Jessica

Jessica Viheart was not a morning person and had never pretended to be.

She'd tried, in her twenties, to be the kind of woman who got up early and did things — exercised, meditated, made a proper breakfast with eggs and everything. It had lasted about three weeks before she'd accepted the truth about herself, which was that she was built for the afternoon and simply had to survive the hours before it. She was fine by ten. She was good by noon. Before that she was just a woman moving through a house on instinct, doing the things that needed doing without any particular awareness of doing them.

The morning routine with Lucas had sorted itself out over years of trial and error into something she could execute almost entirely on autopilot. Alarm at seven. Lie there for four minutes pretending it hadn't gone off. Get up. Bathroom. Lucas's door — open it, say his name twice, the second time louder. Downstairs. Kettle. Toast. The sounds of Lucas eventually appearing at the top of the stairs and making his way down with the specific heavy-footed reluctance of an eight year old who'd been awake since five but had somehow still not come to terms with the morning.

"There's toast," she'd say.

"I know," he'd say, as though she'd told him something he found mildly offensive.

This particular Wednesday was no different to any other Wednesday. Grey outside. The kind of grey that wasn't threatening rain so much as just existing, sitting over the suburb like a lid. Jessica drank her coffee standing at the bench and looked out at the back garden where the grass needed cutting and had needed cutting for two weeks and would probably need cutting for another two before she got to it. Lucas ate his toast in four large bites, drank half his juice, decided he was done.

"Shoes," she said.

"I know."

"Bag."

"I know."

"Have you got your—"

"Mum."

She let it go. He was eight. He knew. He occasionally even remembered.

She pulled her coat on in the hallway and checked her phone out of habit — nothing urgent, a reminder from the dentist, an email she'd deal with later — and they left the house together into the grey Wednesday morning, Lucas pulling his backpack straps up as he walked, Jessica locking the door behind her and dropping the keys into her pocket and already thinking about the meeting she had at eleven and whether she'd prepped enough for it.

They walked the way they always walked. Down Arden Street, left onto Peel, past the newsagent that was always open no matter what time it was, past the little park with the broken swing that the council had been promising to fix since approximately the beginning of time. Lucas walked slightly ahead of her the way he'd started doing this year, that new thing where he wanted a bit of distance, not so much that it was pointed but enough that you could see the shape of who he was becoming. She let him have it. It was fine. It was normal. She just didn't love it yet.

"Did you finish the reading?" she asked.

"Mostly."

"What does mostly mean?"

"Like most of it."

"Lucas."

"It was boring."

"That's not the point of reading."

He glanced back at her over his shoulder with an expression that suggested he fundamentally disagreed but had chosen not to spend energy on it. She almost smiled. He was so much like her in some ways and so entirely his own person in others and the combination of those two things was constantly catching her off guard.

They turned onto Whitmore Street and she could already see the school gates two blocks ahead, the slow drift of other parents and kids converging from different directions, the particular controlled chaos of a school run. She knew these streets well enough now that they existed in her body more than her mind — she didn't think about the route, just walked it, her feet knowing every cracked bit of pavement, every stretch where the trees grew over the path and made it dark even on bright mornings.

It was just past the post box on the corner that she saw Gerald.

He was coming from the opposite direction, Isla half a step ahead of him the same way Lucas was ahead of her — some universal eight year old instinct, clearly — his collar turned up against the cold even though it wasn't that cold. Gerald Kneckhard was the kind of man who looked like he worried even when he didn't have anything specific to worry about, a sort of permanent low-level anxiety written into the way he held himself, the slight tension in his shoulders, the way his eyes moved. She'd known him for about eighteen months, since the kids had started walking home together, and in that time she'd had maybe a dozen real conversations with him and twice as many brief ones. He was kind. He was careful. He asked how you were and actually waited for the answer, which she'd learned early on was rarer than it should be.

"Morning," she said as they fell into step beside each other, the kids drifting ahead.

"Morning." He glanced at the sky. "Grim, isn't it."

"It'll clear up."

"That's what you said Monday."

"And it did, eventually."

"By four o'clock."

"Still cleared up." She pulled her coat tighter. "Isla all right? She looks tired."

Gerald made a sound that wasn't quite agreement and wasn't quite disagreement. "She's been a bit off this week. Not sleeping great. She keeps saying she's fine so." He shrugged in that way parents shrug when they know something isn't quite right and don't have the information to do anything about it yet.

"Lucas has been the same. I think there's something going around."

"Probably." He didn't sound entirely convinced. "How are you anyway? The meeting thing still happening?"

"The eleven o'clock? Yeah. I think I'm ready. I think."

"You'll be fine."

"Very confident of you."

"I've got no basis for that whatsoever," he said, and she laughed, and for a moment it was just two tired parents on a grey Wednesday morning making it work, which was really all any of them were ever doing.

The school gates came into view properly now. There was already a cluster of parents gathered near the entrance, the kids breaking off and gravitating toward each other in that fast, instinctive way they had, friendship groups assembling themselves without any apparent effort. Lucas picked up his pace, the distance between them widening, and she let him go, watched him join Oliver Blair near the bins — Oliver with his mum's dark hair and his dad's laugh, always just slightly louder than everyone else — and then Charlie Sinclair materialising from somewhere to Jessica's left, the three of them immediately mid-conversation about something she couldn't hear.

She stood with Gerald just inside the gate. He was watching Isla find her friends too, that same slight tension in his shoulders she'd noticed earlier.

It was Oliver who started it. She saw it the way you see things in your peripheral vision, not quite directly but enough — a shift in the shape of the group, the boys angling themselves in a particular way, Lucas and Charlie moving slightly apart to reveal the smaller figure who'd been standing nearby, near enough to be hopeful, too far to be included.

Jackson Cooper.

She knew him mostly by sight. Quiet boy. Always slightly separate from the others even when he was near them, like there was an invisible membrane between him and the group that let him observe but not quite join. She'd noticed it before without paying it much attention — kids sorted themselves out, they had their in-groups and their out-groups, it was part of how they learned to navigate things. She'd told herself that. It was probably true.

Oliver said something she couldn't hear.

Lucas laughed.

Jackson looked at the ground.

It was so quick. That was the thing she'd come back to later, on the nights when it would find her at two in the morning and sit on her chest. It was so quick and so ordinary-looking from a distance that there was a version of it where nothing had happened at all. Just boys. Just the noise and shuffle of a school morning. Just kids being kids in all the ways that phrase was used to let you off the hook for things you'd seen and walked away from.

Charlie said something to Lucas — she caught Lucas's expression shift, delighted, conspiratorial — and the three of them moved away from Jackson as a unit, not dramatically, not cruelly enough to be reported, just with that casual exclusion that was somehow worse than cruelty because it didn't leave a mark you could point to. Jackson stood where he was. He didn't follow them. He watched them go with an expression she didn't let herself look at for long enough to read, and then he turned and walked toward the classroom block alone.

Jessica looked at her shoes.

Beside her Gerald had his phone out, checking something. He hadn't seen it, or if he had he was doing the same thing she was doing, which was deciding very efficiently not to have seen it.

"Right," she said. "I'd better—"

"Yeah, me too." Gerald pocketed his phone. "Good luck with the eleven o'clock."

"Thanks." She paused. "See you this afternoon?"

"Should be." He glanced back toward the classroom block for just a moment, something crossing his face she couldn't name. "Have a good day."

She said the same and they went their separate ways, she back through the gate and down Whitmore Street, pulling her coat around her, thinking about the meeting and the prep she still needed to do and whether Lucas had remembered his library book.

She did not think about Jackson Cooper.

She would. Eventually. In the way you eventually think about all the things you've filed under not my problem and kids will sort it out and I'm sure it's fine. But not yet. Not on a grey Wednesday morning with an eleven o'clock meeting and a coffee that needed finishing and a whole ordinary day stretching out ahead of her.

She turned onto Peel Street and walked past the newsagent and the park with the broken swing and didn't think about the boy standing alone watching her son walk away from him.

She went home.

She sat at the kitchen table with her laptop and her coffee and her notes for the meeting and she worked, and the house was quiet around her the way it was only ever quiet when Lucas wasn't in it, and outside the sky stayed grey and still and gave nothing away.

By lunchtime she'd forgotten the morning almost entirely.

It would come back to her.

Everything came back, in the end.

She picked Lucas up at three fifteen.

He came out mid-sentence with Oliver, the two of them finishing some conversation that had apparently been going all day, Lucas with his backpack hanging off one shoulder the way she'd asked him approximately four hundred times not to carry it. He saw her and peeled off from Oliver with a quick see ya and jogged over, and she felt the small reliable warmth of that — that he still jogged over, that she was still the person he moved toward at the end of the day.

"Good day?" she said.

"It was all right." He fell into step beside her. "We did fractions."

"Fun."

"It wasn't."

"No, I know."

They walked. She waited. Lucas talked when he wanted to talk and there was no point trying to accelerate it. After about half a block he said, "Oliver's having people over on Saturday. Can I go?"

"Probably. I'll check with Grace."

"Can you check tonight?"

"I'll check when I get a chance."

He accepted this with moderate patience. They turned onto Arden Street. She could see their house from here, the light she'd left on in the hall visible through the glass panel beside the door.

"Was Jackson at school today?" she asked. She wasn't sure why she asked it. It arrived before she'd decided to say it.

Lucas shrugged. "Yeah."

"He walked home alone, did he?"

Another shrug. Smaller this time. "I don't know. I guess."

She didn't push it. They reached the house and she got her keys out and Lucas was already talking about something else, something about Oliver's PlayStation, and she unlocked the door and they went inside and the day folded itself up and put itself away.

She made dinner. She helped Lucas with his homework — the fractions, which were not fun, he was right about that. She ran his bath and listened to him complain about getting out of it and then helped him find his pyjamas and sat on the edge of his bed while he settled, one arm hanging off the mattress the way it always was.

"Night, bud," she said.

"Night." His eyes were already closing. Then: "Mum?"

"Yeah?"

A pause. She waited.

"Nothing," he said. "Never mind."

She turned his light off and pulled his door almost closed and stood on the landing for a moment in the quiet of the house.

She went downstairs.

She ate standing at the bench. She turned the television on. She sat on the couch in the particular way she sat on the couch on weeknights, half watching, half somewhere else, the day slowly leaving her body.

Her phone was on the cushion beside her.

It didn't buzz that night.

Not yet.