been there at all.

"Kain's got his own vehicle," he said. "He doesn't need me to chauffeur him around."

"That's not what I—" I stopped. Took a breath. There was no point explaining what I'd meant when he'd already decided not to understand it. "Never mind. It was just a thought."

Thomas took a long drink of his coffee, his eyes fixed somewhere past my shoulder. I knew that look — the one that meant he'd already mentally left the room, already moved on to the next item on whatever internal checklist governed his days. The conversation was over. It had been over, probably, before it began.

"What about Rebecca?" he asked, and I realised he was still searching for a solution to a problem I hadn't actually posed. "She's going into the city, isn't she?"

"Rebecca left twenty minutes ago. Early client meeting." I didn't add that Rebecca had barely spoken to her father in three days, not since their last argument about Jeffries Industries' environmental compliance record had ended with her calling him morally bankrupt and him calling her ungrateful. The silence between them moved through the house like a cold front, and I'd learned it was easier to navigate around it than to stand in its path.

Thomas set down his mug with a little more force than necessary. "Louise, I can't. Not this morning. There's too much—" He stopped, pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose in that gesture I'd come to recognise as the precursor to either a headache or an excuse. "Harrison's bringing the quarterly security review. There are concerns about the Queenstown facility, and I need to be across all of it before the board convenes."

Security concerns. Always security concerns. The Queenstown mining operation, the agricultural holdings in the Midlands, the energy contracts, the manor itself. Since 2008, since Charles had walked into his study one evening and simply ceased to exist, Thomas had wrapped himself in layers of vigilance that multiplied with each passing year. More cameras. More guards. More locks on doors that had stood open for generations. More late nights in his study reviewing footage and reports and God knew what else, emerging hollow-eyed and unwilling to share whatever it was he thought he'd found or failed to find.

I'd tried, in the early years, to reach him through it. To sit with him in the darkness of his worry, to understand what he feared and why. But Thomas had constructed walls around those fears — not walls I could scale, but the kind built from silence and misdirection, from topics changed and questions unanswered until I'd stopped asking them. We existed now in a kind of parallel proximity, sharing a bed, a house, a family, whilst our interior lives ran alongside each other like separate columns in a ledger that would never be reconciled.

"Fine," I said, and I heard the flatness in my own voice, the resignation I'd stopped trying to disguise. "I'll let Kain know he's on his own."

Thomas was already moving past me, reaching for his coat on the hook by the door. The good wool one, the one I'd bought him for his forty-fifth birthday when I'd still harboured hopes that the right gift might somehow reach him, might remind him of who we'd been to each other before the accumulated weight of his family's history had pressed the lightness out of him.

"Tom."

He paused, one arm in his coat sleeve, and turned back. There was a flicker of something in his eyes — impatience, certainly, but beneath it, just for a moment, something older. Something that remembered the young man who'd approached me in the library stacks with a question about colonial business records that we'd both known was merely pretext.

"What?"

I wanted to say: When did we become this? When did you stop seeing me as someone to confide in and start seeing me as another item to be managed? Your son is building a house for his family and you can't spare forty-five minutes to show interest. Your daughter thinks you're a stranger. Your youngest spends more time with your grandmother than with you. Come back to us, Tom. Come back to me.

Instead, I said: "Your tie's crooked."

He glanced down, adjusted it with practised fingers. "Better?"

"Better."

And then he was gone, the front door closing behind him with that particular resonance unique to Jeffries Manor — the sound of two-hundred-year-old timber settling back into its frame, a sound I'd heard ten thousand times and still couldn't quite call familiar. Through the window, I watched his car — the silver BMW he'd insisted on after the security consultant had recommended something with "enhanced protective features" — reverse down the drive and disappear through the gates.

The kitchen settled into silence around me.

I stood there for a moment longer than I should have, my hand resting on the cool marble of the countertop, feeling the emptiness of the room expand to fill the space Thomas had vacated. The morning light — thin and pale, filtered through the winter clouds that had settled over the valley — slanted through the windows, illuminating the gleaming surfaces of a kitchen that cost more than my parents' house and rarely saw anything more ambitious than toast.

My phone sat on the counter where I'd left it. No new notifications.

I picked it up, checked again — the gesture had become reflexive over the past couple of days, a nervous habit I couldn't seem to suppress. My message to Jamie, sent the day before yesterday, still showed as unread. The little grey tick that meant delivered but not seen. I'd followed up yesterday with something lighter, a photograph of the frost that had silvered the lawn at dawn, the intricate patterns on the kitchen window like lace made from cold. Beautiful morning here, I'd written. The manor does winter well, at least. Call me when you get a chance?

Nothing.

I pulled up his number and pressed call before I could talk myself out of it. The phone rang once, twice, three times, then clicked over to voicemail with that familiar message — Jamie's voice, slightly awkward as it always was when recorded, saying he'd get back to me as soon as he could.

"It's me again," I said after the tone, and I could hear the strain in my own voice, the worry I was trying and failing to modulate into something that sounded casual. "Just checking in. Give me a ring when you get this, would you? Even just a text to let me know you're all right. I'm probably fussing over nothing." I paused, considered adding something about Luke, then thought better of it. "Love you, Jamie. Call me."

I ended the call and set the phone down, but I didn't move away from it. Through the window, I could see the manor's grounds stretching toward the Derwent, the river sluggish and grey beneath the winter sky, the gardens stripped back to their bones by the cold. Somewhere beyond that water, beyond the hills that folded northward toward Berriedale, my brother was living his life in a house with a man I'd never quite trusted and could never quite explain why.

Jamie, where on earth are you?

I'd been asking myself that question since yesterday morning, turning it over in my mind the way I turned over problem accounts at work — examining it from every angle, looking for the discrepancy that would explain why the numbers didn't balance. It had only been two days, I reminded myself. Two days wasn't long. People went two days without checking their phones all the time.

But Jamie wasn't people. Jamie was my brother, and in the ten years since he'd returned to Tasmania, he'd never gone more than a day without some form of contact. A text, a call, a photograph of those ridiculous dogs. Something.

I pulled the bread from the cupboard and fed four slices into the toaster, pressing the lever down with more force than was strictly necessary. The mechanical click of it engaging felt grounding somehow, a small practical action in a morning that had already begun to drift beyond my control.

He's probably just busy, I told myself, reaching for the butter dish. Or he and Luke have gone somewhere for a couple of days and he forgot to mention it. Or his phone's broken and he hasn't gotten around to replacing it.

But even as I assembled these reasonable explanations, arranging them like line items that should have produced a sensible total, something beneath my ribs remained unconvinced. Call it instinct, though I'd never been one for trusting anything I couldn't quantify. Call it the pattern recognition that made me good at my job — the ability to spot when numbers diverged from expectation, when something was absent from a picture that should have contained it.

Call it the feeling I'd had about Luke Smith from the very first time Jamie had introduced us, ten years ago now, when my brother's face had been illuminated by a happiness I hadn't seen in him since childhood. I'd smiled and said all the right things whilst something small and cold had taken up residence in my chest — a doubt I could never justify with evidence, a suspicion that failed every reasonable test I subjected it to, yet refused to be written off.

The toaster popped, startling me back to the present.

I buttered the toast mechanically, arranged it on a plate, set it on the breakfast bar where whoever emerged next from the warren of bedrooms upstairs could claim it. The manor was stirring now — I could hear footsteps above me, the distant percussion of a door closing, the old pipes groaning in protest as someone turned on a shower. The house surfacing into wakefulness around me, this vast inheritance I'd lived inside for nearly three decades without ever quite feeling it had accepted me as one of its own.

My phone remained silent on the counter.

I picked it up once more, checked once more, found nothing once more, and made myself set it down again.

There would be time to worry about Jamie later. There were always more immediate claims on my attention — the adult children who still required managing, the ninety-one-year-old great-grandmother who needed looking in on, the thousand small transactions of maintaining a household that had never been designed for anything so ordinary as daily life.

But beneath the morning's tasks, beneath the toast and the coffee and the conversations still to come, that cold feeling in my chest persisted. A line item that wouldn't reconcile. An entry in the wrong column.

A deficit I couldn't yet name, but whose presence I could no longer ignore.