The Quiet That Bites Back

“Some silences don’t wait to be filled — they just wait for you to slip.”

The small, sparsely furnished meeting room was steeped in a silence that felt more oppressive than calm—a silence filled not with peace, but with the weight of things unsaid. Louise Jeffries sat opposite me, head bowed, shoulders tense, the scratch of her pen on paper the only sound. She wrote with quiet ferocity, each stroke of the pen etched in restraint, urgency, or both.

I sat watching her, acutely aware of the starkness of the room pressing in around us. The sterile white walls, untouched by art or warmth, seemed to pulse with the cold indifference of institutional design. A single, barred window perched high on the wall admitted a sliver of pale daylight, casting elongated shadows across the table, slicing the floor like prison bars.

My gaze drifted back to Louise. Her face was rigid with concentration, but there was a tremor in her jaw. Whatever façade of control she maintained was paper-thin—like her story, perhaps. There were layers she hadn’t yet peeled back. Layers I was expected to reach.

"How long have you lived at Jeffries Manor?" I asked, injecting a light, conversational tone that I hoped would ease us into something more revealing. But even as I said it, I wasn’t sure where I was going with the question. Maybe nowhere. Maybe I just wanted to hear her voice.

"I'm only forty-seven," she snapped, her pen halting briefly as her tone sliced through the air like a whip. She didn’t look up. Didn’t need to. Her posture alone bristled with indignation.

"Sorry. I wasn’t suggesting… I was just…" I fumbled, my words thinning out into the stale air. I felt like a first-year constable again, being scolded for speaking out of turn. I let the silence stretch. Let it punish me.

A few long minutes passed, heavy with the awkward residue of my misstep. The pen resumed its rhythm, but the energy between us had shifted—cooler now. Thinner.

Still, I pressed on.

"You two sound like you have a bit of a history," I said, careful to keep the words light, nonchalant. A casual remark. An invitation.

Louise’s pen stilled mid-word. Her head lifted sharply, eyes snapping to mine.

"What do you mean?" she asked, too quickly. The defensiveness in her voice was immediate and unmistakable.

I hesitated. "Oh, just the beginning of the disappearance," I said, echoing Karl’s phrasing, hoping it might soften her or at least confuse her long enough to draw something out.

But the attempt backfired spectacularly.

Her expression shifted into something hard and unreadable. "I don’t know what you are suggesting, Detective, but I suggest you stay focused," she said, her voice cold and clipped. There was no room for ambiguity in her tone.

I felt heat creep up the back of my neck. "Of course. Sorry, Mrs Jeffries," I murmured, the words catching awkwardly in my throat. I looked away for a moment, the shame sharp and bitter. I had been trying to disarm her, perhaps even to manipulate—but I’d overstepped. Worse, I had done it out of personal curiosity, not professional necessity.

I glanced at the closed door, wishing for a moment that Karl were still in the room. He had a way of navigating tension like this with instinct, with presence. But he wasn’t here. This was my space. My responsibility.

I sat up straighter and tightened my focus. No more speculating. No more veiled prods. I was a detective, not a voyeur.

From now on, I would play it straight.

This case didn’t need conjecture—it needed clarity.