4338.208 · July 27, 2018 AD
The Name Nobody Says
Jerome Smith sleeps through his mid-morning tutorial and wakes to a throbbing arm, a missed class, and a house that feels wrong. Downstairs, Greta is on the phone — tense, clipped, talking to a police officer about Paul. Claire thinks he's fled to Adelaide after an argument, but Greta hasn't seen him. Then Greta says a name the family hasn't spoken in months: Luke. The call drops before she can finish, and Jerome retreats to his room carrying a question about brothers — the missing one, the invisible one, and what it means to lose someone who's still alive.
The day after the Haven, Jerome wakes late with a throbbing arm and a missed tutorial. He manages the ordinary mechanics of being a university student — bandage change, text exchange with project partner Aiden, data entry that won't quite hold his attention — while yesterday's weight sits unprocessed beneath everything.
The chapter turns when Jerome wanders into the kitchen for biscuits and finds Greta mid-phone call with a police officer. Paul is missing. Claire believes he drove to Adelaide after an argument, but Greta insists he's not there. Then she offers a possibility she clearly hadn't considered until that moment: Paul may have gone to Hobart, to Luke. The name lands in the kitchen like something physical. Jerome hasn't heard Greta say it in months. Before she can provide Luke's contact details, the line goes dead, and she's left staring at a phone that's stopped making sense.
Jerome retreats to his room with the conversation lodged in his chest alongside everything else — Pip, the eagle, Margaret's question, and now the quiet fracture lines of a family that lost one brother to distance and theology and might be losing another to something nobody yet understands.
