We move through the house, room by room. No rush. No need to fill the silence. Just looking. The kitchen. The living areas. Outside, the pool sits still and blue, untouched.
The bedrooms.
Charlotte pauses in the doorway of her old room. I hang back, watching her look around at a space built for someone younger.
Something shifts in her face, then she moves on.
My room’s the same, pieces of a life that stopped at twelve. It doesn’t feel like mine anymore. More like something that’s been kept as it was.
Then we reach Mum and Dad’s room.
We both stop.
“So,” Charlotte says.
“Yeah.”
It’s bigger than the others by a long way. A proper bed. Space that actually works for two people. I glance back down the hall at the smaller rooms and try to picture us in them. It doesn’t fit.
“It would feel strange sleeping in their room.”
I nod. “Yeah. But it’s the only one that makes sense. We’re not eleven and twelve anymore, Char.”
She’s quiet for a second. “No, we’re not.”
“Those rooms belong to the kids we used to be.”
She looks back into the master suite. The bed is made, everything in its place—clean in that maintained, untouched way that says nobody actually lives here.
“I’ll buy new sheets when I go to the shops. But for now, I’ll strip the bed and wash everything.”
We open the windows and doors and let the house breathe. It slowly starts to feel less frozen in time and a little more lived in.
We’re in the middle of making the place our own—Charlotte remaking the bed, me clearing Tara’s and Dad’s clothes from the wardrobe to make room for ours—when the doorbell rings.
We both stop. She looks at me from across the room, and I look back.
“Probably Grandad,” she says. “Checking on us.”
Maybe.
I head downstairs and open the door.
The three faces on the other side don’t register immediately.
Then something clicks.
Quick.
Familiar in a way that reaches all the way back.
“Mate,” the tallest one says.
The voice is deeper than I remember, the voice of a grown man now, but I know it straight away.
Lachlan. Brayden. Jarrah.
We played footy. Rode bikes. Got into the kind of trouble twelve-year-old boys get into when no one’s paying enough attention. Then I got on a boat and didn’t come back.
