The Account You Can't Close

"Worry doesn't arrive in round numbers. It compounds—interest accruing on interest until you can't remember what the original principal even was."

I should have started the dishwasher. I should have wiped down the countertops, checked the inventory in the pantry, made a list of everything that needed replenishing before the weekend. These were the tasks that normally anchored my mornings — small, completable things that created the illusion of order in a house that resisted it.

Instead, I stood at the kitchen window with my second cup of tea cooling in my hands, watching the winter light struggle to penetrate the clouds that had settled over the valley. The Derwent had a particular quality on mornings like this, its surface the colour of pewter, barely distinguishable from the sky pressing down to meet it. I'd stood at this window hundreds of times over the years, watching the seasons shift across that view, and still it surprised me — how something could be simultaneously beautiful and oppressive, how a landscape could feel like both gift and cage.

My phone lay on the counter behind me. I could feel its presence without looking, the way you feel an unpaid bill sitting in a drawer. The screen would be dark. There would be no notification. I knew this with the certainty of someone who had checked repeatedly and found nothing each time, yet the compulsion to verify remained, tugging at me like an error I hadn't quite located in a spreadsheet I'd reviewed too many times.

I made myself stay at the window. Made myself drink the tea. Made myself breathe.

He's fine. He's a grown man of thirty-four. He doesn't owe you a response to every message within twenty-four hours.

But it wasn't twenty-four hours. It was closer to forty-eight now, maybe more. Two days since my message about the Gold Coast trip. A day and a half since my follow-up with the frost photograph. And yes, I knew how that sounded — barely two days, and here I was working myself into knots over what was probably nothing more than a flat phone battery or a busy weekend.

But two days of silence from Jamie felt like two weeks. Two days from a brother who texted me photographs of his dogs eating breakfast, who left rambling voicemails about nothing in particular, who had maintained our connection across every distance life had thrown between us — two days from him felt wrong in a way I couldn't quantify but couldn't dismiss either.

I turned from the window and set my cup down beside the phone, not quite touching it, not quite able to move away. The kitchen clock showed half past seven. Upstairs, the house had grown quiet again — the shower had stopped, the footsteps had receded into bedrooms, the brief flurry of activity subsiding back into the peculiar stillness that Jeffries Manor seemed to generate from its very walls.

It was a house that held its silences strangely. Sound behaved differently here than in any other place I'd lived — conversations seemed to dissipate before they reached the high ceilings, whilst whispers carried through doorways you'd thought were closed. My mother had noticed it the first time she'd visited, back when Thomas and I were still unmarried and Rebecca was a toddler clutching at my legs. "It's like the house is listening," Mum had said, and I'd laughed and told her she was being fanciful. But I'd lived here long enough now to understand what she'd meant. The manor didn't just contain silence; it cultivated it, drew it in and held it close, as if quiet were something it required for sustenance.

This morning, that silence pressed against me with particular weight.

I picked up the phone. Checked it. Nothing.

Set it down again.

Think about something else. Think about the accounts you need to review before Monday. Think about Brianne's scan this afternoon and whether you should offer to go with her. Think about what to make for dinner, whether Thelma will feel up to joining everyone at the table or whether she'll want a tray in her room.

But my mind refused redirection. It kept circling back to Jamie the way water circles a drain — slowly at first, then with increasing inevitability, pulled toward a centre I couldn't see but could feel exerting its gravity.

I had been twelve years old when he was born. Old enough to remember the phone call from Dad, his voice carrying that particular frequency of exhausted joy that new fathers produce. Old enough to understand that this baby, arriving so long after me, was something of a surprise to everyone, my parents included. Old enough to feel, beneath my genuine excitement, a flicker of something more complicated — the sense that our family's careful equilibrium was about to shift in ways none of us could predict.

That flicker had been prescient, as it turned out. But not in the ways I'd feared.

What I hadn't anticipated was how completely Jamie would claim my heart. From the first moment I'd held him — this tiny, squalling thing with his face scrunched against the hospital light — something had rearranged itself inside me. A new room opening in a house I'd thought I knew the dimensions of. He'd gripped my finger with his miniature hand, and I'd understood, with a certainty that bypassed logic entirely, that I would protect this person for as long as I lived.

The memory surfaced now with uncomfortable clarity: Jamie at two, reaching for me when he woke from nightmares, bypassing Mum's outstretched arms for mine. Jamie at four, following me around the house like a small, devoted shadow, asking endless questions I tried my best to answer. Jamie at five, the morning the removalists came to pack up our family for the move to South Australia, standing in the doorway of my bedroom watching me fill boxes with an expression of bewildered betrayal that I can still feel in my chest if I let myself dwell on it.

I hadn't gone with them. I'd stayed behind with Nan to finish my final year at St. Mary's, and Jamie had been loaded into the car with Mum and Dad and Sarah, his face pressed to the rear window as they pulled away, growing smaller and smaller until the car turned the corner and he disappeared entirely.

I'd told myself it was the sensible choice. I'd told myself he was young enough to adapt, that children were resilient, that the twelve-year gap between us meant we'd never been conventional siblings anyway. I'd told myself a lot of things that year, most of them true in their way, none of them adequate to the task of assuaging the guilt that settled into me like sediment and never quite dispersed.

We'd maintained our connection, of course. Phone calls on Sundays. Letters I wrote him weekly, decorating the envelopes with stickers and drawings to make him smile. Visits during university holidays when I'd fly to Adelaide and find him changed in small ways each time — taller, or missing a tooth, or newly obsessed with dinosaurs or trucks or whatever fascination had claimed him in my absence. But I'd watched from a distance as he navigated the things I should have been there to help him through: the move to Brisbane when he was eight, the loss of his best friend Luke in that relocation, Sarah's death when he was eleven.

Sarah's death. Even now, nearly twenty-three years later, the memory carried a particular weight. I'd flown up for the funeral, held Jamie's hand through the service whilst he sat rigid and silent beside me, his eleven-year-old face wearing an expression of locked-down grief that frightened me more than tears would have. He'd refused to go into Sarah's hospital room at the end — had sat in the corridor whilst Mum and I held her hands as she slipped away — and I knew, watching him at the funeral, that he was carrying that refusal like something he'd swallowed whole, something lodged inside him that he couldn't digest or expel.

I'd tried to talk to him about it afterward. Tried to create space for whatever he needed to say. But Jamie had perfected, by then, the art of deflection — answering questions with questions, changing subjects with a deftness that belied his age, smiling in ways that never quite reached his eyes. He'd learned to package his pain into compartments that others couldn't access, and I'd been eight hundred kilometres away, finishing my degree, falling in love with Thomas, beginning the life that would eventually bring me here, to this kitchen, to this window, to this silence that felt increasingly like a held breath.

You should have been there more. You should have pushed harder. You should have found ways to bridge the distance that didn't rely on phone calls and holiday visits and the hope that someone else was paying attention to what he needed.

The guilt was old and familiar, worn smooth by years of handling. I'd learned to live with it the way you learn to live with a recurring entry in an account you can't close — something always present, sometimes sharp, mostly just a figure you've stopped scrutinising until something forces you to look at it again.

Something like two days of silence from a brother who never went silent.

I picked up the phone again. Still nothing.

This time, instead of calling, I opened my message thread with Jamie and scrolled back through our recent exchanges. There he was, just last week, sending me a photograph of Duke and Henri curled together on the sofa, their fur so intermingled you couldn't tell where one dog ended and the other began. Co-dependent, he'd written beneath it, with a string of laughing emojis. Wonder where they learned that.

I'd responded with something about him being one to talk, and he'd sent back a mock-offended reply, and we'd gone back and forth for an hour in that easy, teasing way we'd developed over the years — the shorthand of siblings who'd had to construct their relationship across distance and disruption, who'd chosen to remain close when geography and circumstance had given us every excuse to drift apart.

Before that, a conversation about whether he should refinance his mortgage given the current interest rates. Before that, a link to an article about aged care funding cuts that had made him furious. Before that, a rambling voice message he'd left whilst walking the dogs, describing a resident at Vaucluse who'd told him the most extraordinary story about meeting her husband during the war, and could I believe people used to write actual letters to each other, like with paper and stamps and everything?

Normal. All of it utterly, reassuringly normal.

And then nothing.

I scrolled to the last message I'd sent — the frost on the lawn, beautiful morning here, call me when you get a chance — and beneath it, the grey tick. Delivered. Not read.

The obvious explanation was that something had happened to his phone. Dropped it in water, left it somewhere, run it over with the car. Jamie was capable of such things — he'd always been slightly chaotic with possessions, losing keys and wallets with a frequency that drove his more organised partners to distraction. It was plausible. It was reasonable. It required no sinister interpretation.

But if his phone was broken or lost, he would have found another way to contact me. He would have borrowed Luke's phone, or used the landline at work, or sent an email from his laptop. Jamie knew — had always known — that I worried. That the distance between us, even now that we lived in the same state again, made me anxious in ways I couldn't fully control. He would never have let two days pass without some form of reassurance if he'd had any way to provide it.

Which meant either he couldn't contact me, or he'd chosen not to.

Neither possibility brought comfort.

I set the phone down and pressed my palms flat against the counter, grounding myself in the cool solidity of the marble. You're catastrophising. You're taking insufficient data and constructing worst-case scenarios. This is not rational analysis; this is anxiety dressed up in analytical clothing.

But the voice in my head that urged calm was growing fainter, drowned out by the one that had been whispering since yesterday, the one that sounded less like reason and more like recognition.

Something is wrong.

I thought about Luke, and the whisper grew louder.

I'd never been able to articulate what it was about Luke Smith that unsettled me. God knows I'd tried — lying awake beside Thomas in the early years of Jamie's relationship, trying to assemble my unease into something I could name and examine. Luke was perfectly pleasant. Perfectly charming, even, in that easy way some people have of making you feel like the most interesting person in the room. He asked thoughtful questions and remembered the answers. He laughed at Jamie's jokes and touched his arm with casual affection and looked at my brother, sometimes, with an expression that seemed to hold genuine feeling.

And yet.

There was something beneath the surface of Luke that I couldn't quite see but could somehow sense — a quality of withholding, of performance, of careful calibration. The charm felt constructed rather than organic, assembled from components he'd studied and replicated rather than arising naturally from who he was. When he spoke about himself, which wasn't often, the details were vague in ways that seemed deliberate. His past existed in broad strokes rather than specific memories. His family was mentioned rarely and without warmth. His inner life, whatever it contained, remained locked behind a door he never opened, not even a crack, not even for Jamie.

I'd raised my concerns once, years ago, in that careful way you raise concerns with someone you know doesn't want to hear them. We'd been sitting in the manor's conservatory, just Jamie and me, the winter afternoon light slanting pale through the glass whilst he told me about a trip he and Luke were planning to New Zealand.

"You seem happy," I'd said, and I'd meant it — he did seem happy, happier than I'd seen him in years, perhaps happier than I'd ever seen him. But I'd followed it with: "I just wonder, sometimes, if you really know him. If he lets you know him."

Jamie's face had shifted — not closed exactly, but careful, recalibrating. "What do you mean?"

"I don't know." And I hadn't known. I still don't. "He just seems... guarded. Even with you. Even after all this time."

"Luke's had a difficult life, Lou." Jamie had looked away, toward the garden beyond the glass, his profile catching the light in a way that made him look older than his years. "His parents' divorce, being in hospital so much as a kid, never quite fitting anywhere. He's learned to protect himself. That's not the same as hiding something."

I'd let it drop. What else could I do? Jamie was a grown man who'd made his choice, and Luke, whatever my reservations, had never given me concrete cause for alarm. No cruelty I could point to. No lies I could prove. Just that persistent sense of something not quite aligning, like a figure that should balance but doesn't, and you can't find where the discrepancy lives.

Maybe you're wrong, I'd told myself, countless times over the years. Maybe your instincts are miscalibrated where Jamie's concerned. Maybe you're so determined to protect him that you've become suspicious of anyone who might have the power to hurt him.

Maybe.

But standing in the kitchen now, with two days of silence accumulating like compound interest on a debt I hadn't known I owed, I couldn't make myself believe it.

I heard movement above me — footsteps crossing the landing, a door opening and closing. The house was waking up properly now, its occupants beginning to stir from their various rooms, and soon I would be absorbed back into the demands of managing a household that never stopped requiring management. There would be breakfast to coordinate and schedules to juggle and the hundred small negotiations that constituted family life in a house with too many people and too much history.

But for this moment, I remained at the counter, my hand resting beside my silent phone, staring out at the view that had greeted Jeffries women for two hundred years. The clouds hung low over the valley, heavy with the promise of rain that might or might not come. The river moved sluggishly beneath them, the colour of old silver, and somewhere beyond it, in a house I'd visited but never quite felt welcome in, my brother was either safe and unreachable, or not safe at all.

Jamie, where are you? What's happening that you can't tell me about?

The questions received no answer. The phone remained dark. And the feeling in my chest — that cold knot of worry that had been tightening since yesterday — drew itself another degree tighter, a thread being pulled through fabric, gathering everything toward a centre I couldn't yet see.

Above me, the day was beginning whether I was ready for it or not. I straightened my shoulders, arranged my face into the expression of competent composure I'd worn for nearly three decades, and turned away from the window.

There would be time to worry about Jamie later. There was always later.

But later, I was beginning to fear, might arrive sooner than any of us expected.