The Sound of Small Feet

“You learn to spot danger not in loud bangs or broken glass—but in the quiet moments, when everything feels almost normal.”

The persistent Tasmanian drizzle tapped against the windows like an audience settling before curtain-up — restless, rhythmic, not quite still. I stood in the hallway with my back pressed against the cool plaster, feeling the chill of the morning seep through my cashmere sweater as though the house itself were breathing cold air into my skin. The blue fabric that had felt like comfort upstairs now felt like thin armour, inadequate for whatever the day intended to deliver.

The house was alive with sound. The soft patter of rain against weatherboard. The hurried thud of small feet on polished floorboards somewhere deeper in the house, unpredictable as improvised percussion. Buffy's bark from the back garden, muffled but insistent, the particular bark she reserved for the morning magpies who had the audacity to land on her territory. These were the sounds of our domestic life — the soundtrack of a home that, heard from outside, might have suggested a family in perfect working order. But soundtracks can be deceiving. Any drama teacher knows that. The same music that underscores a love scene can, with the slightest shift in lighting, become the score for something far darker.

Today, the comforting symphony felt exactly like that. A fragile mask. A thin acoustic curtain barely concealing the undercurrent of dread that pulsed beneath every ordinary moment.

"Come on, Sammy, get a wriggle on, mate," I called out, forcing my voice into a playful lilt. The cadence came from somewhere deep in my training — the bright, inviting register I had spent years perfecting on the stage at the Theatre Royal and then honing further in front of classrooms full of teenage girls who could smell inauthenticity at twenty paces. It was the sort of tone that invited trust. That hinted at ease and safety and a mother who had everything under control. But it was a performance, no less scripted than any role I had ever inhabited, and this morning the gap between the performance and the performer felt wider than usual.

My eyes flicked to the digital clock on the oven, its green numbers cutting sharply through the dim kitchen light. 9:42 AM. Each illuminated digit seemed to pulse with its own quiet urgency, a countdown I could feel in my chest. The appointment was at half ten. Hobart Paediatric Centre was a twenty-minute drive in good conditions, longer in the rain, and the rain showed no sign of relenting. Dr Carmichael was the sort of man who noticed lateness. Not unkindly, exactly — but with a precision that made you feel it. The disapproving tilt of his wire-rimmed glasses. The subtle tightening of his jaw when the clock on his wall told him you had failed to manage the morning.

A shiver ran through me that had nothing to do with the cold. His sterile office, with its incongruously cheerful animal posters peeling slightly at the corners and the faint antiseptic smell that clung to the air like a secret, was a place I both dreaded and needed. It represented the thin line between hope and fear that I walked daily now — the possibility that someone, anyone, might look at Sammy and see what I saw. Name it. Explain it. Make it stop.

"Go and find your shoes," I added, my voice warm but firm, "and then you can give Buffy a treat before we leave."

I imagined him scrambling to comply, his usual cheerful determination lighting up his small face, his legs working faster than his coordination could quite manage. The mental picture almost made me smile. Almost.

"Okay, Mummy!" Sammy's voice carried back to me from somewhere down the hall, bright and buoyant, filling the house with a fleeting warmth that no heater could replicate. I watched as he appeared briefly in my line of sight before disappearing into his bedroom, his dinosaur pyjama bottoms dragging slightly on the floorboards, the hems dark with dust and whatever mysteries lived beneath his racing car bed.

A wistful sigh escaped before I could stop it. I leaned against the wall and allowed myself a rare moment to simply stand still and feel the ache of time doing what time does — moving forward whether you are ready or not. In just a few months, my baby boy would turn four. His freckled nose. The dimple that appeared on his left cheek when he smiled, as though his face couldn't contain the joy and had to carve extra space for it. The light in his eyes — curious, mischievous, so startlingly alive. They were all reflections of Nial. Echoes of the man I had fallen in love with.

The man I thought I knew.

The thought arrived like a slap. Sharp. Unwelcome. The kind of intrusive line that an actor dreads — the one from the wrong scene, the wrong act entirely, cutting across the performance you are trying to hold together. I shook my head, physically dislodging it. This was not the time. There was an appointment to keep, a son to wrangle, and the mask of normality to hold firmly in place. Whatever fractures were spreading through the foundation of our lives, Sammy could not be allowed to see them. Not yet. Not today.

I caught my reflection in the hallway mirror as I straightened. The woman staring back at me was not the girl who had once commanded the local stage with nothing but voice and nerve and the particular recklessness of someone who believed the world would catch her if she fell. That girl was gone. In her place stood someone more carefully assembled — dark circles framed her eyes, though the concealer, applied with the practised hand of years, masked them well enough for a casual audience. The jaw was set a fraction too tight. The posture too deliberate, too composed, the kind of composure that comes not from ease but from effort.

I smoothed the soft fibres of my sweater as though the gesture could lend me something the garment itself could not, and pasted on a smile that didn't quite reach my eyes. It would have to do. After all, there was no audience more important than the little boy who depended on me to make the world feel safe, even as it threatened to crumble around us. And I had never missed a curtain call in my life.

Entering Sammy's room, I felt the familiar tug — that bittersweet compression in the chest that motherhood installs somewhere between the first contraction and the first time they say your name. He was perched on the edge of his racing car bed, utterly absorbed in the task of getting dressed with the particular intensity that only a three-year-old can bring to an activity an adult would accomplish in thirty seconds. In one small hand, he gripped a brown sandal. The other sandal dangled precariously from his right foot, held on by just three tiny toes, defying gravity through what appeared to be sheer willpower and a child's complete indifference to the laws of physics.

It was such an endearing slice of toddler life. A moment so pure, so uncomplicated by the machinery of adult anxiety, that it almost made me forget. Almost made me believe that this was simply a Saturday morning, and we were simply a family getting ready, and nothing was wrong.

His room helped sustain the illusion. The walls were painted with drifting clouds against a bright sky-blue backdrop — Nial's handiwork from the weekend before Sammy was born, when fatherhood was still an abstract joy and the biggest worry was getting the colour exactly right. Along the skirting board, a cheerful parade of dinosaurs marched in their eternal formation — a stegosaurus leading, a brachiosaurus bringing up the rear, their painted expressions permanently delighted by the procession they would never complete. It was a world untouched by adult worries. A world where monsters were friendly and brightly coloured and lived on walls. Where the worst thing that could happen was a sandal that wouldn't stay on.

For a fleeting moment, kneeling in that room, so could I feel safe.

"Good effort," I praised, lowering myself in front of him. The carpet was soft under my knees, still marked with the indents of toy cars and the small, ghostly impressions of bare feet from the night before — evidence of the restless wandering that had become part of Sammy's nights and, by extension, mine. Gently, I lifted his foot, adjusting the sandal so it slid in snugly. My fingers lingered for a moment on his warm ankle, feeling the steady pulse of life beneath his skin. Such a small thing. The simple fact of blood moving through a child's body. Yet it filled my chest with a love so fierce it frightened me — and a creeping sadness I could not entirely explain. These little moments felt increasingly rare, increasingly precious, slipping through my fingers like the fine sand in the hourglass Sammy kept on his bookshelf. Each one gone before I had properly held it.

Sammy beamed at me, his grin wide and uninhibited, revealing teeth conspicuously smeared with black. I paused. Leaned in closer. My brow furrowed, a director examining a set detail that was very much not in the script.

"Did Daddy give you liquorice again?" I asked, my voice playfully stern, though my mind had already raced ahead to the implications. Nial knew about this appointment. He knew about Dr Carmichael's dietary recommendations. He knew how carefully I had been monitoring Sammy's sugar intake, the food diary I kept on the kitchen bench, the quiet vigilance of a mother who had been told by medical professionals that every variable mattered when you were trying to understand a child's increasingly inexplicable symptoms. What once might have been a shared moment of parental amusement — Daddy and Sammy sneaking treats, a conspiratorial bond between father and son — now felt like another small fracture in the trust between us. One more thing Nial had done without telling me. One more tiny act of concealment in a marriage that was accumulating them like hairline cracks in old plaster.

Sammy's smile vanished instantly, replaced by a hasty shake of his head. The speed of the denial told me everything. It was the same innocent fib he had practised before, the automatic defence of a child who loves both parents and doesn't want to get either one in trouble. But today it felt different. Heavier. As if even Sammy — three years old, not yet four, a boy whose universe should have extended no further than dinosaurs and sandals and the dog — could sense the tension that had seeped into our home. The secrets that hung in the air like the persistent Tasmanian mist outside, visible and yet impossible to grasp.

His eyes, so like Nial's — the same warm brown, the same way they darkened when something troubled him — darted away from mine, settling on a spot just beyond my shoulder. The avoidance was subtle, instinctive, and it sent a small, cold ripple through me.

"I think he did," I murmured softly, brushing my fingers through Sammy's curls. They were growing darker with each passing month, taking on more of Nial's colouring, the sandy blond of babyhood gradually surrendering to something richer and deeper. The silky strands slipped through my fingers, a tactile reminder of time's quiet theft. "We'd better brush those teeth before we leave."

With his characteristic energy — the sudden, explosive motion of a child who exists perpetually at either full speed or complete stillness — Sammy slid off the bed. His bare feet thudded softly against the floor and he was moving before I could react, a small whirlwind of determination. I reached out instinctively to steady him, but he stumbled and caught himself, giggling at his own near-disaster with the pure, uncomplicated delight of someone who finds gravity hilarious rather than threatening.

My heart leapt into my throat. But his laughter — that bright, ringing sound that was still, for now, untouched by the shadows pressing in around us — soothed me almost immediately.

"Sammy!" I called after him as he careered into the hallway, one sandal on, one foot bare, his trajectory suggesting the bathroom but his commitment to that destination far from guaranteed. "Come and do your other sandal first."

"Not yet, Mummy!" he shouted back, his voice carrying from somewhere near the linen cupboard, a declaration delivered with the supreme confidence of a small person who has absolutely no intention of being managed. The defiance was cheerful rather than hostile — the stubbornness of a child testing boundaries because testing boundaries is what children do.

I smiled despite myself, shaking my head. That stubborn streak. So undeniably his father's. Nial had always possessed the ability to decide on a course of action and follow it with an almost geological determination, immovable and unquestioning. I had once admired it — the way he forged ahead, the quiet certainty that he knew what needed doing and would simply do it, regardless of obstacle or objection. But now that same quality looked different from where I stood. Now I couldn't help but wonder what other inheritances awaited Sammy. Would he one day share his father's capacity for compartmentalisation? For late-night phone calls conducted in whispers? For the particular kind of silence that looks like calm but is actually concealment?

I turned toward the open bedroom door, lost in the kind of spiralling thought that had become my constant companion, only to be startled by Buffy bounding into the room as though she had been launched from a cannon. Her black-and-white coat was a blur of spots and kinetic joy, tail wagging with enough force to rattle the nearby toy chest. She lunged directly for my face, tongue lolling, the unmistakable intention of a Dalmatian who believed that all problems could be solved with sufficient licking.

My reflexes — honed by months of exactly this ambush — kicked in. I pushed her head aside just in time to save the carefully applied concealer from her enthusiastic attentions. The near-miss sent a shot of adrenaline through me, immediately followed by something warmer.

"Buffy, no licking faces!" I scolded, though my voice held more affection than reprimand. She was impossible not to love, this ridiculous, exuberant creature. She flopped down onto the carpet with a theatrical huff — a dramatic collapse worthy of a stage death — her tail still thumping against the floor in a rhythm that suggested she considered the scolding part of the game rather than a genuine correction.

I watched her settle, her dark eyes blinking up at me with that uncomplicated devotion that dogs offer without condition or complication. How simple her world was. Just love, loyalty, and the joy of proximity to the people she had chosen. No secrets. No whispered phone calls. No slowly widening gulf between what was said and what was meant. It was a stark and slightly painful contrast to the complexity of the life I was trying so desperately to hold together around her.

The sudden clatter of toothbrushes hitting the bathroom floor sent Buffy scampering, her nails clicking against the floorboards in a frantic staccato that disappeared down the hallway like a drum roll preceding an entrance nobody had planned. I closed my eyes. Counted to three. Drew in a deep, steadying breath. It was an old technique — one that had calmed my nerves before every opening night at St. Michael's, before every community theatre performance, before every moment in my life when the gap between what I felt and what I needed to project had been dangerously wide. Three counts. Inhale through the nose. Hold. Release. A lifeline. A tether to composure when composure was all that stood between the audience and the chaos backstage.

But when I opened my eyes, the fragile calm dissolved like breath on cold glass. Because this was not a performance. Not really. The appointment with Dr Carmichael was not a routine visit. It was not a box to be ticked, a formality to be endured. It was a chance — a desperate, white-knuckled hope — to understand what was happening to my son. The nightmares that tore him from sleep screaming words I couldn't make sense of. The bruises that appeared on his small arms like accusations written in a language I couldn't read. The moments when he seemed to slip sideways into a world I couldn't reach, his eyes going distant, his body present but his attention somewhere else entirely, somewhere no three-year-old should know existed. Each incident was a small fracture in the foundation of our family life, and the fractures were multiplying faster than I could plaster over them.

I moved toward the bathroom, my pace quickening as Sammy's giggle echoed down the hall. Normally, that sound was a balm — the single purest thing in my life, the one note that always rang true regardless of what dissonance surrounded it. But today it sent a chill rippling through me. It was too sharp. Too high. Almost manic in its intensity, the kind of laughter that sits on the very edge of something else.

Rounding the corner, I found him on his step stool, toothbrush in hand, smearing a thick layer of minty toothpaste across the bathroom mirror with the focused concentration of an artist working on a commission. The air was damp and cool, the minty scent clinging to the lingering condensation from the cold night, and for a disorienting moment the scene felt not like childhood innocence but like something slightly off-axis. A frame just fractionally out of focus. The familiar tilted toward the surreal.

"Oh, Sammy," I sighed, reaching for the washcloth that hung on the rail beside the sink. As I began to wipe the smeared paste from the glass, our reflection materialised behind the streaks — my beautiful boy, all tousled curls and a grin as mischievous as it was charming, utterly pleased with his handiwork. And beside him, me. Dark circles lurking beneath my eyes despite the concealer's best efforts. Jaw set. Shoulders held with that careful, deliberate composure that is itself a form of exhaustion. Together, we looked like a mismatched pair in some offbeat production — the kind that made you laugh in the moment but left a hollow ache in your chest on the drive home.

Behind us in the reflection, the edge of the bathtub peeked into view, its porcelain rim still stained with the colourful rings from last night's bubble bath — pink and blue and green, a cheerful geological record of an evening that had, briefly, felt normal. Sammy splashing. Buffy's nose pressed against the bathroom door. The scent of strawberry soap and the sound of a child's laughter, genuine and unforced.

Bittersweet. Everything was bittersweet now.

"Mummy," Sammy said suddenly, and the shift in his voice was so complete, so immediate, that it was like watching a lighting change transform a stage from comedy to something far more serious. The playfulness was gone. In its place was a gravity that sat wrong on a face so young, a seriousness that belonged to someone who had lived decades, not years. "Is the doctor going to make the bad dreams go away?"

The question stopped me cold. The washcloth froze mid-air, a drip of toothpaste-tinged water falling from its edge and landing on the tiles with a sound that seemed, in the silence that followed, unreasonably loud. My breath caught somewhere between my throat and my chest, and for a moment I simply looked at him — his upturned face, the trust in his eyes, the absolute belief that his mother could answer this question honestly and that the answer would be the right one.

How could I explain to my three-year-old that not all monsters could be banished by nightlights or brave teddy bears? That sometimes the scariest things were not the ones hiding under the bed but the ones lurking in plain sight — formless, nameless, impossible to point at and say there, that is what is hurting us? How could I tell him that I did not know whether Dr Carmichael or anyone else could make the bad dreams stop, because I did not understand where the bad dreams were coming from, and the not-knowing was eating me alive?

I could not. So I did what mothers do. I performed.

"We're going to try, sweetheart," I said, forcing a smile I did not feel. "That's why it's so important that we're not late. Now, let's get those teeth brushed, shall we?"

As I guided his small hand, helping him angle the brush properly against teeth that were still so impossibly tiny, my mind drifted backward against my will. Last night. Nial had come home late again, slipping through the front door with the careful quietness of a man who hoped not to be noticed. His clothes had carried the faint but unmistakable smell of cigarette smoke — and something else beneath it, something sharper, chemical, that I couldn't quite place and that vanished before I could properly register it. When I had asked about his day, standing in the kitchen doorway with my arms folded and my voice carefully neutral, he had given me that smile.

Once, it had made my heart skip. That particular curve of his lips, the slight crinkling at the corners of his eyes — it had been the smile that made me fall in love with him, the one I had spent years believing was mine alone. Now it filled me with a dread so precise I could feel its edges.

"Just work stuff, Jen," he'd said, pressing a kiss to my cheek. His lips had been cold. The involuntary shiver that followed had nothing to do with temperature.

"Nothing for you to worry about."

But I did worry. I worried about the hushed phone calls and the way he slipped out of bed at hours when no fencing contractor in Tasmania would be awake. I worried about the absences that had no clear explanations and the explanations that had no clear truth. I worried about the way he sometimes looked at Sammy when he thought I wasn't watching — an expression caught between tenderness and something darker. Was it guilt? Fear? Recognition of something he could see in our son that he was not willing to name? Whatever it was, it gnawed at me. A splinter lodged deep beneath the surface of my thoughts, too small to extract, too sharp to ignore.

"All done, Mummy!" Sammy's voice jolted me back to the present. He grinned up at me, teeth sparkling clean, the liquorice evidence now obliterated by minty toothpaste and the determined brushwork of a child who, when properly motivated, could accomplish anything.

"Well done, my little man," I said, ruffling his hair. The silky strands slipped between my fingers, and I held onto the sensation a beat longer than necessary. "Now, let's get that other sandal on and we'll be ready to go."

As Sammy darted off — a whirlwind of energy and excitement, his bare foot slapping the floorboards in alternation with the sandalled one, creating a lopsided rhythm that was both absurd and achingly dear — I lingered in the bathroom for a moment. The toothpaste was gone from the mirror. But the reflection remained. Me, holding it all together for Sammy's sake. Me, with the smile that didn't reach. Me, with the careful composure and the concealer and the cashmere armour and the growing certainty that none of it would be enough.

Making my way back through the hall, my gaze caught on the framed photograph hanging between Sammy's bedroom door and the linen cupboard. Our wedding day. A snapshot that had captured a moment so full of possibility it almost hurt to look at now. Nial and I were beaming at the camera — my head thrown back in laughter at something he had whispered in my ear, something I could no longer remember but that had, in that instant, been the funniest and most perfect thing anyone had ever said. His arms were wrapped around my waist, pulling me close, and the evening light painted the sky in hues of amber and gold behind us. Our silhouettes merged at the edges, as though we were two halves of a single, unbreakable whole.

I remembered how invincible I had felt that day. How certain. The absolute, unshakeable conviction that our love was the kind that stories were written about — the kind that endured, that deepened, that made everything else bearable because at the end of every difficult day, there would be him. But now, years later, that certainty felt like a script from a production that had closed and would never reopen. The woman in the photograph seemed almost like a stranger to me — naïve, trusting, radiant with a confidence that the woman standing in this hallway could barely remember possessing.

My fingers brushed against the frame. The cool glass formed a barrier between that moment and this one, between who we had been and who we were becoming, and no amount of wanting could dissolve it. A silent prayer formed on my lips, though I was no longer sure who I was praying to, or whether anyone was listening.

Please, let this appointment bring us answers. Let us find our way back to something solid.

"Mummy, look!" Sammy's excited shout shattered the silence, pulling me back from the place where grief and memory overlap. I turned to see him proudly displaying his achievement — the other sandal was on, though backwards and barely hanging onto his foot, secured by determination alone and likely to last approximately four steps before gravity reasserted itself.

The sight was so endearing, so perfectly and irreducibly Sammy, that I felt my throat tighten. Tears welled unexpectedly, and I had to blink them back before he could see. The intensity of the love I felt for him in that moment was physical — a fierce, aching pressure that radiated outward from my chest like a shockwave, filling every part of me with the desperate, uncompromising need to protect this child. To keep him safe. To stand between him and whatever was coming, no matter how dark, no matter how incomprehensible.

"Oh, darling," I laughed, dropping to my knees beside him. "You're getting to be such a big boy."

My fingers moved quickly, securing the strap of his sandal.

"There we go," I said, standing and taking his hand in mine. His small fingers curled around mine with the unconscious trust of a child who has never yet been given reason to doubt that his mother's hand is the safest place in the world. That tiny gesture — the warmth of his palm, the certainty of his grip — was both the most comforting and the most heartbreaking thing I had felt all morning.

"Ready for our big adventure?" I asked, injecting my voice with the brightness of a Saturday outing, as though we were heading somewhere wonderful rather than to a paediatric neurologist's office where the cheerful animal posters were designed to distract children from the fact that something might be seriously wrong with them.

Sammy nodded enthusiastically, his earlier question about the bad dreams seemingly forgotten, buried beneath the resilience that young children carry like a superpower — the ability to pivot from fear to excitement in the space of a breath. I envied that. I envied it fiercely. And I feared the day he might lose it. The world had already taken so much from us. I could not bear the thought of it taking his light too.

At the front door, I slung my handbag over my shoulder and paused for one final check. The inventory of a mother's bag. Keys. Purse. Sammy's favourite toy car — the red one, the one that had to come everywhere, the one whose absence from the waiting room would cause a meltdown of theatrical proportions. And tucked into the hidden pocket, pressed against the lining where no casual hand would find it, the burner phone I had bought last week.

My fingers brushed its cheap plastic casing as I confirmed its presence. The small device felt heavier than its actual weight, denser than it had any right to be, as though it had absorbed the quiet desperation that had driven me to a Vodafone kiosk in the Elizabeth Street Mall, paying cash, avoiding eye contact, doing the kind of thing that people in films do and that I had never imagined would become part of my reality. It was a symbol of how far the ground had shifted beneath me. Of the lengths I was now willing to go. Of the woman I was becoming — resourceful, suspicious, frightened, and utterly unwilling to sit still and wait for whatever was happening to simply happen to us.

I zipped the pocket shut. Opened the front door.

Outside, the rain had softened to a fine mist, the kind that didn't fall so much as exist — suspended in the air like a cool, translucent curtain that clung to every surface it touched. The sharp scent of wet earth rose from the garden beds, mingling with the crisp, slightly medicinal tang of eucalyptus, a smell so quintessentially Tasmanian that it usually grounded me, connected me to place and home and belonging. Today it simply smelled like winter. Like cold. Like something waiting.

I locked the door behind us. The click of the deadbolt broke the morning silence with a finality that made my chest tighten — the particular sound of a door being secured against a threat you cannot yet see. Our front garden, usually a riot of colour by late spring, looked subdued under the grey sky, the hardy winter plants glistening with moisture, their leaves drooping under its accumulated weight as though they, too, were tired of holding things up. Even Sammy's vibrant pink daisies — brave outliers in the winter gloom, the ones he had helped me plant in autumn with his bare hands deep in soil, laughing at the worms — seemed dulled. Their cheerful faces were bowed and soaked, waiting for a warmer season to restore them.

As I bent to buckle Sammy into his car seat, a prickling sensation crept over the back of my neck.

It was sudden and visceral — not a thought but a sensation, the kind of instinctual warning that bypasses logic entirely and speaks directly to something older and deeper. The animal brain. The part of you that existed before language, before reason, before the civilised veneer that tells you there is a rational explanation for everything. My pulse quickened. My hands hovered over the seatbelt buckle, frozen mid-motion.

I scanned the street, trying to appear casual. Trying to look like a woman adjusting her son's car seat who happened to glance up. Not a woman who felt, with absolute and inexplicable certainty, that she was being watched.

My gaze landed on an unfamiliar car parked across the road, three houses down on the opposite side. It was the kind of vehicle designed to blend in — nondescript, dark-coloured, the automotive equivalent of a grey suit. The sort of car you would not notice unless you were looking. But the darkly tinted windows made my stomach knot. In Fern Tree, where the neighbours drove sensible Subarus and muddied utes and the occasional battered Volvo, a car with windows you could not see through was conspicuous precisely because it was trying so hard not to be.

For a second — just a second — I thought I saw movement inside. A shifting of shadow behind the dark glass, there and gone so quickly it might have been nothing. A trick of the light. The mist playing with reflections. The overactive imagination of a woman who had been sleeping badly and worrying constantly and had recently started buying burner phones with cash.

I told myself it was nothing. My mind refused to accept the instruction.

"Mummy?" Sammy's small voice broke through my spiralling thoughts, cutting through the noise of my own internal alarm like a clear, high note piercing an orchestra. "Are you okay?"

I turned back to him. His face was upturned in the car seat, his eyes searching mine with a perceptiveness that should not have been possible at his age. Children see everything. That was something I had always known as a teacher — that young people miss nothing, that they read the adults around them with an accuracy that is both remarkable and, in moments like this, terrifying.

I forced a bright smile. Paper-thin. The kind that might crumble under the weight of a three-year-old's innocent question if he pressed even slightly harder. "Of course, sweetheart," I said lightly, reaching down to adjust the strap on his sandal — a piece of stage business designed to buy another moment, to give my hands something to do whilst my face reassembled itself. "Just checking we haven't forgotten anything."

I slid into the driver's seat. My hands trembled slightly as I turned the key. The low rumble of the engine seemed too loud, too intrusive against the morning's careful stillness, announcing our departure to anyone who might be paying attention. I adjusted the rearview mirror — habit, instinct, something more — and cast one final glance at our house as we began to pull away.

The pale blue weatherboards. The native garden with its rain-bowed flowers. The porch where Nial and I had spent countless summer evenings watching Sammy chase butterflies through the long, golden light, his laughter rising into the mountain air like something weightless and free. It all looked so normal from this angle. So perfectly, convincingly ordinary. A family home on a quiet Fern Tree street, set against kunanyi's brooding slopes, surrounded by the wet bush and the dripping eucalypts and the kind of silence that could mean peace or could mean something else entirely.

It looked like a life. But it felt like a set. And I was no longer sure which role I was playing, or whether the audience could tell the difference.

My eyes flicked to the strange car again as we pulled onto the road. It had not moved. Its windows remained inscrutable, dark and reflective, giving nothing back. But the unease it had inspired remained, settling into my gut.

This was not paranoia. Paranoia was irrational fear, unfounded suspicion, the mind inventing threats where none existed. What I felt was different. What I felt was recognition. The quiet, dreadful certainty that comes when the thing you have been afraid to name finally shows itself — not fully, not yet, but enough. A shape in the fog. A shadow behind tinted glass. Enough to know that you were right to be afraid.

For the briefest moment, I considered turning back. It would be so easy. Pull over. Unbuckle Sammy. Lock the front door. Wrap us both in the illusion of safety within those familiar walls and pretend the world outside did not contain whatever that car contained. But I could not. Not if I wanted answers. Not if I wanted to understand what was happening to my son. Not if I wanted to save us.

And saving us — however impossible, however unclear the path — was the only option I was willing to consider.

"Ready for our adventure, Sammy?" I asked, injecting as much steadiness into my voice as I could summon.

"Ready, Mummy!" he chirped from the back seat, his excitement unclouded, his world still simple and bright and populated by dinosaurs and toy cars and a mother who would always, always keep him safe.

I tightened my grip on the steering wheel, feeling the cool leather beneath my fingers. My eyes flicked to the rearview mirror one last time as the street fell away behind us. The car grew smaller in the distance. It did not follow.

But I could not shake the feeling — settling over me now like the mist itself, cold and pervasive and impossible to outrun — that this was not the last I would see of it.