What the Glass Reveals

"Put a one-way mirror between yourself and a conversation and you'll learn more than you ever would sitting at the table."

The observation room was small, cramped, and perpetually cold—a forgotten alcove that smelled of stale coffee and institutional neglect, the kind of space that existed in every police station but appeared on no floor plan anyone would show the public. The walls were painted that particular shade of government grey that had been chosen decades ago because it was cheap and nobody cared enough to change it. A single chair faced the one-way glass, positioned for optimal viewing of Interview Room Three, its vinyl seat cracked and peeling from years of detectives shifting their weight during long interviews.

I didn't sit. I stood.

My knee would make me pay for that later, but right now I needed to be upright, needed to feel my own weight on my feet, needed the slight discomfort to keep me sharp. Thirty-odd hours without sleep had turned my thoughts into something thick and sluggish, and sitting down in this cold little room might tip me over into the kind of half-doze that missed crucial details. I'd made that mistake once, years ago. Never again.

Through the glass, I watched them arrange themselves. The image was slightly distorted—the glass did that, bent things just enough that you had to account for it—but I could read the room clearly enough. Sarah took a position near the wall, notepad ready, her posture alert but deliberately unobtrusive. The good cop who fades into the background while the interview happens. Karl crossed to the table where Louise sat waiting, her composure held together with the same steel cables I remembered from a decade of interviews. Her hands were still folded in her lap. Her spine was still straight. But something in the set of her shoulders had changed since I'd left the room—a tension that hadn't been there before, or maybe one she'd been hiding better.

"Louise Jeffries?"

Karl's voice came through the speaker mounted in the corner, thin and slightly distorted by equipment that should have been replaced years ago but never made it onto any budget. I saw the recognition hit him—the way his body stiffened like he'd touched a live wire, the slight hitch in his breath that was visible even through the glass. Whatever he'd expected to find in that room, whatever name he'd been preparing himself for during the walk from the change room, it wasn't her.

"Oh my God! It is you."

Interesting. The surprise was genuine—you couldn't fake that kind of physical reaction, that involuntary stiffening of the spine, that widening of the eyes. He'd had no idea who was waiting for him. Which meant someone had kept that information from him deliberately. Which meant I'd sent him in blind to see what his face would reveal.

It had revealed plenty.

"You two know each other?"

Sarah's voice carried an edge I hadn't heard before. Not quite accusation—more like a hunting dog whose ears had pricked at an unexpected sound, head turning toward something that didn't fit the pattern. She was cataloguing this, filing it away in whatever mental system she used for things that might matter later. Good. That was why I'd brought her in. Fresh eyes. No history with the Jeffries family to cloud her judgement.

"You could say that."

Karl's response was evasive. Protective. He kept his eyes on Louise, maintaining the kind of focus that excluded everyone else in the room, that drew a circle around the two of them and left Sarah standing outside it. I watched Sarah register this—the slight tightening around her mouth, the way her pen stopped its rhythmic tapping against the notepad. She didn't like being excluded. She'd remember it.

"How have you been?"

A stupid question for an interview room. The kind of thing you say when your mouth moves faster than your training, when the personal shoves aside the professional before you can stop it. Karl knew it too—I could see the wince he tried to suppress, the way his jaw tightened around the words he wished he could take back. You didn't ask how someone had been when they were sitting in an interview room reporting missing family members. You didn't pretend this was a reunion over coffee.

"Please, Karl. Sit."

Louise's voice hadn't changed in ten years. Calm. Measured. The voice of a woman who had learned to hold herself together through things that would have broken others, who'd built walls so strong that even sustained interrogation couldn't find the cracks. I'd sat across from her for months after Charles disappeared, watching that composure never waver, and I'd respected her for it even as it made my job feel like trying to crack a safe with a toothpick.

Karl sat. The chair groaned under his weight—a plastic protest that the speaker picked up and amplified into something almost comical. In other circumstances, I might have smiled.

"I've already told most of this to your colleague here," Louise said, nodding toward Sarah. "But I wanted to tell you directly."

You. The word carried weight. Not the department. Not the police. Not the institution or the uniform or the badge. You. Karl, specifically. Karl, personally. Whatever she had to say, she wanted him to hear it from her mouth, wanted to watch his face while she said it.

I watched Karl lean forward, watched him try to find the line between professional and personal and fail to locate it anywhere. He was struggling. Good. Struggling meant he was still human underneath whatever mask he'd constructed, whatever walls he'd built to keep the personal and professional in separate boxes. Those boxes were spilling into each other now, their contents mixing in ways that would make everything messier.

"I'm listening."

Louise drew a breath. The kind of breath I'd seen before—the one that preceded something difficult, the gathering of air into lungs that would need it for what came next. The breath people take before they say things that can't be unsaid.

"My son, Kain, is missing."

I watched Karl's reaction carefully, reading his face the way I'd read a thousand faces over the years. Recognition flickered across his features like heat lightning—there and gone, but unmistakable. He knew Kain. Knew him well enough that the name landed with impact, left a dent in his composure.

How? When? Through Louise, presumably—but that connection went deeper than casual acquaintance, deeper than someone you'd met once at a family function and promptly forgotten. I filed it away. The filing cabinet in my head was getting crowded.

"And so is my brother."

Karl's posture changed. Subtle, but visible through the glass. His shoulders drew back slightly, tension climbing into muscles that had been trying to relax. His jaw tightened, the tendons standing out in his neck.

"Jamie?"

The name came out like something he'd been holding in his mouth for years, something that had been sitting there waiting to be spoken even when he'd thought it was buried. Not a question seeking information—a question seeking confirmation of something he already feared, already knew in his gut was true.

The web was perhaps more tangled than I'd realised. Threads running everywhere, connecting people I'd thought were separate, drawing patterns I couldn't see clearly yet but could feel taking shape in the dark.

"Yes."

Louise's confirmation was quiet.

"Are you sure?"

Karl was reaching for procedure now—the safe harbour of professional questions when personal waters got too deep to stand in. I recognised the gesture because I'd made it myself a thousand times over the years. When you don't know what to feel, you fall back on what you know how to do. You ask the questions you've been trained to ask. You write things down. You pretend the notepad and the procedure and the familiar rhythm of interrogation can protect you from whatever's happening inside your chest.

"I haven't been able to contact him for several days now. He hasn't answered any of my calls or responded to any of my texts. I've driven past his house a few times and his car is still in the driveway."

Car in the driveway. Not a good sign. Either Jamie was inside and couldn't—or wouldn't—answer. Or he'd left by other means. Means that didn't require a car. Means that didn't require roads or airports or any of the normal ways people travelled from place to place.

Means like a portal.

I pushed the thought aside. Too early for that. Too many unknowns. But the thought didn't push easily—it lingered at the edges of my awareness like something half-seen in peripheral vision, refusing to disappear entirely.

"Have you knocked on the door?"

"I didn't at first."

Louise's voice cracked. A hairline fracture in the composure, thin but visible. "Maybe if I had, Kain would still be around."

Guilt. The familiar companion of everyone who'd ever lost someone, who'd ever wondered whether different choices might have changed everything. I'd watched guilt settle onto Louise ten years ago, after Charles, and here it was again—heavier now, accumulated weight that she carried in her shoulders and her voice and the way her hands pressed against each other in her lap.

"I'm confused, Louise. You said you didn't knock on his door at first. But you have now?"

Karl was trying to build a timeline. Good. That was the job. That was what he should be doing, what I needed him to do, piecing together the sequence of events that might tell us what had happened and when.

"Yes. But he didn't answer. I only spoke to Luke."

My pulse quickened. Here it came. The name I'd been waiting for, the name that connected everything, the name that had been circling through my thoughts since Beatrix Cramer had vanished through a portal and left me standing alone with my offer of protection hanging in empty air.

"Who is Luke?"

"Luke Smith. Jamie's partner."

The name landed in the observation room like something physical, like a stone thrown through a window. Luke Smith. The name I'd spoken to Beatrix twelve hours ago, offered up like a bargaining chip in a game I'd thought I was winning. The name connected to networks that operated below the surface of anything official, that ran through channels I'd spent years learning to recognise and avoid and occasionally, when necessary, use.

I watched Karl's face through the glass. Saw the surprise register—not at the name itself, but at what it implied. The shape of Jamie's life that Karl hadn't known about, the relationship that had formed while Karl was elsewhere, living his own life, not paying attention.

"Oh. I didn't realise."

He hadn't known Jamie was gay. Hadn't known about Luke at all. Whatever history existed between Karl and Jamie, it predated Luke's arrival in Jamie's life. Which meant Karl and Jamie had been out of contact for years—long enough for entire relationships to form and solidify and presumably become common knowledge to everyone except the people who'd known Jamie before.

How long had they been strangers? Years, apparently. Long enough for everything to change.

"It's okay," Louise said, and I heard something gentle in her voice. She was protecting Karl from his own ignorance, smoothing over the awkwardness the way you do with someone you care about, someone whose feelings still matter to you even when you're drowning in your own crisis.

Interesting dynamic. She still cared about him. Still worried about his comfort, his embarrassment, his feelings. After everything. After years of whatever had kept them apart.

Karl reached for his pen and notepad. Retreating into procedure.

"Louise, I'm still quite confused. Please, start again from the beginning."

"The beginning?"

Alarm in her voice. She thought he meant their beginning—the history that predated this room, the past that neither of them wanted to excavate. Not here. Not now. Not with Sarah watching from the corner, pen poised over notepad, recording everything that might matter later.

"Just of the disappearance."

Relief. Subtle, but visible. Neither of them wanted to dig into that particular burial ground. Not with witnesses. Not when the ground was still fresh enough that disturbing it might release things better left underground.

Louise began again. Four days since Jamie stopped answering. The unusual silence. Her concern about his relationship with Luke.

I leaned closer to the glass, close enough that my breath fogged the surface briefly before fading. Her concern about his relationship with Luke. She'd said something similar in our interview—that she'd never trusted Jamie's partner. At the time, I'd assumed it was the usual family friction, the garden-variety suspicion that sometimes attached itself to a sibling's romantic choices. Now I wondered if she'd sensed something more. Something she couldn't articulate but couldn't ignore. The instinct that tells you something's wrong even when you can't explain why.

"I sent Kain over to their house to check on him. But I haven't heard from Kain since."

Two days. Kain had been missing for two days. And before that, Jamie for four. Six days total of silence from people who shouldn't have been silent, who had lives and responsibilities and people who expected to hear from them.

If Luke was involved—if this was connected to the Guardian networks, to the portals, to everything I'd spent years learning about and still didn't fully understand—then we were already behind. Two days was an eternity when portals were involved. Kain could be anywhere by now. Literally anywhere. He could be in Clivilius. He could be walking through a settlement I'd never seen, in a world I'd never visited, beyond any reach I had.

"I'm really worried that something terrible might have happened to them."

Louise's voice was straining now. The composure cracking further, the fractures widening into something that might actually break if pushed much harder. I watched Karl reach across the table and place his hand over hers.

The gesture was intimate. Too intimate for a professional interview. Sarah would have noticed—I could see her pen pause, could see her eyes flick toward their joined hands and then away. She was adding it to her catalogue, filing it under things that didn't fit, things that would need explaining later.

I certainly noticed. I noticed the way Louise didn't pull away, the way her fingers curled slightly around Karl's, the way she seemed to draw strength from the contact even as it violated every protocol either of them had ever been taught.

Karl asked about the timeline—when Kain left, who he'd contacted, whether the fiancée had heard anything. Louise answered, but I was only half-listening now. I was watching the dynamic between them, the unspoken communication that ran beneath the words like water beneath ice. The way they leaned toward each other. The way their eyes met and held just a beat too long.

They had history. Real history. The kind that left marks you couldn't see but couldn't ignore either.

"So, after driving past Jamie's house several times, I finally decided yesterday morning—"

Her voice caught. Karl's hand tightened on hers.

"I decided that I'd go and knock on the door. I pulled into the driveway, but I didn't get a chance to knock. Luke was already walking out the front door."

Luke. Walking out. As if he'd known she was coming, as if he'd been watching through the window, waiting for her car to appear. Or as if he'd been leaving for somewhere else entirely, somewhere that didn't require explanations or witnesses or anything as mundane as a packed suitcase.

"I asked him about Jamie, and he told me they were having relationship issues and Jamie had gone to Melbourne for a few weeks to think things over."

Melbourne. A convenient lie, if it was a lie. Far enough away to explain the silence, close enough to sound plausible, normal enough that anyone who wasn't already suspicious would accept it and move on.

But if Jamie had gone through a portal instead—if he was in Clivilius right now, walking around in a world that Louise couldn't imagine existed—then Melbourne was just a story. A cover. Something to keep people from asking questions that couldn't be answered.

"And do you believe him?"

"Well, he did seem to be pretty upset about it all. But even if it were true and Jamie had gone to Melbourne, that doesn't explain why he won't respond to any of my calls or messages."

She was right. Even in the middle of relationship troubles, Jamie wouldn't go completely silent on his sister. Not after what they'd been through together, not after losing their sister, not after all the years of looking out for each other. The silence itself was the evidence that something was wrong. The silence was the tell.

"And did Luke say anything about Kain?"

"Not really. He just said that Kain never made it around. He said he hadn't seen him since last Christmas."

I felt something cold settle in my chest, spreading outward like ice forming on still water.

Luke said Kain never arrived. But Louise had sent Kain specifically to that house, specifically to check on Jamie. Either Kain had gone somewhere else—unlikely, given his purpose, given the kind of son who goes when his mother asks—or Luke was lying.

And if Luke was lying about Kain, what else was he lying about?

"None of this makes any sense at all."

Sarah's voice cut through the tension, sharp and clear through the speaker. She was right, from her perspective. The timeline was fractured. The accounts contradicted each other. Nothing added up in any way that made sense if you were looking at this as a normal missing persons case.

But I was beginning to see a different picture. One where Luke Smith—a man connected to things Sarah couldn't imagine, things that existed outside the boundaries of normal investigation—had reasons to make people disappear. Reasons that had nothing to do with relationship troubles or Melbourne or anything that would appear in a police report.

"No, it doesn't," Karl agreed.

He stood. The interview was winding down, the formal part at least, the part that would generate paperwork and case numbers and the illusion that normal procedures could address whatever had happened here.

"Thank you for coming in, Louise. Detective Lahey and I will write up our notes and open an investigation immediately. We'll keep you informed of our progress. I'm sure we'll be in touch very soon."

Professional. Proper. The words of a detective doing his job, saying the things you were supposed to say when someone reported their family missing and you couldn't tell them what you actually thought because you didn't know yet, couldn't know, weren't supposed to speculate out loud.

But his eyes lingered on Louise a beat too long. And when she said "Thank you, Karl," her voice cracking slightly on his name, I saw something pass between them that had nothing to do with procedure. Recognition. Shared history. Maybe something more.

"Detective Lahey will take you to a more comfortable room where you can write up your formal statement."

Louise turned to Sarah. I caught the reluctance in her expression—she didn't want to repeat everything to someone who wasn't Karl, someone who didn't share their history, someone who would just be another detective asking the same questions without understanding what lay beneath them.

Karl placed a hand on her shoulder. Professional. Reassuring. But we all knew it was more than that. We all knew, even if nobody was willing to say it out loud.

"Don't worry. We'll find them. Both of them."

A promise he had no business making. The kind of promise you make when you can't bear to leave someone without hope, when the alternative—telling them you have no idea what happened or whether you'll ever be able to help—is too cruel to speak. I understood why he'd made it. Some promises weren't about probability. They were about need. About giving someone something to hold onto while everything else fell apart.

Sarah led Louise out. The door closed behind them, separating the interview from whatever came after.

Karl stood alone in the interview room, staring at the empty chair where Louise had been sitting. I watched his shoulders drop, watched the mask slip now that he thought no one was looking. His hand moved to the back of his neck, pressing against skin, fingers digging in like he was trying to anchor himself to something solid. His head dropped forward. His eyes closed.

He was rattled. Deeply rattled. The interview had cracked open something he'd kept sealed for years, pried up a stone that should have stayed where he'd put it.

Good.

Rattled men made mistakes. But they also told the truth—sometimes without meaning to, sometimes without realising they were doing it. The walls came down when you were rattled. The carefully constructed stories fell apart.

I turned from the glass and headed for the door.

Time to find out exactly how much Karl Jenkins knew about Jamie Greyson, Luke Smith, and the things that connected them. Time to see what he'd tell me when I pushed, when I asked the questions I'd been saving, when I showed him that I knew more than he thought I knew.

Time to show him the paper.

The door handle was cold under my palm. I turned it, stepped out into the corridor, and walked toward the interview room where Karl Jenkins was about to learn that his secrets weren't as secret as he'd believed.