The Green Backpack

“Some objects look ordinary until you realise they’re carrying the weight of every choice you’ve ever tried to hide.”

Arriving home, I half expected the air itself to betray me. The driveway looked exactly as I had left it—the fence with its peeling paint, the overgrown shrubs that Jamie always promised to trim but never did, the faint smell of eucalypt—but instead of comfort, the familiarity gnawed at me. It was as if the entire house, its walls and windows and the very foundations sunk into Tasmanian clay, already knew what I carried and was judging me for it.

The adrenaline from the bank had not dissipated; if anything, it had crystallised into a sharp tension that made my every movement stiff, deliberate, unnatural. I moved with single-minded focus through the hallway, the backpack's straps digging into my shoulders, as though reminding me with each step: this is not yours, this is borrowed time, borrowed trust.

The house was silent. No Jamie, obviously—he was still in Clivilius, nursing his wound and his resentments in equal measure. No Paul. No dogs.

Just me. Me and the weight on my back and the secrets I carried.

The bedroom, usually my refuge, felt stark and unforgiving. The bed where Jamie and I had slept—had made love, had argued, had lain awake in the darkness pretending everything was fine—seemed to accuse me of something I couldn't quite name. The wardrobe door let out its usual scrape along the track as I pulled it open—a sound I had heard countless times—but today it rang out like an alarm, shrill and accusatory, bouncing off the quiet walls.

I froze, listening, imagining footsteps, a voice, Jamie bursting in to ask what the hell I was doing. Nothing. Just silence. Just the faint tick of the house settling and the distant cry of a magpie in the neighbour's yard.

Stretching on my toes, I retrieved the small key from the top shelf, my hand trembling slightly. The key lived tucked behind the winter jumpers I rarely wore and the spare blankets that gathered dust most of the year. Jamie's absence was felt even here. His clothes, which had once filled this wardrobe and provided a sort of moral cover for this ritual, were largely gone—packed into bags and carried through the Portal to a new life in Clivilius.

The bare shelf was an accusation: I couldn't even pretend anymore that I was hiding this amongst our things, as though shared ownership somehow diluted the deception.

I knelt beside the wardrobe, the green backpack thudding softly onto the carpet next to me. Its weight was obscene—heavier than money should be, heavier than numbers in a bank account could ever feel. Fifteen thousand dollars from the teller, another few thousand from the ATM, Jamie's savings withdrawn without his knowledge. The mathematics of betrayal, converted into paper rectangles.

Peeling back the carpet's corner revealed the metal trapdoor. The sight always brought a jolt, like glimpsing a door that shouldn't exist, a passage into somewhere I wasn't supposed to go.

The key slid in easily, clicking into place with the smooth resistance of well-maintained mechanism. I'd oiled it regularly, kept the lock functioning, because a sticking key or a rusted hinge could mean the difference between smooth retrieval and panicked fumbling at exactly the wrong moment.

I unzipped the backpack slowly, almost ceremoniously. The money spilled out, cascading onto the floor in untidy stacks, the soft flutter of paper indecently loud in the quiet room. For a moment I just stared. The sight was absurd, surreal—a mountain of notes that looked more like a stage prop than real currency. The kind of cash you saw in heist films or crime dramas, stacked in briefcases by men in dark suits.

But this was real. This was mine. Withdrawn from accounts that bore my name and Jamie's, converted from digital abstraction into physical fact.

I scooped a bundle into my hands, marvelling at the texture, at the sheer weight of it. My heart pounded, and a wild, incredulous chuckle escaped me before I could stop it. This is ridiculous. I pressed the notes to my face and inhaled deeply. The sharp, metallic tang of ink and fibre filled my lungs. It wasn't a pleasant smell—not like fresh bread or rain on earth or any of the scents people claimed to find comforting—but it was unmistakably real. Real money. Real choices. Real consequences.

For a moment, holding those notes, I felt powerful. In control. As though the chaos of this day—Joel's murder, Jamie's confession, Cody's appearance and disappearance, the sisters drafted into conspiracy—could be managed, directed, shaped by sheer force of will and adequate resources.

The chuckle faded, replaced by the cold edge of paranoia. Each note I touched became another potential link in a chain that could drag me under if anyone ever found this. If Beatrix mentioned something careless to the wrong person. If Gladys, drunk and loose-lipped, decided to pry into questions she shouldn't ask. Or worse—if Joel's killer, whoever they were, already knew about me, already watched me, already planned their next move.

Cody's face floated through my mind. We've been waiting for you. The words still echoed, unexplained, ominous. How much did he know? How much had he observed? And where was he now, really? Had he taken Joel's body to dispose of it, as he'd claimed, or had he taken it somewhere else entirely—somewhere it could be used against me when the time was right?

I tried to push the thoughts away, but they clung like burrs, snagging on every attempt at calm.

Carefully, deliberately, I stacked the bills, aligning corners, pressing down each pile as though neatness could somehow neutralise the danger. One bundle after another disappeared into the safe, swallowed by its dark mouth. Each thud of a stack hitting the others was both reassuring and oppressive—the sound of resources accumulating, but also the sound of evidence compiling.

As the last bundle slid into place, I felt a flicker of satisfaction. Paranoia or not, the money was secure. The safe was closed, locked, concealed beneath carpet that showed no seam. To anyone walking into this bedroom, it was just a wardrobe, just a floor, just an ordinary space in an ordinary house.

For now, so was I. Just an ordinary man who'd had an extraordinarily difficult day.