The Locked Door

The front door was locked. The entire plan — run downstairs, slam the door, create the sound of departure — collapsed against the fact of a deadbolt that Beatrix had not accounted for. Her hand slipped twice on the metal. The hallway compressed around her. And Wendy's voice, arriving from behind with the precision of a woman whose instinct for intercepting her daughter had been refined across three decades of practice, eliminated every remaining option except the one Beatrix was least equipped for: staying.

Beatrix lied. Luke had just left to meet Dad at his place. The explanation was technically adjacent to truth — Luke was leaving, he was headed to his own house — and it was delivered with the composure that came from years of managing her mother through curated disclosures and strategic omissions. Wendy received it with silence. Not the silence of acceptance but the silence of a woman cataloguing the distance between what had been said and what she suspected, and choosing to defer the accounting to a moment when the balance would tip further in her favour.

Then Wendy changed register. The sharpness receded. The maternal authority softened into something Beatrix found more destabilising than confrontation — genuine vulnerability. Her parents had something to discuss. Beatrix's first instinct was medical: illness, diagnosis, the catastrophes that parents deliver in quiet voices in hallways. Not her mother. Not her father. The relief lasted a single breath before the actual subject arrived and proved to be, in its own way, more dangerous than either.

Gladys. Both parents had independently encountered a man at Gladys's house. Wendy had seen him from the kitchen window — standing at the periphery, still, watching with the particular attention of someone whose presence was neither casual nor accidental. Brett had met him at the front. The man had said he was waiting for Gladys. He had not offered a name. He had not explained himself. He had simply walked away when Wendy confronted him, with the unhurried confidence of someone who did not consider a mother's scrutiny to be a threat worth acknowledging.

Wendy had connected the sighting to a question Beatrix had asked days earlier — an idle enquiry about whether her parents knew anyone called Cody. At the time, it had been a fragment thrown into a conversation without weight. Now Wendy had caught it, held it up to the light, and matched it against the man in her daughter's garden. The name had acquired teeth. And Wendy, whose investigative methodology consisted of visiting her daughters unannounced, letting herself in with the spare key, and observing everything that did not match her expectations, had assembled a case whose accuracy was far closer to the truth than Beatrix could safely permit.

Beatrix offered the explanation that required the least dismantling of everything else: Cody was Gladys's boyfriend, they had been seeing each other for months, he looked intimidating but was harmless. The lie was smooth, plausible, and immediately undermined by the fact that Beatrix's own earlier question had implied she did not know who Cody was — an inconsistency Wendy identified with a single raised eyebrow and a silence more effective than any cross-examination. Beatrix redirected. Talk to Gladys. She needed to see Luke. The excuses were transparent and both women knew it, but Beatrix was already moving — not toward resolution but toward escape, because the conversation had reached the boundary where further engagement risked exposing not just Cody's identity but the entire network of lies that connected Cody to Joel to the Portal to Clivilius to the dead dog that had started the evening's cascade.

Wendy's sigh followed her down the hallway — long, slow, weighted with the particular disappointment of a mother who had offered her daughter an opening and watched her walk past it. There would be more to discuss when Beatrix returned with her father. The promise sounded like weather and felt like a warrant.

Beatrix reached the front door. She unlocked it. She opened it with enough force to create the sound of departure. She slammed it shut. She did not step through it. The door that had been locked when she needed it open and was now open when she needed it to make noise served one final function: its flat surface accepted the Portal Key's activation, and the colours bloomed across its timber face with the same impossible light that had erupted against a whiteboard in a casino storage room, against a living room wall in Berriedale, against a storage cabinet in a pet shop basement. Beatrix stepped through her own front door without opening it, leaving behind a house that contained a mother with a name she should not have, a father driving a dead dog to an empty house, and the sound of a door slamming that proved nothing except that someone wanted it to be heard.