One Direct Match

The entire encounter depends on timing. The officer who knows the Smiths, who knows the file, who would ask the questions Claire can't afford to answer, is at lunch. In her place is Felicity Massey, two days into a rural posting, still learning names, still acclimatising to the particular dynamics of a town where everyone's history is public property. She's alone at the desk when the door opens and a woman walks in carrying an urgency that fills the room before she's spoken a word.

Claire has prepared for this. The shower, the clean clothes, the concealer — all of it was rehearsal for this moment. She arrives with a performance ready to deploy: the exasperated wife, sharp-tongued, impatient, treating Felicity's inexperience as an inconvenience rather than an opportunity. She steers the conversation with the precision of someone who knows exactly which story she's telling and which one she's hiding. The missing husband. The meddling mother-in-law. The trip to Brisbane. Greta's phone number scribbled on a yellow sticky note and thrust across the desk. Every detail calculated to build a paper trail that leads in one direction and nowhere near another.

Felicity receives all of this with the particular discomfort of someone being managed by a civilian and knowing it. Claire is rude, dismissive, condescending — and Felicity's training tells her to look past the surface behaviour to what's driving it. The file on screen offers history: incidents, call-outs, the documented wreckage of a marriage in a town too small to contain it. But Claire interrupts the reading, redirects, refuses to let the file tell its version. Felicity notes this. Files it alongside the other things that don't quite fit — the intensity behind the performance, the urgency that seems disproportionate to a husband who's been difficult before, the way Claire's composure holds a fraction too perfectly, like a surface with tension but no depth.

When Claire mentions the children — the fear that Paul might take them — something shifts in Felicity that has nothing to do with police work. A private grief surfaces, brief and uninvited: the face of a child whose absence is permanent, a wound she hasn't learned to carry quietly. The maternal chord Claire strikes is real, even if the context around it is constructed. Felicity promises to look into it, and means it — not because Claire's performance has convinced her, but because somewhere beneath the manipulation and the condescension, a woman is afraid for her children, and that fear, at least, is not a lie.

Claire leaves before the other officers return. Felicity sits in the quiet station with a yellow sticky note and a file full of history and the persistent feeling that she has just been shown a very carefully curated version of something much larger. The encounter is over. Its consequences are just beginning.