4338.205 · July 24, 2018 AD
Twenty Minutes and Counting
Twenty minutes late. Again. Joel pulls into the car park at Southern Freight & Logistics with hands still shaking from the morning's revelation. Garry's voice booms across the warehouse. The manifest waits. The route makes no sense. And somewhere beneath the fog rolling down from the mountain, Joel is already lost in ways the GPS cannot fix.
The drive to work was a blur. Hands on the wheel, foot on the pedals, but Joel's mind never left that kitchen—never stopped seeing the birth certificate, the name, his mother's face. Jamie Greyson. Not dead. Never dead. Just gone.
He's late again. Garry knows it. The whole warehouse knows it. Two warnings already, and Liam quit last week, which is probably the only reason Joel still has a job at all. The confrontation he's bracing for doesn't come—not quite. Instead, Garry hands over the manifest with an unusual hesitation, something unspoken passing between them.
The route is backwards: south to Huonville through fog so thick Joel can barely see the white lines, then back north to Berriedale. Inefficient. Frustrating. But Joel doesn't argue. He just needs to drive, to move, to put distance between himself and the questions he can't answer.
As the truck rumbles into the grey, Joel finds himself thinking about the life he might have had. About economics degrees and friends who went to university. About fathers who weren't supposed to be alive.
The fog thickens. The road disappears. And Joel keeps driving.
