The Bottle Rolls Both Ways

“Sometimes the loudest sound in the car isn’t the radio, or the road—it’s the silence after a lie.”

I found myself lost in contemplation, gazing through my bedroom window at the world beyond the glass—still, muted, washed in that pale morning hue that makes everything seem slightly unreal. The familiar sound of the car's tyres crunching over gravel reached my ears, drawing me back to the present. Gladys, like clockwork. I flicked my eyes to my phone. Almost to the second—one hour since she’d dropped me off.

There was something perversely comforting about her punctuality. In a world where so little seemed to unfold as expected—where people disappeared, and secrets burned like fuse wire—it was satisfying, in a quiet, slightly absurd way, to know that Gladys could still be relied upon to arrive on the dot.

Sitting on the edge of my bed, I bent to wrestle the first sneaker onto my foot. The motion was automatic, almost meditative. Laces in hand, I felt the tug of the morning’s weight settle onto my shoulders. A foggy cocktail of poor sleep, residual guilt, and anticipation pressed in around me.

Then came the horn.

Abrupt. Long. Sharp enough to slice through the thin veil of calm I’d managed to wrap around myself.

I winced. Not just at the sound, but at the intent behind it.

Gladys is more impatient than usual this morning, I noted, a flare of irritation curling at the edges of my mood. Whatever thin thread of composure I had was suddenly being reeled in by someone else’s hands—and I hadn’t yet decided if I was going to follow.

"You took your time," Gladys's voice carried a mix of impatience and accusation as I settled into the passenger seat. The door had barely clicked shut before the comment landed—sharp-edged and clipped. Her words, meant perhaps to pass for a casual greeting, felt more like a veiled critique wrapped in passive aggression.

Seriously? I couldn't help but think. What is Gladys's problem today? The question rang out in my mind like a dropped coin in a quiet room—hollow, unanswered, irritatingly loud.

"I had to put my shoes on," I retorted, my tone chilled to match the temperature she’d set. The coldness wasn’t premeditated, just instinct—my own thin defence against her rising hostility. I shot her a glare as I reached down to tie the last shoelace, each movement deliberate, as though pulling the lace tighter might somehow pull my temper back into check.

"Doesn't look like you've even finished that yet," she observed, voice dry, tinged with sarcasm and no small amount of smugness.

I didn’t reply. I didn’t need to. Her tone was enough to stoke the embers of frustration already smouldering beneath my skin.

Gladys was being especially irritating this morning—her barbs quicker, her edges less rounded than usual. It wasn’t just her words; it was the way she gripped the steering wheel a little too tightly, the tense line of her jaw, the way her foot hovered just a bit too impatiently over the accelerator. Something was off. Again.

And the worst part? I couldn’t tell if it was her mood that had soured... or mine.

As my foot accidentally clinked against a glass bottle rolling around at my feet, frustration bubbled to the surface, sharp and immediate. The sound—hollow, unmistakable—snapped the already fraying thread of my patience.

"Why do you have a bottle of wine in the car, again?" I asked, lifting my gaze to meet hers. The question came out flat, but its undercurrent was far weightier than the casual delivery. It wasn’t just curiosity. It was an accusation laced in worry, a silent expression of my concern, my confusion at her choices. At the patterns repeating with unnerving frequency.

The car jostled us as it rolled over the lip of the driveway, that familiar bump jolting me in my seat, as though the ground itself was reacting to the awkward silence now blooming between us. The wine bottle clinked against my foot again—less a sound now, more a symbol. A symbol of everything we weren’t talking about. A tangible reminder of the mess beneath the surface, of the dependencies she dressed up as quirks.

"It's good to have one nearby. You never know when a good bottle will come in handy," she answered, her voice breezy, as if we were discussing an extra umbrella or an emergency chocolate bar. Her tone was light, but it skated perilously close to something darker—habit, deflection, denial.

I exhaled a heavy sigh, the air thick with the words I didn’t say. The weight of my concerns for my sister pressed down on me like a slow, suffocating tide. She wasn’t fine. Not really. Not in the ways that mattered.

My sister really needs help. The thought had become a constant refrain, looping in the background of every interaction, louder now than ever—insistent, unignorable, heartbreaking.

"I know what you're thinking, Beatrix. Stop it," Gladys warned, her voice sharp, cutting through the silence of the car like a blade. It was the kind of tone that didn’t leave room for argument—a familiar cadence we both knew too well. She didn’t even need to look at me; her gaze remained fixed on the road, knuckles pale against the steering wheel, but her words struck with precision, like she'd plucked the thought straight from my skull.

It was as if she had read my mind, a feat that wouldn’t have surprised me. Years of shared history, of whispered confessions and carefully observed moods, had left us able to read each other in ways that were sometimes more curse than comfort.

"Stop what?" I asked, masking myself in feigned ignorance. It was a defensive play, familiar and rehearsed. A way to keep the conversation from diving into the deeper water I wasn’t sure either of us could tread.

"You know what," she replied, her tone weighted with both frustration and resignation. "We got a little carried away last night."

The words lingered in the air between us, suspended like smoke. I scoffed lightly, the sound involuntary. An understatement if ever I’d heard one. A ‘little carried away’ didn’t cover the layers we’d burned into the night. Secrets incinerated. Truths avoided. A name whispered in the dark. The wine hadn’t so much loosened our tongues as blurred the edges of everything we didn’t want to say out loud.

Gladys pressed on, her voice adopting a defensive tilt. "I've only had one or two glasses a week for the last three months."

Her words struck me as carefully chosen—too carefully. The kind of line rehearsed in front of a mirror, maybe, or repeated just enough to sound believable. To others. To herself.

My eyebrow rose, scepticism sharpening my features before I even registered it. "Really?" I asked, the disbelief threaded openly through my tone. I didn’t mean to challenge her. Not exactly. But the claim clashed so violently with the evidence at my feet—a wine bottle rolling in the car—that it couldn’t go unchecked.

"Yes, really," she shot back, pouting in a way that might’ve been comical if it weren’t so tragically earnest. There was something stubborn and small in the gesture, a glimmer of the little girl I used to know buried beneath layers of adult pain and denial.

Despite myself, a laugh escaped—a small one, a hiccup of humour in an otherwise heavy moment.

"What?" Gladys asked, her eyes still locked forward, not shifting from the road for even a second. The rigidity of her posture belied her question, like she needed to stay in motion to avoid unravelling.

"It's nothing," I murmured, the giggle already gone, fading like a breath on glass. The silence that followed wasn't empty. It was thick with what we couldn’t say, what we didn’t want to feel. A kind of mutual detente, unspoken but understood.

And the car fell silent again, that fragile quiet stretching out between us. A soft space. Not quite peace. Not quite tension. Just the heavy, complicated quiet that often falls between people who love each other more than they know how to say—and are too exhausted to try.

As the landscape outside the car window blurred into a monotonous stream of greens and greys, its gentle undulations smeared by the car’s movement, a sudden thought cut through the quiet like a scalpel. The question—Cody—pressed insistently at the edges of my mind, refusing to be dismissed.

I reached for my handbag, fingers closing around my phone. The screen lit up with a soft glow, too bright against the dull light of the overcast morning. My thumbs hovered over the keyboard, hesitant yet purposeful, weighed by the knowledge that once the question was asked, something might shift.

Beatrix: Hey Leigh. Do you know anyone called Cody?

The message sent with a faint whoosh, dissipating into the invisible channels between us. It hung there in the digital ether like a stone dropped in still water, the ripples yet to form. The silence inside the car stretched, long and taut, the tyres humming against the bitumen the only sound besides the occasional, rhythmic swish of passing trees.

I watched the screen. Two minutes. Each second felt longer than it had any right to be. I could almost feel the anticipation tightening across my chest like the start of a storm.

Leigh: No. Why?

The reply was curt, almost too swift—efficient in that way only Leigh could manage. It mirrored the urgency of my question but offered no comfort. I stared at the words for a few seconds longer than necessary, my mind already spiralling, fingers twitching to answer.

I began to type, stopped. Deleted. Typed again. Stopped. What reason could I give? Just curious felt too dismissive. Gladys said it in her sleep sounded like a betrayal. The words weighed too much. And Leigh—Leigh, who had warned me repeatedly not to share names, not to give too much—would see through any half-truth I offered.

I was certain Brody’s situation had no connection. And yet... the way everything had spiralled, the speed of it, the silence that followed—who was I to claim certainty now?

Finally, I pivoted.

Beatrix: What about Luke Smith?

A longer pause this time. Long enough for my nerves to start to settle—then twitch again.

Leigh: Everyone knows Luke Smith.

The response was dry. But something in it tightened the air in my lungs. A soft gasp slipped from me before I could contain it.

I turned my head ever so slightly, casting a sidelong glance at Gladys. She hadn’t noticed. Her fingers were tight around the steering wheel, her attention tethered to the road ahead, brow furrowed in thought or maybe just habit. Either way, she was oblivious—for now.

I tucked the phone into the folds of my jumper, suddenly aware of the quickening pace of my heart. Leigh’s words were casual on the surface, but they unsettled me. Everyone knows Luke Smith. That should have been innocuous. But it didn’t feel that way.

It felt like a warning. Or worse, a reminder that knowing someone—truly knowing someone—was not the same as recognising their name.