4338.207 · July 26, 2018 AD
Rosemary and Glass
Greta has been avoiding this call all morning, filling the hours with visits and schedules and the comforting rhythm of routine. Claire has been on her knees in a ruined studio, scrubbing at stains that won't lift. When the phone finally connects them across fifteen hundred kilometres, what passes between them is beyond anything either woman's careful preparations can absorb. By the time the line goes dead, both are holding a silence that demands something neither of them is ready to give.
This is the second call between these two women, and it bears no resemblance to the first. Yesterday's exchange was hostile but contained — the hostility of someone still performing control. This one is what happens when the performance stops entirely.
Claire answers from the floor of her studio, where she's been scrubbing bloodstains that won't lift. Greta's name on the screen ignites everything the hospital walls had held in check. Her rage is precise and total — every measured phrase Greta offers is met with something sharper, every attempt at reason dismissed as the same sanctimonious interference it's always been.
Greta makes the call from the quiet of a parked car in Playford, having spent all morning avoiding this exact moment. She's distracted herself with visits and schedules and the comforting rhythm of communal duty, but Paul's silence has grown too heavy to carry alone. She needs to know if Claire has heard from him. She steels herself, taps the green button, and receives something she wasn't prepared for — not just anger, but the sound of a woman who has stopped caring what anyone thinks of her. Greta tries to bridge, to soften, to find the careful words that have always been her instinct. None of them land. Each one is returned to her in pieces.
Then comes the ultimatum: Paul has until tomorrow morning, or Claire takes Mack and Rose to Queensland. The names of her grandchildren wrapped in a threat shift something fundamental in Greta. This is no longer about managing a difficult daughter-in-law. This is about losing access to the two small people who hold her heart. The call ends with a click that offers no revision.
What follows is equally devastating on both ends. Greta sits motionless in the car, her laminated schedule — colour-coded, carefully creased, built on the assumption that life can be organised into manageable blocks — lying across her lap like a relic from a world that no longer exists. Evelyn is still walking among the rosemary, serene and unhurried, and the distance between that peace and Greta's interior feels unbridgeable. She wanted to help. She wanted to say the right thing. And she has never been more aware that the right thing might not exist.
Claire, standing in the wreckage of her studio, finds the ultimatum already dissolving. Tomorrow morning means another night in this house, another night of scrutiny and silence and waiting. The question surfaces sharp and clear: why wait? The answer is that there is no reason to. The snap comes without warning — she drops the cloth, crosses the glass, and moves with a purpose she hasn't felt in days. She's not waiting until tomorrow. She's leaving now.
