Claire Elizabeth Smith

July 27, 2018 AD

Approaching Zero

Claire returns to the outback at dawn and searches in widening spirals — the property, the mine shafts, the scrub, the ruins — her voice growing hoarse, her hands bleeding, the landscape yielding nothing but animal tracks and silence. By mid-morning the mathematics are inescapable: she cannot find two children alone in a landscape measured in thousands of square kilometres. But asking for help means explaining things she cannot explain. What follows is a transformation that begins with a nail brush and ends with a woman she doesn't recognise driving toward the police station.

July 28, 2018 AD

Arms Like Apologies

Rose wakes in the corrugated iron building after days of cold and hunger, her brother curled around her like armour. Then a sound that doesn't belong — tyres on dirt, an engine coughing its last. Claire is running before the dust settles. But the children who step into the light aren't quite the ones she lost, and the mother gathering them close carries secrets heavy enough to reshape everything that comes next.

July 28, 2018 AD

Bait Worth Taking

Dawn reveals what the darkness delivered. The note under Claire's windscreen wiper is a map — crude pencil on receipt paper, a route she's never taken, a destination circled so heavily the paper nearly tore. It could lead to her children. It could lead somewhere far worse. The only certainty is that the man who hunted her through the night wants her to follow.

July 25, 2018 AD

Barefoot on Glass

The back door opens onto cold and Claire walks through it without shoes. Across the frosted yard, the studio waits — the one place her body has always known what to do. But the barre won't steady her, the mirror won't lie, and the phone keeps finding its way to her ear no matter how many times she puts it down. When the two things she can't stop doing finally become the same thing, something is going to break. It won't be the glass.

July 23, 2018 AD

Between Refuge and Reckoning

The five-minute drive to her mother's house feels infinite as Claire watches the studio's hard-won peace disintegrate with every red light. Her phone sits silent on the passenger seat—a dark mirror offering no answers—whilst through the windscreen, the yellow porch light promises comfort she's not sure she can afford.

July 26, 2018 AD

Bin Night

Claire makes it home, but the six metres between her car and the front door become the longest distance she's ever crossed — because Gertrude is at the fence with a bin bag and a full evening's worth of questions. What follows is the performance of Claire's life, delivered to an audience of one who notices everything, and the cold arithmetic of what happens when the curtain finally falls.

July 26, 2018 AD

By Lunchtime

Claire wakes with something that feels almost like clarity—and a precise understanding of what the next few hours require. The fluorescent lights haven't changed, but she has, and by the time the psychiatric registrar arrives, she's ready to show them exactly who they need her to be.

July 28, 2018 AD

Child-Shaped

The doorway isn't empty. Claire is running before she knows she's moved, and for one perfect, airless moment the nightmare ends. But the children who step into the light aren't quite the same ones she lost — and the mother gathering them into her arms is already calculating the distance to Brisbane, the lies she'll need to tell, and how long before the boy watching her face stops pretending to believe them.

July 27, 2018 AD

Clean Hands

Claire sits in her car and works through the mathematics of her situation — and finds a path that requires becoming someone she doesn't recognise. What follows is a transformation: the shower she couldn't take yesterday, the clothes that say the right things, and a drive toward a conversation she's already rehearsing in her head.

July 24, 2018 AD

Cold Tea and Voicemail

The house is quiet. Too quiet. Claire stands at the kitchen window and watches the light change without understanding how long she's been standing there. The tea in her hand has gone cold. The clock has jumped forward. And somewhere in the hours she can't account for, the rooms have started to feel like they belong to someone else. There's a study door she won't open. A toothbrush that's gone dry. And a voicemail greeting she can't stop calling just to hear.

July 25, 2018 AD

Conversations Without Her

Past midnight, curled in a circle of lamplight, Claire's thoughts turn to all the people who must be talking about her—and what they must be saying. The town, the café, a lounge room in Adelaide: everywhere she isn't, she's certain she's the subject of conversation.

July 28, 2018 AD

Crunch, Pause

Claire wakes in her frozen car to silence so complete it presses against her eardrums. When she steps into the outback night to get her blood moving, she discovers she's not alone. Something is out there—something that doesn't run, doesn't hurry, just follows with footsteps that fall in a rhythm she'll never forget. The outback has rules about predator and prey. And Claire is about to learn them.

Dance in the Dust

Ask anyone in Broken Hill about Claire Smith and the answer is the same. The patient dance teacher. The devoted mother of two. The kind of woman whose composure makes a difficult room go quieter the moment she walks into it. Ask her sister and you get the same answer in a slightly sharper voice. Ask the woman herself, inside her own head, on a bad day, and the answer is a voice you already know.

July 23, 2018 AD

Dead Air

The taillights are gone. Claire is standing barefoot on her own porch, shivering under stars that don't care, watching a road that offers nothing back. The deadbolt clicks home before she remembers he has his keys. Her sister's voice fills the kitchen for eighteen minutes, then silence reclaims it. After that, there's just the phone — and a voicemail greeting that plays the same way every time, warm and professional, as if nothing has changed at all.

July 25, 2018 AD

Easier Than Staying

Sirens cut through the darkness, and Claire surfaces into a world of practised hands and professional voices speaking about a body that used to be hers. As the ambulance carries her toward fluorescent corridors she remembers too well, she finds herself facing a choice between fighting to stay present and surrendering to something that asks nothing of her at all.

July 23, 2018 AD

Empty Rooms, Full Questions

Claire can't stay still in the empty house, moving from room to room with Charlie trailing behind her like a silent witness. She pauses at closed doors—some she opens, some she doesn't, each threshold presenting choices she's not ready to make. The kids' bedrooms hold their own accusations, the lounge room shadows hide what she's not prepared to face, and Paul's study waits at the end of the hall with answers she might not want to find. Meanwhile, the clock keeps ticking, and something basic has been forgotten.

July 26, 2018 AD

Every Box Ticked

Freedom comes wrapped in paperwork—forms to sign, prescriptions to collect, crisis numbers to file away and never call. Claire accepts it all with the appropriate gratitude, but the phone in her belongings tells its own story: still nothing from the one person the hospital has been trying to reach.

July 26, 2018 AD

Every Corner

Claire hits the doorway at a sprint, her children's names tearing out of her before her eyes have adjusted to the dark. What follows is a search that takes her through every room, under every surface, and out into the scrub beyond the fence — a mother dismantling an abandoned property piece by piece while the afternoon turns to dusk.

July 26, 2018 AD

Everything That Fits

The decision is made, and Claire's body knows what to do before her mind catches up. Drawers emptied by the handful. A suitcase still wearing its Brisbane baggage tag. A stuffed dog. A purple blanket. A prescription hidden not to take but to keep from being found. Three lives reduced to what the car can carry. But the hardest part isn't the packing — it's what comes next, because collecting the children means facing the one person most likely to see straight through her.

July 24, 2018 AD

Fifteen Steps to Human

Surfacing through pharmaceutical fog, Claire discovers that her husband's silence has outlasted her escape from consciousness. With her trained body refusing simple commands, she must relearn the choreography of basic survival—each small act of getting dressed and standing upright a performance she's not sure she can sustain.

July 23, 2018 AD

Five Times to Voicemail

Claire dials Paul's number and hears his warm, professional voicemail greeting—the voice he uses for the outside world that doesn't know what he's really like. She hangs up and calls again. And again. As the minutes tick by and her calls go unanswered, Claire paces her kitchen with the phone clutched like a talisman, convinced Paul is sitting in some pub ignoring her deliberately. Charlie's water bowl sits nearly empty in the corner, but Claire has more important things to think about—or so she tells herself.

July 25, 2018 AD

Four Small Circles

The night fractures into anger and desperation as Claire cycles between voicemails that beg and voicemails that accuse. When the present becomes unbearable, older memories start bleeding through—fluorescent lights, locked doors, a voice saying things she's spent years trying to forget.

July 24, 2018 AD

Half Measures

Claire just needs to run a few errands. Normal things. Ordinary things. A woman in a car, driving through a town she knows by heart, stopping for coffee because that's what people do on a Wednesday morning. If her hands are steady and her route is familiar, then everything is fine. Everything is fine. The fact that she can still walk into a café and handle a small matter of business with perfect professionalism proves it. Doesn't it?

July 24, 2018 AD

Hi, You've Reached

The evening dissolves into a ritual Claire can't seem to break—call, listen, hang up, repeat. Hours vanish between glances at the clock, and somewhere along the way, the line between persistence and something darker begins to blur.

July 24, 2018 AD

Improvised Reunion

Claire drives to her parents' house to see her children. Rose watches from the window as the car pulls in too fast. What happens between the front door and the driveway is the same visit — the same hugs, the same questions, the same lies about where Daddy is — but the woman telling the story and the girl listening to it are living in two very different versions of the afternoon. One of them knows exactly what she's doing. The other one might be right.

July 24, 2018 AD

Improvised Steps

Claire returns to her childhood home to see her children, but the visit quickly reveals how many stories she's now juggling—and how closely her son has been listening. What should be a simple reunion becomes something else entirely when the lies refuse to line up.

July 26, 2018 AD

Just Up Ahead

Claire drives into a landscape that doesn't believe in landmarks, navigating by a twenty-five-year-old memory of melting icy poles and her mother's voice drifting from the front seat. Every wrong fork costs minutes she can't afford, and the afternoon is tilting toward dark.

July 26, 2018 AD

Lavender and Iron

Claire pulls into her mother's driveway with a packed car and a rehearsed speech, ready to collect the children and disappear. The curtain that's always open is closed, and behind the unlocked front door, every plan she's made—every plan she'll ever make—comes apart.

July 23, 2018 AD

Locked Out, Locked In

In the cold aftermath of Paul's departure, Claire stands barefoot on her porch, watching an empty road under the Broken Hill stars. Time moves strangely as she waits for headlights that don't come, her body registering the desert chill whilst her mind tries to process what just happened. When she finally locks the front door behind her, the deadbolt's click feels like punctuation—until she realises Paul has his keys, and the locked door means nothing at all.

July 24, 2018 AD

Midnight Counts to Nothing

Returning home to a house that feels like a stranger's, Claire confronts a night that refuses to end. As the hours crawl past midnight, her determination not to reach for her phone becomes its own exhausting performance—one she keeps losing.

July 23, 2018 AD

Mother's Capable Hands

Dawn's yellow kitchen hasn't changed in decades, and neither has her ability to extract truth. Claire tries to start with Sandra Fitzgerald, tries to make this about the studio, but her mother's steady gaze won't let her hide behind smaller grievances. Over weak tea, the real story fractures out in pieces Claire can't control. Down the hall, a closed door waits—and Claire discovers some thresholds even desperation won't let her cross.

July 24, 2018 AD

Muscle Memory

Claire wakes to a body that has forgotten how to be a body. Every movement — standing, walking, reaching for the tap — must be consciously willed, each step a negotiation between the woman she was yesterday and whatever she is now. But the world outside her front door doesn't know that. The servo needs visiting, the car needs petrol, and the people of Broken Hill are going to ask about Paul. The body remembers how to smile. Whether the woman inside it does is another question entirely.

July 24, 2018 AD

Neighbourly Concern

Claire returns home to find a neighbour waiting at the fence with pointed questions about midnight headlights, missing husbands, and a dog left out in the cold. Every answer she gives only seems to confirm what Gertrude already suspects.

July 25, 2018 AD

No One Left to Call

Fifteen minutes with a phone and Claire knows exactly who to call—the woman who always shelters Paul when he runs. But the conversation doesn't go as planned, and by the time she hangs up, the certainty she'd been clinging to has crumbled into something far more unsettling than anger.

July 26, 2018 AD

Non-Negotiable

Claire moves through the house with a clarity that feels almost chemical—cataloguing, grabbing, reducing three lives to what fits in a car boot. But collecting the children means facing her mother first, and she's already calculating which version of herself will be most likely to walk out the door with them.

July 25, 2018 AD

Not a Dollar More

The woman who found Claire in the studio returns with an envelope and a promise—she won't tell anyone what she saw. But Claire has spent a lifetime reading audiences, and something in Denise's smile suggests that keeping a secret and keeping a student might not be the same thing.

July 25, 2018 AD

Not in Adelaide

Claire calls Adelaide from her hospital bed, certain she'll find Paul at the other end of the line. What she finds instead is his mother — and a silence that dismantles everything she thought she knew. From a thousand kilometres away, Greta absorbs the accusations of a woman she's never met, biting back words that would only make things worse. The call ends without goodbye. Both women are left holding the same unanswered question — and the growing fear that no one knows where Paul is.

July 27, 2018 AD

One Direct Match

Claire walks into the police station and finds exactly what she needs — a new officer who doesn't know the Smith family history. What passes between them across the cracked reception desk looks like a straightforward missing husband report. But one woman is choosing every word with surgical precision, and the other, despite her inexperience, can't quite shake the feeling that she's only being shown half the picture.

July 26, 2018 AD

Past the Reservoir

Claire drives into the outback with blood on the steering wheel and her mother's last words for a map — past the reservoir, toward Stephens Creek, the old property. But Dawn's memory of this landscape is decades old, and the maze of unmarked tracks and identical dirt forks doesn't care about urgency. Somewhere out here, two children are waiting for someone to find them. The afternoon is tilting toward dark, and Claire is navigating by a twenty-five-year-old memory of a melting icy pole.

July 25, 2018 AD

Point It North

Trapped in a hospital bed while her mind calculates the damage she can't control—the ruined studio, the neighbours who saw the ambulance, the whispers already spreading—Claire finds herself imagining a car pointed toward Queensland and a sister with a standing invitation. But no plan can move forward until she finds the husband who still hasn't called.

July 23, 2018 AD

Porch Light

Five minutes. That's all it takes to drive from the studio to her mother's house. Five minutes for every thread of calm to pull loose. The phone sits dark on the passenger seat. The yellow porch light at the end of Wills Street promises something Claire isn't sure she can afford. But the empty house behind her is worse than whatever waits at that door.

July 23, 2018 AD

Refuge in Movement

When the walls close in and silence becomes unbearable, Claire flees to the only space that's ever been purely hers. In the cold studio at the back of her property, she loses herself in the vocabulary her body knows better than words. And when she finally returns to the house, drained and clear-headed, she makes a decision that surprises even herself.

July 24, 2018 AD

Rooms That Breathe

Hours slip away unnoticed as Claire wanders through a home that no longer feels like hers. Every room holds evidence of a life interrupted—belongings left behind, spaces that seem to watch her pass—and one closed door she isn't ready to open.

July 26, 2018 AD

Rosemary and Glass

Greta has been avoiding this call all morning, filling the hours with visits and schedules and the comforting rhythm of routine. Claire has been on her knees in a ruined studio, scrubbing at stains that won't lift. When the phone finally connects them across fifteen hundred kilometres, what passes between them is beyond anything either woman's careful preparations can absorb. By the time the line goes dead, both are holding a silence that demands something neither of them is ready to give.

July 25, 2018 AD

Seven Out of Ten

The psychiatric assessment arrives, and Claire knows this choreography by heart—which truths to offer, which to bury, how to appear just damaged enough to seem honest but stable enough to be released. But a casual mention about Paul's phone plants a seed of doubt about everything she thought she knew from the night before.

July 23, 2018 AD

Sister's Validation

Claire calls Amelia back, seeking the validation only a sister can provide. As the kettle cools and Claire paces endless circuits of her kitchen, Amelia finally says what she's been thinking for years about Paul—but the comfort of being understood comes with an uncomfortable question Claire isn't ready to answer: what happens next? With two thousand kilometres between them and an empty house around her, Claire faces the gap between knowing she deserves better and being willing to demand it.

July 23, 2018 AD

Small Absences

The bedroom window is still open, winter air pouring through curtains that billow like something breathing. Claire closes it and turns to face the room — and that's when the small absences start to register. A missing charger. An empty shelf. The overnight bag that was there last week and isn't anymore. The house has things to tell her, if she's willing to walk its rooms and listen. Some doors she opens. One, she doesn't.

July 24, 2018 AD

Small Town Choreography

Armed with the excuse of a quarter-empty petrol tank, Claire ventures into a town where every face is familiar and every conversation carries her husband's name like a reflex. Each smile and pleasantry becomes a performance she's not sure she can sustain—and a preview of the whispers yet to come.

July 25, 2018 AD

Somewhere Past Midnight

The lamp in the corner is the only light left. Claire sits in its shrinking circle and waits for something she can't name — and the waiting opens doors she's spent eight years keeping shut. The town is talking about her. Paul is describing her to his mother. The walls are listening. And somewhere between the voicemails that beg and the voicemails that accuse, a different kind of darkness starts bleeding through — fluorescent lights, a baby crying, a voice she's tried to forget. By dawn, the number she's been calling all night will deliver a different message entirely.

July 25, 2018 AD

Standard Greeting

The social worker brings practical questions about discharge and support, but she also brings Claire's phone—and an invitation to test what she thinks she knows. When Claire dials Paul's number and hears something she's certain she couldn't have heard last night, the ground beneath her begins to shift in ways no explanation can quite steady.

July 27, 2018 AD

Ten Paces

Claire returns at first light and searches in widening spirals — the property, the mine shafts, the scrub, the ruins — her voice growing hoarse, her hands bleeding, her body moving through a methodical routine that has replaced thinking. The outback doesn't negotiate, and neither does the clock.

July 28, 2018 AD

The Circled Square

Dawn brings clarity to the paper left on Claire's windscreen. A crude drawing, a winding route, a destination circled so heavily the pencil nearly tore through. The man who hunted her all night wants her to follow. The question isn't whether she will — it's what's waiting at the end of those scratched lines, and whether a mother desperate enough to walk into a trap is still walking into one at all.

July 24, 2018 AD

The Clean Half

Claire's search for Paul takes her through familiar streets where the ordinary and the alarming blur together without distinction. By the time she sits down for coffee, it's clear that whatever compass once guided her sense of proportion has quietly stopped working.

July 23, 2018 AD

The Dancer Stands Still

With Mack and Rose away at her parents' house, Claire finally confronts Paul about the emotional distance that's been suffocating their marriage. The argument escalates until Paul's response leaves Claire stunned and furious. As her sister Amelia's voice crackles through the phone, witnessing the chaos unfold, Claire stands alone in the gathering darkness, forced to confront a question she's been avoiding for years: does she even want him to come back?

July 26, 2018 AD

The Debris Field

Claire comes home to a house that remembers everything she's tried to forget. The stale air, the unwashed dishes, the tangled sheets — each room a catalogue of the days she lost. But it's the studio that holds the worst of it. Daylight turns the shattered mirror into a glittering debris field and the blood trails into a map of something she can barely remember doing. She scrubs until her arms ache, but some stains have seeped too deep. And while she's on her knees, the town is already making its calls.

July 25, 2018 AD

The Door Opens from the Outside

Sound first. Before sight, before sense — a dog barking, hands on her face, a voice she almost recognises calling her name. Claire surfaces into fragments she can't assemble: a cold floor, glass beneath her, someone saying words like "ambulance" and "pills" and "how many." She's been here before. Not this floor, not these hands, but this feeling — of being carried somewhere she hasn't agreed to go, of decisions being made by people who know better, of doors that only open from one side.

July 23, 2018 AD

The Evidence of Premeditation

Claire ventures into the freezing bedroom where the window still stands open, curtains billowing with winter air. As she closes it against the cold and surveys the familiar space, small absences begin to register—details that don't quite fit the narrative of a spontaneous escape. Charlie watches silently from the doorway as Claire pieces together a truth that transforms everything she thought she knew about tonight.

July 26, 2018 AD

The Good Patient

Claire wakes in her hospital bed knowing exactly what the day requires. She eats the tasteless breakfast, answers every question with the right blend of vulnerability and resolve, and watches each professional leave satisfied she's ready. By lunchtime, the forms are signed, the prescription is in hand, and the discharge lounge is waiting. But between the crisis numbers she'll never call and the medication she won't take, the distance between the woman they think they're releasing and the one actually walking out grows wider with every box ticked.

July 25, 2018 AD

The Grammar of Sanity

Claire wakes to fluorescent lights and the smell of a place she swore she'd never see again. The questions begin immediately — careful, clinical, loaded — and she discovers that some performances don't require rehearsal. She knows this choreography by heart: which truths to offer, which to bury, how to appear just damaged enough to seem honest but stable enough to walk free. She's done this before. She survived it before. But when someone mentions that Paul's phone is going to voicemail, something doesn't add up — and the ground she's been rebuilding starts to shift.

July 25, 2018 AD

The Number You Have Called

Dawn arrives with a different voice on the line—flat, automated, final—and Claire realises the door she's been knocking on all night has been bricked over from the other side. In the bathroom mirror, someone she's spent eight years outrunning is finally catching up.

July 25, 2018 AD

The Right Answers

Claire wakes to fluorescent lights and the particular smell of places where bodies are brought to be fixed or to fail. The questions begin immediately—careful, clinical, loaded—and she discovers that some performances don't require rehearsal; they're written into the bones of anyone who's been here before.

July 27, 2018 AD

The Right Side of the Desk

Claire walks into the police station and finds exactly what she needs: a new officer who doesn't know her history and won't ask the right questions. What follows is a carefully managed conversation about a missing husband, a meddling mother-in-law, and a trip to Brisbane — every word chosen, every detail calculated, every tear strategically timed.

July 25, 2018 AD

The Road North

The afternoon stretches and Claire's mind won't stop counting the damage she can't control from a hospital bed. The studio floor is ruined. The mirror is destroyed. Gertrude saw the ambulance. And somewhere in Broken Hill, the story is already being told. But a thought arrives quietly beneath the noise — Queensland. Amelia's house, her big pool, her standing invitation. Pack the children in the car and drive until the town can't see her anymore. It could work. It could all work. If she can just find the husband who still hasn't called.

July 23, 2018 AD

The Sewing Room Door

Dawn's yellow kitchen hasn't changed in decades. The kettle clicks on before Claire has finished her first sentence. Behind a closed door down the hall, two children who are supposed to be asleep are listening to every word through thin walls — and learning that grown-ups lie in the dark just as easily as they tell the truth in daylight.

July 26, 2018 AD

The Smell of Neglect

Claire bypasses her mother and takes a taxi home alone—she'll face those knowing eyes later. The house hasn't forgotten what happened inside it, even if it pretends otherwise, and beyond the back door something waits that she's been avoiding since she woke up in the hospital.

July 23, 2018 AD

The Sprung Floor

The house is too full of absence. Claire crosses the dark yard in thin socks, finds the key under the rosemary pot, and steps into the only space that has ever been purely hers. The barre is cold under her hand, but it will warm. Everything will warm. The silence that follows an hour of movement is nothing like the silence she left behind.

July 25, 2018 AD

This Time

With five minutes of privacy and a cracked phone, Claire makes two decisions: one to erase, one to connect. The call to her mother carries eight years of history in every silence, and Dawn's words leave behind a question Claire isn't sure she wants to answer.

July 23, 2018 AD

Through the Window

A marriage collapsing in real time. Claire and Paul circle each other in the kitchen, years of resentment finally erupting. Then Luke calls—needs Paul urgently, already bought the ticket. While Paul listens to Luke's "serious issues," Claire vents to her sister about her "bastard" husband. The window becomes Paul's escape route. Rose bushes become his obstacle. And by the time Claire reaches the porch, his taillights are disappearing into the night.

July 25, 2018 AD

Through Water, Through Walls

Claire surfaces into fragments—a dog barking, a cold floor, hands she can't feel herself holding. Someone has found her, someone is calling for help, but between the voice and the darkness rising to meet her, she's not sure which one will reach her first.

July 25, 2018 AD

Twenty Women Falling

Claire crosses the frosted yard to her studio, barefoot and barely conscious of the cold, seeking the one ritual that has always saved her. But the barre won't steady her, the mirror won't lie, and when the two compulsions she's been fighting finally merge into one, something has to shatter.

July 24, 2018 AD

Two in the Morning

The house is dark when Claire pulls into the driveway. She calls his name in the hallway before she can stop herself. Every light goes on. The dog goes out. The phone stays silent. By two in the morning, the only voice left in the kitchen is hers — cracking on a voicemail she already knows he won't return. And when dawn finally bleeds across the sky, she finds a different kind of darkness in the bathroom cabinet.

July 24, 2018 AD

Watercolour Surrender

As dawn bleeds across Broken Hill in shades of pink and gold, Claire watches from a couch she doesn't remember choosing, positioned perfectly to see an empty driveway she refuses to admit she's watching. When the morning light offers no mercy, she searches for a different kind of darkness.

July 26, 2018 AD

Why Wait

The phone rings with the last name Claire wants to see, and everything she held together at the hospital comes flooding out in accusations and declarations she can't take back. She sets a deadline—but standing in her ruined studio, she finds herself asking a different question entirely.

July 26, 2018 AD

Written in the Grain

Claire finally steps into the studio and finds daylight makes everything worse—the glittering debris field, the dark trails mapping a violence she can barely remember. While she's on her knees scrubbing at stains that refuse to fade, her phone delivers proof that gossip travels faster than floor cleaner, and the feeling of being watched through every window.

July 26, 2018 AD

You Were Never Here

Words become shrapnel between mother and daughter—accusations thrown from opposite sides of a grief neither can hold. Dawn is clutching something she shouldn't be, talking about promises and protection, and when Claire reaches for it the room changes in a way that can never be changed back.