Chapter 1: The Man Who Has EverythingLachlanThe speech ran nine minutes. I had rehearsed it in the car, in the shower, once in the lift with my eyes shut, and when I finished the room did what rooms always do for me. It stood up.Eight hundred people in black tie, applauding a building. Vance Tower. Sixty-one floors of glass the colour of a cold lake. Behind me the screen showed the skyline with our name stamped across it, and I thought, as I had thought all year, that it looked like a headstone.I smiled anyway. I’m good at that.Ten minutes earlier I’d stood in the wings with my father’s watch in my fist, squeezing it until the clasp left a mark. Eight years ago, before my first big speech, Kaelia had stepped in front of me and fixed my tie without asking. “Breathe, Vance,” she’d said. “They’re just people who want to be told it’ll be okay.” Tonight I fixed it myself. Crooked, probably. Nobody said.Briony’s hand slid into the crook of my arm before I’d cleared the last step. She

Chapter 3: Sunday LunchLachlanUncle Cormac cooks the way other men pray. Slowly, without talking, with his whole back.I stood in the doorway of his kitchen and watched him baste a shoulder of lamb with a wooden spoon older than I am. He wore the blue apron with the faded daisies. It was Aunt Maren’s, and he’s worn it every Sunday since the funeral, and in nine years I have never once seen him tie it in any way but crooked. Rosemary and garlic hung in the air so thick I could have leaned on it.“You’re letting the heat out,” he said, not turning around.“I’m standing in a doorway.”“Standing in a doorway is how heat gets out. Come in, boy. Sit. You look like something the cat found.”I sat at the scarred oak table, the same one where I did my homework at ten and learned to lose at chess at twelve. He put a mug in front of me without asking. Tea, too strong, two sugars. I haven’t taken sugar since I was seventeen. I drank it anyway.That’s the thing about Cormac. He’s seventy-one, a

Chapter 5: The Doctor Who VanishedLachlanI didn’t tell anyone where I was going. Not Marcus, who’d left three messages by eight a.m. Not Briony, who sent a single text, Feeling better. Dinner tonight?, and then a second one, a minute later, Everything ok? Not Cormac, who would have said be patient in that voice that makes a man feel like a fool for wanting answers.I sent my driver home, took the old grey Volvo out of the garage, and drove across the city alone with the folder on the passenger seat and the seat belt across it, because I couldn’t stand to see it slide.Marlowe Street is a narrow road behind the hospital district, all brass plates and awnings and the smell of cut stone. Specialists’ territory. People come here to be told things in low voices. I found the number halfway down on the left and pulled in under a plane tree, and for a while I just sat there with the engine ticking.Shutters. That was the first thing. Grey metal shutters, pulled all the way down over a groun

Chapter 7: The VoicemailKaelia's "Is work a bad man?" Wren asked, her mouth full of toast.I stopped with the knife halfway through the butter. "Who told you that?""Uncle Jett. He said you're going to work to be cross with a bad man."Behind me, Jett became very interested in the coffee machine. "Uncle Jett talks a lot for someone who sleeps on our couch.""Is it true?""Work is spreadsheets and boring phone calls. Nobody's bad."She chewed on that. She had Vegemite on one cheek and a look I knew, the one that said she'd caught me leaving something out. She'd had it since she was a baby, as if she'd been born knowing that adults edit."If he's bad," she said, "tell Uncle Jett to be cross too.""I promise."I kissed the top of her head and kept my mouth there a second too long, like I was memorising her. Honey and sleep. I'd stopped sleeping through a night the day she was born, and I had never once wanted that back.In the car, Jett waited until we'd cleared Palm Beach. "I only sai

Chapter 9: The NumberLachlan's Harold Carmichael did business the way he did: fast, and without apology."December," he said around a mouthful of rare beef. "The sixth. It's a Saturday. My people have already looked at the church.""It's March.""It was March. Now it's December.""We agreed last Sunday.""You agreed. With my daughter and your uncle. Nobody asked me." He pointed his fork at me. The private dining room on the fifty-first floor of Carmichael Shipping was all dark wood, brass and framed photographs of ships, a place built to make a visitor feel already trapped inside the hull. Below the windows, Circular Quay. Ferries, gulls, and a cruise liner the size of a suburb parked at the terminal like a joke.Gideon Marsh sat across from me, cutting a piece of fish into very small, very exact pieces. He hadn't said a word since the main arrived. He'd smiled when Harold spoke, and nodded now and then, like a man who'd rehearsed on the way over and was waiting for his cue. I'd bar