Deep Wate - Sarah Epstein Page 0,76

faded couch on the other side of the glass. It’s been overturned, cushions flung into various corners of the room.

‘What …?’ I shove against the door with my shoulder, managing to nudge the couch out of the way. There are papers strewn all over the floor, the small side table and magazines knocked to one side. Luisa’s cup of pens has been upended across the computer keyboard, but the computer seems otherwise untouched. The door into our residence is wide open. I can see all the way through to the back door of our unit, which is also ajar.

With a sinking feeling, I realise somebody has burgled us while Luisa’s been outside in the garden.

I check the top drawer of the desk where we keep the cash box. It’s still safely locked. Moving through into our unit, I brace myself for a missing TV or microwave, the cupboards ransacked and drawers emptied. Everything is exactly how I left it that morning.

From what I can tell, nothing has been taken.

It’s only as I’m walking back into the office that I notice a sheet of paper pinned to the door of our unit. It flaps lightly in the breeze blowing through from the back door.

One message. Only three words long.

LEAVE IT ALONE

One day before the storm

Please call me.

Can I come over?

Where are you?

Will you talk to me?

I’m worried.

I miss you.

Are you breaking up with me?

Mason’s phone had been chiming with so many messages from Rina over the last week that he was tempted to switch it off altogether. Instead he kept it on silent, just in case something came through from Tom. He worked long days at Stu’s workshop, came home and crawled into bed. Workshop. Bed. Workshop. Bed. Sometimes food. A shower. Workshop. Bed.

Something had shifted. Mason felt detached, and more alone than ever.

He let his eighteenth birthday slip by without a fuss, choosing to drink his first legal beer alone in a corner of the back bar at the Criterion. He’d followed it up by purchasing his own bottle of whisky for the first time ever, and hiking up to the bush hut with a sleeping bag so he could deaden himself without interruptions.

That night alone in the bush hut solidified a few things in Mason’s mind. He’d never felt a stronger pull to leave The Shallows and start over somewhere new. He’d taken the job with Stu Macleod to give himself options, and so far he hadn’t been brave enough to put any real plan into place. He’d managed to pay off the Subaru in the first seven weeks working for Stu, and since then he’d saved over eighteen hundred dollars. It was the most cash he’d ever seen in his life. Now that he was a full-time apprentice, he hoped to double that amount over the next month.

Mason’s phone chimed with another message. He ignored it, his fingers carefully peeling the blue envelope from the underside of his lower desk drawer. He hadn’t yet opened a bank account because he was too worried the bank might send him something in the post and his mother would find out. He’d considered hiring a PO Box in town until he found out what it would cost: over a hundred bucks a year. When you’d scrimped and saved the way Mason had been forced to, a hundred dollars felt like a thousand.

He hadn’t found his birth certificate yet, or his surname change documentation; he was worried his mother had lost everything. They had to be somewhere in this house, though, because they’d never lived anywhere else. He’d need them for when he was ready to hit the road. He pulled out his wallet and slid two green hundred-dollar notes into the envelope along with the rest. How much money would he feel comfortable with if he took off right now? Five thousand? Was that enough? Mason suspected the day would come soon when it would simply have to be.

As he stuck the envelope of cash back underneath the drawer he heard his bedroom door creak behind him.

‘Are you leaving?’ a voice said.

Mason jerked around to find Henry standing in the hall, peering through the gap in the door. He was wearing that green baseball cap he’d bought with last year’s birthday money. Lucky-7. Mason felt a strange attachment to it, like he’d wrapped and gifted it to Henry himself. It had been difficult to make that twenty dollars happen when they’d suffered through a particularly long and lean few months. It