The Number on the Label

Cody Jennings had been inside the house on Branscombe Road again. The evidence was not subtle — a handwritten note on the kitchen bench, an apology for the previous night's intrusion offered in the register of a man who understood he had frightened someone but who framed the transgression as a lapse in manners rather than an unauthorised entry into a locked residence conducted via interdimensional transit. Beside the note, in the pantry, a bottle of shiraz occupied the third shelf with the deliberate centrality of an object placed to be discovered. Ten digits had been written on the label in dark ink — a phone number, the first means of conventional communication Cody had ever provided Gladys, offered on the surface of a peace offering whose subtext neither of them had yet agreed to examine.

Gladys saved the number and did not open the wine. The two acts were connected in ways she did not articulate but that the omniscient view of her evening made plain. The woman who had drunk from the bottle in Luke's driveway while a body cooled beside her, who had drunk through the burning of the water bottle label, who had drunk to manage the storage unit in Moonah and every night since — that woman reached for the shiraz Cody had left, touched its label, read his number, and slid the bottle back onto the shelf. It was the first act of deliberate refusal she had performed in a day whose every other demand she had met with compliance, and its significance lay not in the discipline itself but in what it indicated about the direction of her attention. She was not refusing wine. She was choosing questions over sedation. The questions were multiplying faster than the wine could suppress them, and for the first time in longer than Gladys could honestly recall, she wanted the answers more than she wanted the fog.

The questions concerned Cody, and they had been accumulating since the hallway encounter two nights earlier. How a man entered a locked house without triggering any mechanism of entry Gladys could identify. How he had known where Luke Smith lived when Gladys had never mentioned the address. What relationship existed between a man who whispered urgent instructions about trust during a thunderstorm and a man who left apology notes beside bottles of shiraz with his phone number written in the margin. Whether the Cody who had held her down in the dark and the Cody who left gifts in her pantry were expressions of the same person operating in different registers, or whether the distance between those two versions of him constituted a warning she was choosing to read as charm. And beneath all of these, the question she had heard him answer that morning in Luke's driveway without understanding its full weight: who was "we," and what had they been waiting for?

She texted him the details of the memorial — eleven that evening, Luke's house — and waited for a reply that did not arrive. The silence was familiar. Gladys had spent enough of her life extending connection and receiving absence in return to recognise the shape of it, and she settled into the evening with the cats and the quiet and the understanding that the day had deposited her back at Branscombe Road carrying more information than she had left with and less certainty about any of it.