4338.201 · July 20, 2018 AD
The Distance Home
The theatre doors close behind him. The fog starts to lift. And Sergeant Charlie Claiborne drives home through a city that doesn't know what he's carrying. The invitation presses against his chest like a question he can't answer—a thread connecting a dead man in a velvet chair to a gala his wife has spent months organising. Evidence, he tells himself. Not omen. Not warning. Not something with his name written on it. But the lie tastes like ash before he even reaches Battery Point.
July 20th, 2018. Morning. The handover is complete.
Charlie Claiborne steps out of the State Theatre into a city waking without knowledge of what sits inside—a man arranged like an audience member, a performance staged for discovery. Behind him, forensics will reduce mystery to data. Ahead, the ordinary world continues: delivery trucks, café queues, commuters checking phones. None of it falters. None of it cares.
But Charlie carries something the machinery can't process. An invitation folded in his pocket. Cream cardstock, gilt edges, the MONA Foundation logo embossed with elegant precision. The same invitation pinned to his kitchen fridge. The same gala Sandra has poured herself into for months.
He tells himself it's evidence. Tells himself he's protecting her by keeping it close, by understanding it before surrendering it to process. But the rationalisation sounds too familiar. He's heard it before—from suspects, from colleagues he later investigated, from Bradley Mitchell in an interview room where justifications crumbled into disgrace.
The route home is muscle memory. The weight in his pocket is something else entirely.
Some protections look exactly like betrayal, depending on where you stand.
