Neither Sister Innocent

Gladys Cramer woke to Snowflake's insistent nudging and the pale winter light pressing through her bedroom blinds with the indifferent patience of a morning that did not know what the previous night had cost. The routine that followed — cats fed, kettle boiled, slippers found — carried the automated quality of a body performing its habitual functions while the mind behind it continued processing events that resisted orderly filing. The kitchen still held traces of the evening's wreckage despite the superficial tidying Gladys had managed before bed. The wine bottles had been placed beside the recycling. The sink had been rinsed. But the faint chemical trace of burnt adhesive lingered in the air like a scent memory the extraction fan could not fully dispel, and the water bottle — stripped, emptied, anonymous — still sat on the benchtop where neither sister had thought to dispose of it.

Beneath the morning's domestic surface, Gladys carried the additional weight of Cody Jennings's visitation — the hands in the dark, the whispered instruction to trust Luke, the desperate urgency of a man who had crossed dimensions to deliver a message she did not yet know how to evaluate. She had concealed this from Beatrix hours after sealing a covenant of mutual disclosure, and the violation sat in her chest with the particular discomfort of someone whose entire identity had been organised around the principle that rules, once agreed upon, were to be honoured. That she had broken her own pact before dawn introduced a dissonance she was not yet prepared to examine. Instead, she channelled the morning's restless energy into the one thing that had always steadied her — the management of other people's schedules.

Beatrix, woken by her sister's knock and the creak of a door opened with performative slowness, surfaced from shallow, wine-soured sleep into a morning she had no appetite for. The spare room held the evidence of her collapse — one shoe on the floor, the other still on her foot, her clothes unchanged from the previous evening, her mouth tasting of tannin and regret. Gladys stood over her with the brisk composure of a woman who had already showered, dressed, and fed two cats, and the contrast between them — Gladys functional, Beatrix wrecked — activated the oldest dynamic in their relationship: the responsible sister and the chaotic one, the organiser and the disruption, the pattern that had defined them since childhood and that neither had ever fully outgrown.

The exchange that followed was not planned by either woman. It began in the register of familiar bickering — Beatrix's sarcasm about Gladys's capacity to function after a night of heavy drinking landing with the precision of someone who knew exactly where the tender points were located. But the implication beneath the quip — that Gladys's relationship with wine had crossed a threshold both sisters recognised but only one was willing to name — pushed the conversation past the boundary where humour could contain it. Beatrix observed that Gladys sometimes appeared more damaged by Brody Taylor's death than the woman who had loved him, and the words, delivered with the casual cruelty that exhaustion and hangover permit, found their target with devastating accuracy.

Gladys's response was not measured. It was not contained. It was the eruption of something she had held beneath professional composure and sisterly forbearance for four years — the image of Brody's body in the storage unit in Moonah, the blood, the stillness, the administrative nightmare that followed when authorities concluded their investigation with a verdict that satisfied no one and an unsealed silence that Gladys had been forced to inhabit alone. She had found him. Not the police. Not Beatrix. Gladys, who had driven to Moonah on an errand she could no longer recall the purpose of, who had opened a door expecting nothing and encountered everything, who had carried that image behind her eyes through every night since and medicated against it with the wine her sister now used as ammunition.

The accusation landed on Beatrix with a force that silenced her completely — not because the image was new to her imagination, but because the guilt it activated was. Beatrix had known things about the circumstances surrounding Brody's death that she had not shared with Gladys. She had allowed her sister to carry the weight of an unexplained death without offering the partial explanation that might have eased it, and the reasons for that silence, felt insufficient against the sound of Gladys's voice breaking on the word blood.

The confrontation exhausted itself within minutes. Neither sister possessed the reserves to sustain it. The silence that followed was not resolution but the mutual recognition that they had reached a depth neither was equipped to navigate without rest, distance, or considerably less dehydration. Gladys, defaulting to the pragmatic register that served as her emotional failsafe, proposed a visit to Luke Smith's house in Berriedale. She needed to collect the truck she had left there the previous day. The invitation carried more than logistical convenience — it was an offer to move forward, to redirect the morning's energy toward action rather than excavation, to place both sisters in proximity to the only person who might possess answers to questions that had multiplied faster than either woman's capacity to formulate them.

Beatrix accepted. She needed a shower, coffee, and a change of clothes. Gladys drove her to Lesdelle Street and watched her sister walk toward the front door of their parents' house without looking back — the dismissive wave a gesture Gladys had received enough times to no longer interpret as personal but which, on this particular morning, carried an edge that made her grip the steering wheel harder than the turn required. 

They would reconvene within the hour. They would drive to Berriedale together, carrying between them a night's worth of burnt evidence, suppressed visitations, unequal guilt, and the fragile scaffolding of a sisterhood that had been dismantled and rebuilt so many times that neither woman could say with certainty whether the current structure was stronger or weaker than the one it replaced.