Rotted at the Waterline
There is a kind of man who walks into a room and notices what nobody else is meant to notice. A colleague's affair. A constable's small lie. A wife who flinched in the bakery beside her husband. Detective Glen Crosswell files what he sees in a small cabinet at the back of his head. Most days he does not need to open the drawer. The days he does, he tells himself information has a price in his building, and he does not pretend otherwise.
Glen Crosswell learned to read a room before he learned to read a book. The instinct, plus an uncle in the right office, made him a detective at twenty-two. He was good at the job. He still cares about old men beaten in their own homes.
Beside the casework, he was building something else. A small private archive of everything he had ever noticed about the people he worked beside. Most of it sat there. Some of it did not. He has, on occasion, sold his silence to a colleague who could not afford his honesty. He has made rooms smaller for women who could not call him on it. Glen knows what those moments are, and what the better man would have done. He has been choosing the cheaper version of himself across the whole of his marriage.
Behind the Sandy Bay house is a workshop where he builds model ships. The man in the workshop is patient, careful, and needs nothing on anyone. That man is the truer Glen — the one his wife sometimes catches across the dinner table. He has never told her the cabinet exists. He has not quite told himself either. Some things rot from the inside, slowly, until the day the boat goes under and everyone is surprised — everyone but the wood.
