Ice on Still Water

"There are things your body knows before your mind will accept them. I've learned to trust that knowledge, even when I can't explain it."

The morning settled into stillness after Katie left, a particular quality of quiet that only Jeffries Manor could produce. It wasn't silence, exactly — there were always sounds if you listened closely enough. The occasional creak of floorboards overhead as Brianne moved through her and Kain's room. The radiators clicking and sighing as the heating system laboured against the July cold. The house breathed, settled, shifted in ways that two hundred years of habitation had made almost imperceptible.

But beneath those sounds, the quiet remained. Waiting.

I stood at the kitchen window for a long time, watching the morning unfold across the valley. The clouds had thickened since dawn, pressing down on the hills like something with weight and intention. The Derwent moved sluggishly beneath them, more grey than silver now, and the gardens stretched between the house and the water in their winter dormancy — bare branches, frost-browned lawns, the skeletal shapes of trees that would be beautiful again in spring but now looked merely abandoned.

Twenty-eight years I'd lived in this house. Twenty-eight years of waking to this view, of walking these halls, of trying to make a home within walls that had witnessed things I could never fully know. I'd been nineteen when I first set foot in Jeffries Manor, Thomas's nervous girlfriend meeting his grandparents for the first time, pregnant with Rebecca though I didn't know it yet. I remembered the way the entrance hall had seemed to swallow me — the height of the ceilings, the portraits staring down with their painted eyes, the sense that I was being evaluated by something older and more permanent than the elderly couple who'd greeted me with careful courtesy.

James III had been kind, in his distant way. He'd asked about my studies, expressed polite interest in my family, made the sort of small talk that put guests at ease without revealing anything of substance. But Thelma — Thelma had looked at me differently. Had taken my measure in a single glance and seemed to find something there worth noting. When she'd clasped my hand at the end of that first visit, she'd held it a moment longer than necessary and said, quietly enough that only I could hear: "You'll do. You're stronger than you look."

I hadn't known what to make of those words then. I wasn't sure I knew now, nearly three decades later. But I'd thought of them often over the years, particularly during the times when strength was the only thing I had — when Rebecca arrived before Thomas and I were ready, when I was finishing my degree with a baby on my hip and another on the way, when Thomas began his slow retreat into the fortress of his own fears and I had to learn to love him across distances that had nothing to do with geography.

Thelma had seen something in me that day. Perhaps the same thing she saw in Katie now — a resilience that didn't advertise itself, a capacity to endure.

I hoped she'd been right. I had a feeling I was going to need it.

My phone sat on the counter where I'd left it, its dark screen reflecting a distorted sliver of the window. I made myself look away from it, made myself focus on practical tasks. The dishwasher needed emptying. The shopping list needed updating. There were accounts I should review before Monday, household matters requiring attention, the endless cycle of maintenance and management that kept a house this size from descending into chaos.

I did none of these things.

Instead, I drifted through the ground floor rooms like someone visiting a place they'd never see again, looking at everything with eyes that seemed suddenly unfamiliar. The drawing room where Thomas and I had told his grandparents about Rebecca, Thelma's expression shifting from surprise to something that might have been approval. The library where I'd spent countless evenings reading whilst Thomas worked late, the leather chairs worn smooth by generations of Jeffries seeking escape in books. The formal dining room we rarely used, its long table built for the kind of gatherings that had grown less frequent as the family contracted and Thomas's paranoia expanded.

Each room held layers of memory, stacked like sediment, the weight of years pressing down until the original shape of things became obscured. I remembered Christmas dinners and birthday celebrations, arguments that had shaken the windows and reconciliations that had happened so quietly no one else noticed. I remembered Rebecca's first steps in the entrance hall, Emily's quiet concentration as she read in the conservatory, Kain's thunderous footsteps as he raced through corridors that seemed designed to amplify sound. I remembered Katie as a toddler, following Thelma like a small devoted shadow, learning the house's secrets from someone who'd kept them for sixty years.

I remembered being happy here. I was certain I had been, at least some of the time. But the happiness felt distant now, like something I'd read about rather than experienced, and I couldn't tell whether that was the fault of memory or whether the happiness itself had been less substantial than I'd believed.

The conservatory was cold when I entered it, the winter sun too weak to warm the glass-enclosed space. This had been Thomas's mother Rebekah's favourite room, according to James III — she'd had it built in the twenties, a place where she could write her poetry surrounded by plants and light. I'd never known Rebekah; she'd died young, when Thomas was barely more than a child. But I'd always felt a kind of kinship with her in this room, two women who'd married into the Jeffries family and tried to carve out spaces that felt like their own.

The plants she'd cultivated were long gone, replaced by my own selections over the years — ferns that tolerated the low winter light, a few stubborn orchids that refused to bloom on any predictable schedule, herbs I grew more for the pleasure of tending them than for any culinary purpose. They were looking neglected, I noticed. The basil needed water. The rosemary could use pruning. Small failures of attention that had accumulated while I was focused on other things.

While you were focused on worrying, I corrected myself. While you were checking your phone and leaving voicemails and watching the grey tick that never turned blue.

I sank into the wicker chair by the window — Rebekah's chair, though I'd reupholstered it twice since we'd moved in permanently — and allowed myself to stop pretending I was doing anything other than waiting. Waiting for Kain to call. Waiting for Jamie to text. Waiting for the cold feeling in my chest to resolve itself into something I could address or dismiss.

The house seemed to lean in around me, listening.

I had never spoken to anyone about the way Jeffries Manor felt to me. Not to Thomas, who'd grown up within these walls and seemed immune to their peculiarities. Not to my mother, who'd sensed something on her first visit but would have dismissed any further observations as fanciful. Not even to Katie, who shared my awareness of the house's strange qualities but who'd made her peace with them in ways I never quite had.

The manor was alive. Not literally, not in any way I could defend with reason or evidence, but alive nonetheless — possessed of a presence that went beyond architecture, a consciousness that existed in the spaces between walls, in the quality of the silence, in the way certain rooms felt welcoming and others felt like warnings. I'd learned to navigate it over the years, learned which corridors felt safe and which made the hair rise on the back of my neck, learned to recognise the difference between the house settling and the house paying attention.

Today, it was paying attention.

I could feel it in the stillness that pressed against the conservatory windows, in the way the grey light seemed to thicken rather than illuminate, in the particular quality of cold that had nothing to do with temperature. The manor was watching me, waiting along with me, and for the first time in years I found myself wondering what it knew that I didn't.

The Jeffries family history was riddled with disappearances. William Sr., the convict founder, vanishing from the manor in 1821 and never seen again. Charles, Thomas's father, walking into the study in 2008 and simply ceasing to exist. Others, too, if you went back far enough — deaths that were never quite explained, absences that were never quite resolved, a pattern of loss that wound through the family tree like a genetic defect, surfacing in each generation with terrible reliability.

I'd told myself, when I married Thomas, that I didn't believe in curses. That the Jeffries family's troubles were the result of human choices and human failings, not supernatural intervention. That whatever had happened to William Sr. and all the others, it had explanations that simply hadn't been discovered, mysteries that could be solved if someone looked hard enough and long enough.

I still believed that, mostly. But sitting in the conservatory with the winter pressing in and my brother silent and my son driving toward whatever waited for him in Berriedale, I felt the edges of that belief beginning to fray.

What if some things don't have explanations? The thought arrived unbidden, unwelcome. What if some patterns can't be broken because they aren't really patterns at all, but symptoms of something deeper, something woven into the foundations of this family and this house and this piece of land where it stands?

I pushed the thought away. I was catastrophising again, letting anxiety metastasise into superstition. Jamie was fine. Kain would call any minute to confirm it. The cold feeling in my chest was nothing more than the residue of a difficult morning, exacerbated by too little sleep and too much caffeine and the particular strain of living with Thomas's paranoia whilst trying not to develop my own.

My phone remained silent.

I should call Thomas. The thought surfaced and I dismissed it almost immediately, knowing how the conversation would go. He'd be in his meeting by now, or preparing for it, his attention consumed by security concerns and quarterly reports and whatever other abstractions occupied the space where his family used to live. Even if I reached him, what would I say? I'm worried about Jamie. I'm worried about everything. I'm sitting in the conservatory feeling like something terrible is about to happen and I don't know how to stop it.

He'd tell me I was overreacting. He'd be patient, or try to be, but I'd hear the distraction in his voice, the desire to return to matters he considered more pressing. And then I'd feel worse than before — not just worried, but alone in my worry, carrying it without anyone to help distribute the weight.

This was what our marriage had become. Two people in the same house, the same bed, the same life, who had somehow forgotten how to turn to each other when they needed to.

I remembered, with painful clarity, how it had been in the early years. Thomas coming home from the office and actually telling me about his day, asking about mine, engaging with the mundane details that constituted a shared life. Thomas reaching for me in the night, not just for sex but for comfort, curling around me like I was something he needed to survive. Thomas laughing — God, when had I last heard him really laugh? The kind that came from genuine joy rather than social obligation, the kind that had first made me fall in love with him across that university library?

The Thomas I'd married had been careful and reserved, yes, but he'd also been present. He'd been capable of intimacy, of vulnerability, of admitting when he was afraid. The Thomas I lived with now was a fortified city, all his gates closed and guarded, everything vital locked away where no one could reach it.

I didn't know how to reach him anymore. I wasn't sure he wanted to be reached.

The clock in the hallway chimed nine-thirty, its tone muffled by the intervening walls but still audible in the conservatory's quiet. The drive to Berriedale took fifteen minutes, maybe twenty if the traffic was difficult. Kain should be arriving at Jamie's house about now. Should be knocking on the door, seeing Jamie’s face when he answered, asking after him in that casual way young men had when they'd been sent on errands by worried mothers.

He'd call soon. Any minute now.

I pulled out my phone and checked it again, knowing before I looked that there would be nothing. The screen glowed with the time, the date, the weather forecast I'd never asked for. No messages. No missed calls. Nothing from Jamie, nothing from Kain, nothing from the universe to suggest that my fears were unfounded or my instincts mistaken.

Give it time, I told myself. He's probably just getting there now. He's probably standing on the doorstep right this moment, waiting for someone to answer. You'll hear from him in five minutes, ten at most, and then you'll feel foolish for working yourself into such a state over nothing.

But the cold knot in my chest didn't loosen. If anything, it drew tighter, pulling at something deep in my body, something that remembered what it felt like to lose someone — to sit in a hospital corridor while Sarah's breathing slowed in the room beyond, to watch my parents drive away with Jamie's face pressed to the window, to feel Thomas retreating into himself inch by inch while I stood helpless, unable to follow.

I knew loss. I knew how it announced itself, how it sent advance messengers of dread and premonition before the main force arrived. I knew the particular frequency of fear that preceded it, the way your body understood what your mind refused to accept.

And my body understood something now. Had understood it for days, maybe, while I'd been busy making excuses and constructing explanations and telling myself that two days of silence didn't mean anything, that people went quiet sometimes, that there was nothing unusual about a brother who texted me pictures of his dogs every morning suddenly stopping without a word.

Jamie was in trouble. I knew it the way I knew my own heartbeat, with a certainty that bypassed evidence and logic and settled directly into the marrow of my bones.

The only question was what kind of trouble, and whether I'd sent my son into it.

I stood abruptly, unable to remain still any longer, and began to pace the conservatory's small space. Five steps to the window, turn, five steps to the door, turn, repeat. The movement helped, gave my body something to do while my mind spun through scenarios I couldn't complete, possibilities I couldn't assess, outcomes I couldn't face.

Kain will call. He'll call and say Jamie's fine, just been busy, phone was broken, sorry for worrying you. And you'll laugh with relief and feel ridiculous and life will go on the way it always has.

Or.

Or he'll call and his voice will be strange and he'll say something happened, something's wrong, you need to come.

Or.

Or he won't call at all.

I stopped at the window, pressing my palm flat against the cold glass, feeling the chill seep into my skin. Beyond the garden, beyond the river, beyond the hills that folded toward the north, my son was driving toward my brother, and I had no way of knowing what either of them would find.

The house waited with me, patient and watchful, its two centuries of secrets pressing in from every direction. Somewhere upstairs, Brianne was resting with her hand on her belly, carrying a grandchild I might never know. Somewhere above that, Katie was wrestling with words and stories, trying to make sense of a family whose history defied easy narrative. Somewhere in her sitting room, Thelma was reading about a queen who'd survived a lifetime of threats and betrayals, holding onto her throne through sheer force of will.

And somewhere out there, in the grey morning and the gathering clouds and the world beyond these walls, something was happening that I couldn't see and couldn't stop and couldn't understand.

I checked my phone one more time.

Still nothing.

The conservatory clock — a small brass thing Rebekah had bought in Melbourne, or so the family story went — ticked steadily in its corner, counting off seconds that felt increasingly like a countdown. The clouds thickened over the valley. The river moved sluggishly toward the sea.

And I stood at the window, waiting, while the cold feeling in my chest spread outward like ice forming on still water, and the house that had never quite accepted me as its own seemed to hold its breath alongside me, as though it too was bracing for whatever came next.

Please, I thought, though I wasn't sure who I was addressing — God, the universe, the listening walls, my own desperate hope. Please let me be wrong. Please let this just be anxiety. Please let Kain call and tell me everything's fine.

Please don't let me lose anyone else.

The prayer, if that's what it was, dissolved into the silence. The house offered no response. The phone remained dark in my hand.

And the morning continued, grey and cold and full of waiting, while somewhere beyond my reach, the machinery of catastrophe turned another degree toward the reckoning none of us saw coming.