4338.212 · July 31, 2018 AD
Three Feet of Silence
The morning after a nightmare, Karl Jenkins drags himself to work hollow-eyed and shaking. A new missing person case awaits—but so does Sarah, the partner he wronged the night before. As they maintain a careful distance through Hobart's streets, every step measures the gulf between them. Professional courtesy masks profound damage. Some silences speak louder than any confession, and three feet might as well be miles.
There are days when survival feels like performance—when you move through familiar routines whilst something inside you has fundamentally broken. For Karl Jenkins, 31 July 2018 is one of those days.
The detective wakes bruised and hollow after a night that defied the ordinary boundaries of sleep. His reflection shows a man on the brink. His body protests every movement. His mind replays fragments he'd rather forget. But the job doesn't pause for personal crisis, and a new case demands his attention: another disappearance, another thread in a pattern he can't quite see.
Worse than the exhaustion or the lingering dread is the reckoning he must face with Sarah Lahey—his partner, and the woman he hurt through his own selfishness. She meets him with professional ice, every word calibrated to maintain distance. When they walk together toward the car, she positions herself exactly three feet away—close enough to appear collegial, far enough to make her feelings unmistakable.
This quest explores the aftermath of collapse through measured distance and careful silence. You'll witness how obsession doesn't just corrupt the mind; it destroys the connections that might have saved it. Sometimes the space between two people tells the whole story.
