Honest Catch
The thing about building fences is that you learn where things end. Property lines, safe ground, the exact point where yours becomes someone else's. Nial Triffett built them for a living — custom work, clean joints, the kind of precision that only matters to someone who believes structure keeps chaos out. His business bore his name. His house sat on a mountainside in Tasmania. His boy had his eyes. Then a phone rang with an offer no honest man should have trusted, and Nial trusted it anyway, because honest men are the easiest to catch when they're desperate.
Only child of a fisherman and a nurse, raised where good work spoke for itself. Nial built fences the way his father read the sea — with patience, precision, and respect for the line between what holds and what gives. Custom residential work, parks contracts, a reputation that meant his handshake still closed deals. Tasmania knew his name. The books told a different story.
An accounting error nobody caught for years opened a hole beneath everything. Tax obligations multiplied, creditors circled, and the business he'd built with his hands started collapsing under numbers no spirit level could fix. Jenny saw the stress but not the scale — he made sure of that. When a former client rang with a cash job too large to be legitimate, Nial knew something was wrong. A desperate man doesn't need it to make sense. He needs it to be possible.
The job was a doorway. The doorway was a trap. Nial builds fences now in a place he never chose, protecting people who were taken the same way he was. Jenny and his boy came through later — together again but not restored, wired back into something that holds without looking the way it used to. The joints are still clean. The man who trusted that good work protects you has learnt exactly what it doesn't.
