"Did you see someone?"

"No."

"You answered very quickly."

"I didn't see anyone."

Eleanor tilted her head.

"Sometimes people outside are only people inside, reflected badly."

Daniel looked at her, and for one second his face softened with a strange expression: almost tenderness, almost apology, but before she was sure, he turned away.

"There's no one outside."

Michael was not convinced.

He had spent too many nights in desert camps to ignore movement in darkness. The outback trained the eyes differently. Wind moved one way. Animals another. People had an intention.

What he had seen had intention.

"I'll check," he said.

"No," Daniel said.

The sound came out too sharply, and everyone looked at him, so Daniel corrected himself.

"I mean, don't be ridiculous. It's New Year's Eve. The streets are full of people. Someone probably cut through near the fence."

"There is no easy cut-through," Jack said. "I made sure of that."

Ty replayed his video.

"I got something."

Daniel stepped towards him.

"Ty."

The warning in his voice was unmistakable, so Ty looked from Daniel to the phone, and for once, he did not make a joke.

On the small screen, the study window reflected the room. Behind Daniel's shoulder, something moved in the garden.

A dark shape, a person perhaps, or a branch moved by the bay wind, or nothing at all. Maybe it was perfect evidence of imagination going wild at night.

"That's going online," Ty whispered.

"No, it is not," Daniel said.

"It could get views."

"It could get someone into trouble."

"Who?"

Daniel did not answer, and Claire's face had become very pale, but only Michael noticed. Jack, naturally, noticed the whisky.

"Before this becomes a theatre production, can somebody at least bring a cloth?"

Georgia's voice arrived from the hall.

"Dinner is ready."

Nobody moved, and the announcement, so eagerly awaited ten minutes earlier, now sounded strangely misplaced.

Dinner, as if people could simply return to the table, as if glass had not broken, as if someone had not moved in the garden.

As if Daniel's face had not betrayed, for one unguarded second, that he knew far more than he intended to say, Claire stepped closer to him.

"Daniel, what is happening?"

He looked at her, and now she was sure there was love in his face, not warmth, not romance, but something heavier, older, and somehow almost unbearable.

"Nothing," he said.

And because Daniel Mason was not a man who wasted words, everyone understood he was lying.

Eleanor bent down and picked up a tiny shard of crystal from the rug. It was no bigger than a fingernail, and she held it against the light.

"Funny," she said quietly.

"What is?" Ty asked.

"The smallest pieces are always the sharpest."

She slipped the shard into the pocket of her turquoise scarf.

Only Ty saw her do it and wondered why, but he quickly forgot about it.

Because at that exact moment, Daniel walked past them all, out of the study and back towards the dining room.

"Let's eat," he said.

His voice had returned to normal, which made it worse, but as they always did, one by one, they followed him.

Claire remained behind for a moment in the study that smelled of whisky, glass dust and cold air from the open window.

On Daniel's desk, beneath one clear drop of blood, lay a sheet of paper covered in neat engineering lines. It was not exactly a drawing, nor a letter.

A plan -Claire reached towards it and then stopped.

From the dining room, Daniel called her name, and she answered as she looked once more at the paper, then at the closed drawer and at the window that was now closed.

​

"Coming now, darling," she said, but she was not speaking to him; she was speaking to the house.