Locked Out, Locked In

"A dancer knows exactly when to hold position, when to move. I locked the door before remembering he still has the keys."

I don't remember going back outside.

One moment I was sitting at the kitchen table, phone silent on the wood in front of me, staring at the pile of post Paul had left scattered there. The next I was standing on the porch, bare feet on cold boards, arms wrapped around my ribs, watching the empty road.

The cold was what brought me back to myself. That, and the realisation that I was shivering—a fine tremor running through my shoulders, my jaw clenched tight against the chatter of teeth. My breath made small clouds in the air. How long had I been standing here?

The street was quiet. Not silent—never truly silent out here, there was always the wind, always something moving in the distance—but quiet in that particular way that residential streets get after dinner, when families have retreated indoors and the only signs of life are the blue flickers of television screens behind curtained windows. The Maguires' house across the road had their porch light on, a yellow glow that made a small warm circle on their front step. Someone's dog barked, far away, a series of sharp sounds that faded into nothing.

Paul's car was gone. Of course it was gone—I'd watched him drive away, watched the taillights shrink and disappear around the curve by the Hendersons' place. That had been... how long ago? I didn't know. The sky had finished its descent into full dark while I'd been—what? Sitting at the table? Standing here? The time between felt smeared, indistinct, like a photograph taken with an unsteady hand.

I made myself focus. The road. The streetlamp casting its orange pool of light on the bitumen. The peppercorn trees at the corner, their leaves rustling faintly in a breeze I couldn't feel from here. All of it ordinary, familiar, the same view I'd seen a thousand times. None of it containing Paul.

Fine.

The word formed in my mind, hard-edged and satisfying.

Fine. Run then.

I could feel my jaw clenching, the muscles tight all the way up to my temples. My shoulders were hunched up around my ears. A dancer's body knows tension—knows how it settles into the neck and spine, how it shortens the breath and tightens the chest. I made myself exhale slowly, counting the way I taught my students to count before a performance. One, two, three, four. Release on five.

It didn't help.

Above me, the sky had deepened from purple to black, and the stars were coming out. Not tentatively, the way they did in cities, but boldly, assertively, the way they only appeared out here in the far west where light pollution was something that happened to other places. The Milky Way was starting to show itself—that great smear of light across the darkness that I'd grown up under, that I'd pointed out to Mack and Rose on summer nights when we'd lain on blankets in the backyard and I'd tried to teach them the names of constellations I only half-remembered.

The thought of the children sent something sharp through my chest, and I pushed it away. They were fine. They were at Mum and Dad's. They were probably asleep by now, or nearly, tucked into the fold-out bed in the sewing room with their grandparents down the hall.

They didn't know about any of this.

I realised I was still staring at the empty road, at the place where the curve bent away behind the peppercorns, as if Paul's car might reappear at any moment. As if he might change his mind, turn around, come back to explain himself. To apologise. To act like a bloody adult instead of—

Instead of climbing out a window.

The image surfaced again, vivid and absurd: Paul's lanky frame silhouetted against the dusky sky, his legs awkwardly straddling the windowsill, the moment of imbalance before he pitched forward into the roses. My roses. The ones I'd planted three years ago, the David Austins that had finally established themselves and were supposed to bloom properly this spring.

A sound escaped my throat—not quite a laugh, not quite anything else. The night air swallowed it.

I became aware, slowly, of the cold in my feet. Really aware of it, not just as background sensation but as something demanding attention. The boards of the porch were rough under my soles, and cold, the kind of cold that would turn to aching if I stood here much longer. My toes were starting to feel distant, the way extremities did when the blood retreated to protect the core.

How long had I been standing here?

I didn't know. Time had gone strange. It felt like minutes, but the sky said longer—full dark now, the last traces of sunset completely gone from the western horizon. The temperature had dropped the way it did out here once the sun went down, that rapid desert cooling that could catch you off guard if you weren't paying attention.

I wasn't paying attention.

Or rather, I was paying attention to the wrong things. To the empty road. To the memory of taillights. To the window, the roses, the absolute bloody nerve of a man who would rather fall into a garden bed than finish a conversation with his wife.

The wind shifted slightly, carrying the faint mineral smell of the desert—red dust and dry grass and something else underneath, something ancient and indifferent. Broken Hill smelled like nowhere else on earth. I'd grown up with that smell, left it behind during my years of training in Adelaide and Sydney, and returned to it like a homecoming every time. Tonight it seemed sharper than usual, or maybe I was just more aware of it, my senses heightened the way they got before a performance.

But this wasn't a performance. This was just me, standing on my own porch in the dark, watching nothing.

See if I care.

The thought was childish and I knew it, but I held onto it anyway. Let it sit in my chest, hard and bright. He wanted to leave? Let him leave. He'd be back. He always came back. This was the pattern, the rhythm we'd fallen into over years of marriage—Paul retreating, Paul hiding, Paul letting silence say everything he couldn't say out loud, and me left to fill the gaps, to smooth things over, to pretend everything was fine until it actually was, or at least until it looked like it was, which amounted to the same thing.

The only difference this time was the window.

I turned away from the road.

The front door was still open, spilling a rectangle of light onto the porch boards. Through it I could see the hallway, the coat hooks, the side table with the bowl where we kept keys. The interior of my house, ordinary and familiar, waiting for me to come back inside and resume my life.

My feet didn't want to move. The cold had stiffened something in them, or maybe it was just reluctance—some part of me that understood that once I went inside, this would become real. Out here, standing in the dark, it was still something that was happening. Inside, it would become something that had happened. A fact. A new shape to my life.

I made myself take a step. Then another.

The threshold was warmer than the porch, the air inside the house holding the last of the day's heat. I stepped over it and stood in the hallway, and the change in temperature made my skin prickle, my body suddenly aware of just how cold it had been.

The door was still open behind me. I could feel the night air against my back, a cold breath on my neck.

I reached for the handle and pulled it closed.

The sound it made was soft—just the click of the latch engaging, the slight compression of the weather seal—but it seemed loud in the quiet house. Final, somehow. A punctuation mark.

My hand found the deadbolt without thinking, the movement automatic after years of locking up at night. The bolt clicked home with a solid chunk of metal against metal.

There.

I stood with my hand still on the lock, fingers resting against the cool brass. The door was solid between me and the outside, between me and the road, between me and wherever Paul was going. If he wanted to come back, he could knock. He could stand on the porch the way I'd just been standing on the porch, and he could wait for me to decide whether to let him in.

My hand dropped to my side.

The hallway stretched ahead of me, longer than it usually seemed. The overhead light wasn't on—just the lamp in the lounge room casting a dim glow through the doorway at the far end, and the brighter light from the kitchen spilling across the floorboards. The coat hooks by the door were mostly empty; the kids' jackets and school bags were at Mum and Dad's, and Paul's coat was—

Gone. He'd taken his coat. Of course he had. He'd planned this. Packed a bag, grabbed his things, waited for the right moment to escape.

The side table was to my left, the ceramic bowl sitting where it always sat. I looked at it without meaning to. Keys went in that bowl—car keys, house keys, the spare key to the studio, the little fob for the alarm system. My keys were there, a jumbled pile of metal and leather keyring. Paul's were not.

He had his keys. He had his keys to the house, to the front door, to the deadbolt I'd just locked.

The realisation arrived a half-second late, too slow to matter. I'd locked the door. He had keys. If he came back, he would just let himself in, the same way he let himself in every day, and the locked door would mean nothing at all.

I didn't unlock it.

From somewhere deeper in the house came a soft sound—the click of claws on floorboards, the particular rhythm of four feet moving. Charlie appeared at the end of the hallway, her dark shape resolving out of the shadows.

She stood there, watching me.

Her tail moved—not a full wag, just a tentative sweep, side to side, side to side. Her ears were pricked forward, head slightly tilted. Waiting. Dogs were always waiting for something—food, walks, attention, reassurance. An endless series of needs requiring response.

I stepped around her and walked towards the kitchen.

Her claws clicked behind me as she followed. I could feel her there, a presence at my heels, but I didn't look back. The kitchen light was too bright after the dimness of the hallway, and I paused in the doorway, letting my eyes adjust.

Everything was exactly as I'd left it.

The kettle on the bench, switched off now, the water inside gone cold. The post still scattered across the table—bills and catalogues and a flyer for something I hadn't looked at, all of it sitting where Paul had abandoned it when he'd answered his phone and walked away. His chair was pushed back at an angle, not tucked in the way I always tucked mine in.

I stood in my kitchen, in my house, in my life, and the silence pressed against my ears like cotton wool.

My phone was in my hand. I didn't remember picking it up from the bench, but there it was, the screen dark, the weight of it familiar in my palm. I must have grabbed it on the way out to the porch, some instinct to have it close.

Amelia would be wondering what had happened. I'd left her hanging mid-sentence when I'd seen Paul at the window, and she'd heard—what? My voice cutting off. The sounds of me moving through the house. Maybe the muffled shout when I'd found him straddling the windowsill.

The screen lit up when I touched it. No notifications. No missed calls. No messages.

Nothing from Paul.

Charlie had settled onto her bed by the door, turning once, twice, before lying down in the tight curl dogs made when they were trying to conserve warmth. Her eyes stayed on me, liquid and watchful.

I looked at my phone. At Amelia's name in my recent calls.

My thumb moved before I'd decided anything, finding the contact, pressing the call button. The phone was already ringing before I'd brought it to my ear, and I stood in the too-bright kitchen with the cold still aching in my feet and waited for my sister to answer.