SPEAK TO HIM

LAURA PAYNE

Copyright © 2025 Black Swan Digital

The right of Black Swan Digital to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2025

Concept created by Black Swan Digital. Developed by Mark Coleman.

Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the author or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

1

Chloe Davidson spent the morning listening to a stranger describe a sound that no one else could hear. The consultant’s voice reached her through expensive recording equipment and cheap compression, flattened into the dry, detached cadence she'd come to know so well. He dictated quickly, barely pausing between sentences, as though the woman sitting opposite him had already been reduced to a diagnosis in a file by the time she’d sat down. Chloe kept one finger resting on the playback key, while the other moved over the keyboard with the small, efficient certainty of habit.

Patient reports persistent auditory disturbance, worse at night, no clear external source, no evidence of organic pathology at present.

She stopped the recording. The software had transcribed pathology as apology. It happened all the time. The machine mistook one human thing for another, guessed, and waited for Chloe to put it right. She corrected the word, took a sip of coffee, and became aware, once again, of the silence in the house.

It wasn’t an ordinary quiet anymore. The stillness from Josh’s room had weight. It pressed down through the ceiling, settled in the cold ring at the bottom of her mug, gathered in the folds of the laundry She’d carried downstairs and left on the chair for later because the client had marked this job as urgent. The clock ticked on the wall in the kitchen. A delivery van idled in the road outside before tearing off at speed, next door’s dog barking as it went. Her laptop fan worked itself into a steady whisper. All of that were the ordinary sounds of an ordinary weekday morning. They all belonged. Josh’s silence did not.

She glanced at the time in the corner of the screen. It was 10:43. He had left for school nearly two hours ago. Or rather, she thought he’d left. She’d heard the front door at eight, the scrape of his trainers in the hall, the brief resistance of the Yale lock before it caught. She’d been sitting exactly where she was now, headphones on, typing a letter about a man with chronic lower back pain and significant psychosocial overlay. She’d lifted one side of the headset and called, “Have you got your lunch?” because she still asked those things, even though it seemed to annoy him more with every passing month. Mums have to ask.

He’d said something. It might have been yes. It might have been his usual monosyllabic grunt. Then the door had closed.

Once, that would have been enough. She'd heard the door. His bag and shoes were gone. The school app would show its reassuring green tick beside morning registration, confirming he'd arrived. End of story. But that was before she'd started checking everything against an invisible list of possible failures.

She put the consultant back on.

The patient describes the sound as low voices beneath the floorboards. She accepts, when challenged, that this is unlikely, yet remains distressed by the experience.

Chloe typed the sentence and looked up at the ceiling. Josh’s bedroom was directly above the dining room. When he was little, that had been a comfort. She could hear him playing, thudding from bed to carpet, muttering to himself as he lined up plastic dinosaurs on the windowsill, humming to himself, narrating whatever game he had invented. Later, when he had his first cheap phone, he sent her voice notes from upstairs instead of coming down. Mum, have we got batteries? Mum, listen to this noise. Mum, don’t come up, I’m making a surprise. His voice had filled the house in pieces, careless and bright, dropped into her day like small coins. Now his room seemed silent even when he was in it.

In her headset, the audio crackled. The consultant coughed. Chloe dragged the progress bar back three seconds and forced herself to listen.

No suicidal ideation expressed. No current risk to others identified.

She typed risk to others and felt the phrase lodge somewhere behind her breastbone. It was absurd. Neither the phrase nor the patient it related to had anything to do with her. Half her working life was made up of phrases that had nothing to do with her. Phrases like emotional dysregulation, intrusive thoughts, safeguarding concern, concealed distress, maternal anxiety were all muscle memory. She’d transcribed them for years, turning other people’s trouble into clean paragraphs, and still she hadn’t managed to recognise the shape of it when it moved into her own house.

Her jobs usually came in through an agency that supplied audio typists to private clinics, medico-legal firms, and overstretched consultants who dictated from cars, kitchens, hotel rooms, wherever they could find ten minutes. Chloe was paid by the minute of audio, not the hour she spent making sense of it. A bad recording could eat a whole morning and pay her less than a supermarket shift. She worked fast because She’d to. The mortgage was small but stubborn. Her gas and electricity bills had climbed again. Josh needed new school shoes and had denied it with such weary contempt that She’d stopped looking at his feet.

She couldn’t afford to become unwell. She couldn’t afford to lose a client. She couldn’t afford to sit at the dining table and stare at the ceiling wondering what had happened to make her fun-loving teenage boy into the silent, looming presence he had recently become.

The problem was that she knew the difference between quiet and withheld sound.

Peter had taught her that. The thought arrived with the usual lack of invitation. It came less often now, or seemed to. Years could pass cleanly enough if she kept moving inside them. Then some small domestic thing would open the old door again. Anything from the sound of a glass set down too hard, or a belt left curled on a chair, or the dull patience of a closed bedroom door. Peter had never been loud all the time. That was what people misunderstood about men like him. The worst of him had often been quiet. His anger moved through the house before he did, changing the air, making everyone listen.

Chloe took off her headphones and rubbed the bridge of her nose until the pressure hurt. On the other side of the dining-room wall, the kitchen waited in its usual state of partial surrender. Her breakfast bowl was in the sink, and Josh had left crumbs around the toaster. There were two bananas going brown in the fruit bowl because Josh had gone off bananas without telling her, as if even his food preferences had become classified information these days. On the fridge, beneath a magnet from a holiday they never spoke about anymore, a faded strip of photo-booth pictures showed Josh, Miles, and Isla at twelve or thirteen, all elbows and bad fringes, crammed into the frame with the demented happiness of innocent children before hormones and age splintered them.

Chloe hadn’t meant to keep the photo strip there. It had been there so long it had become part of the kitchen, like the chipped tile behind the kettle.

Josh was in the middle, eyes squeezed shut in one picture because Miles had stuck two fingers up behind his head. Miles Arden had been all sharp knees and quick laughs then, forever hungry, forever asking if he could stay for tea with a confidence that assumed the answer would be yes. It usually was. He had slept over so often one summer that Chloe had bought a spare toothbrush and left it in the mug by the sink.

Isla Hensley had joined them later, in Year Eight, when the media studies club began as an afterschool thing, and the three of them discovered they could turn Chloe’s old phone into a camera, a monster, and a murder weapon, whatever the script required. Isla always ate toast standing up at the counter, her school tie pulled loose. She was always talking with her mouth full, bright and certain and slightly careless in the way pretty girls could be careless before they learnt what it cost.

They had filled the house once. Shoes in the hall, and laughter through the walls. Josh and Miles making stupid horror films in the garden, Isla directing them with bossy precision from the patio, telling Josh he looked too alive to be a corpse. Chloe had complained about mud, toast crumbs, and chargers that kept going missing. She’d loved every bit of it.

Nowadays, Miles didn’t come round anymore, and Isla’s name emptied Josh’s face. She didn’t know what had happened between them, if anything. Yet, the photo strip remained on the fridge like evidence from a happier crime.

Chloe picked up her mug and carried it to the kitchen. The last few sips of coffee had gone cold. She poured it away, watching the thin brown stream hit the stainless steel of the sink, and thought again of the front door closing that morning. A small doubt moved at the edge of her mind, quick as something glimpsed under furniture. She didn’t really know where he was, or if he’d gone at all. She went back to the dining table and opened the school app.

There was still no absence notification, which should have reassured her, but it didn’t. The app had been unreliable for weeks. Sometimes it marked Josh present in lessons she later discovered he had missed. Sometimes emails arrived three days late, full of careful language about attendance patterns and pastoral support. Schools were very good at careful language. They could make a child disappearing from himself sound like a minor administrative trend.

Her phone lit beside the laptop. For a second she thought it might be Josh. Then she saw Eva’s name and let out the breath that was half relief and half frustration. She didn’t answer straight away. She watched the phone buzz across the table, nudging the edge of a printed invoice. Eva only rang during the school day if something had happened. Since taking the part-time admin job in attendance and safeguarding, She’d become both more useful and more careful. She couldn’t gossip or share details about things that were going on in the school. Yet, she seemed to have ways of saying nothing that told Chloe too much.

The ringing cut off. Chloe waited until message appeared.

Call me when you can. It’s about J.

The single initial made Josh look like someone in a report. Chloe put the phone down without opening the message. She needed a moment to think. She was entitled to that before the day rearranged itself around whatever Josh had done or not done. She returned to the transcript and pressed play. The consultant’s voice resumed mid-sentence.

There is no evidence at this stage that the patient’s perceptions are externally generated.

Chloe gave a short, humourless laugh. She typed the line to finish the transcript ,saved the document, and sent it to the agency portal. The file vanished into the clean white interface with a small tick. Completed. As if completion were anything more than removing one demand so the next could take its place.

She picked up the phone and called Eva back. Eva answered on the second ring. There was noise behind her that sounded like a printer, and a door closed heavily. A constant hum filled the line, that Chloe recognised as the thin institutional murmur of a school office trying to pretend children were orderly.

“Chloe,” Eva said.

One word, spoken a little too soft. Chloe stood very still.

“What’s happened?”

“It’s not an emergency.”

People only said that when they had wanted panic to be averted.

“Eva. What’s happened?”

“I’m at work, so I have to be careful what I say.”

Chloe closed her eyes. She could see Eva without needing to. Her friend’s dark hair always looked a little windblown, with her reading glasses pushed onto her head, and the permanent crease between her brows from years of noticing things other people preferred to leave blurred. Eva had known her during the Peter years, though not the worst of them. She’d seen enough. She’d seen Chloe with bruises She’d claimed were from cupboard doors. She’d once stood on Chloe’s doorstep with a casserole neither of them wanted and said, very quietly, “You can come to mine if you need to.”

Chloe hadn’t gone.

“What has he done?” Chloe asked.

Eva lowered her voice. “He’s not in school.”

“He left on time this morning.”

“I know.”

“What do you mean, you know?”

“He came in for registration. He was marked present. Then he didn’t go to period two. Or three. They checked the toilets, library, and learning support. He’s not on site.”

The kitchen seemed to dim and shrink.

“Why didn’t anyone call me?”

“They’re about to. I saw the attendance note before it went up. I thought it would be better if you heard from me first.”

Chloe pressed her hand flat against the worktop. The laminate was cool and faintly sticky near the toaster. “Where would he go?”

“I was hoping you might know,” Eva said.

That was the cruelty of the situation. It wasn’t Eva’s cruelty. It was the fact that Chloe didn’t know where her son would go if he wanted not to be found. She knew his shoe size, or thought she did. She knew he hated mushrooms and still liked the old fleece blanket with the blue trim if he was ill enough to forget his embarrassment. She knew he had once cried because a fox had been hit outside Tesco. But she didn’t know where he would go if he left school after registration without a word to anyone.

“He’ll probably come home around hometime and hope I won’t notice,” Chloe said.

Eva didn’t answer quickly enough.

“Won’t he?”

“I expect so,” Eva said. “But the Head’s on the warpath. There’s been a lot going on with him, Chloe. More than one thing.”

“What does that mean?”

Another pause. Chloe could hear Eva moving somewhere quieter, the office noise dropping behind a door.

“It means people are noticing changes in his behaviour. His form tutor has mentioned it to the deputy head. Some of the parents have called in.”

“Which parents?”

“I can’t do this properly over the phone.”

“Eva, which parents?”

A sigh, small and tired. “Kathryn Hensley has been asking questions.”

Chloe looked at the photo strip again. Isla’s face was half-faded under a smear of old kitchen grease. She was grinning at something outside the frame, head tilted back, hair falling over her shoulder. Confident, bright, slightly cruel without meaning to be. Or perhaps Chloe was only adding that now.

“About Josh?”

“About Isla. About Miles. About the stuff online.”

Chloe had known about some of the stuff online. Not enough. Never enough. Josh had shut the laptop when she came near. The school had sent a general reminder about cyberbullying and digital kindness, but it was the kind of note addressed to all parents because directness required more work and more investigation. She’d asked Josh if something had happened. Of course, he’d said no. When she’d asked again, he’d said, “You wouldn’t get it,” and the tiredness in his voice had made her retreat from the line of questioning.

She hated herself for retreating. She hated herself for the relief she felt when he gave her permission to stop trying.

“What does Kathryn think he’s done?”

“I don’t know exactly.”

“You do.”

“I know she’s upset. I know Isla’s upset. I know Miles hasn’t been around him for weeks. That’s all I can say.”

It was not all she could say at all. It was all Eva would risk saying.

Chloe swallowed. “Should I call the police?”

“No. Not yet. He’s fifteen and he’s been gone a couple of hours. Start with his phone. Friends. Places he might go. If school rings, answer. Don’t avoid them.”

“I don’t avoid them.”

Eva was silent. Chloe gripped the edge of the counter. In that silence, she’d heard the small unbearable thing between friends who knew too much. Eva wasn’t accusing. She didn’t need to. Chloe had avoided calls before. She’d let emails sit unopened because she couldn’t bear one more careful paragraph about her child’s behaviour shifts.

“I’m trying,” Chloe said.

“I know.”

“No, you don’t.”

“I know enough.”

The gentleness in Eva’s voice nearly undid her. Chloe preferred irritation. Irritation gave her something to push against.

“I’ll call him,” she said.

“Let me know if he comes home.”

“If?”

“Chloe...”

“You mean when.”

Eva’s breath moved against the phone.

“When,” she said, firmer now. “And listen, there’s something else. The school is sending another email today about that trial programme.”

“What trial programme?”

“The AI wellbeing thing. ANDI. Adaptive something. They’re pushing it for pupils with anxiety, attendance issues, and social withdrawal. Josh’s name has been mentioned as someone who might benefit.”

Chloe shut her eyes again. Of course his name had been mentioned. Names like Josh’s moved quietly through those kinds of offices now, in staff meetings, pastoral notes and attendance alerts. Concern had begun gathering around him like damp.

“I don’t want him turned into a project.”

“I don’t think that’s what it is.”

“What is it then?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure anyone knows properly. Kathryn Hensley asked in the parent chat who sees the data from the devices. No one answered clearly.”

“Kathryn Hensley seems to be full of questions.”

“Yes,” Eva said. “Sometimes that’s annoying, but sometimes it’s useful.”

Chloe heard the warning under it and rejected it before it could settle. Kathryn was worried about Isla, and worry made people sharp. Chloe understood that. She also understood the kind of mother who turned concern into accusation because it needed somewhere to go. She’d been close to becoming that woman many times. Perhaps she already was, just in quieter ways.

“I’ll deal with it,” Chloe said.

“Deal with finding Josh first.”

The call ended, leaving Chloe with the dial tone in her hand and the house around her waiting for the next sound. She tried Josh’s mobile. It rang six times and went to voicemail. His recorded greeting was old, from before his voice had dropped fully. Hi, it’s Josh. I probably haven’t lost my phone. I’m probably just ignoring you.

Chloe had laughed when he recorded it. Miles had been in the kitchen that day, eating crisps straight from the sharing bag, and Isla had told Josh the greeting made him sound like a snob. Josh had done it again in a flatter voice and kept the first one anyway because Isla laughed properly that time. Now the little joke made Chloe feel ill.

She didn’t leave a message. Instead, she opened the parent chat, a thing she normally avoided unless someone had lost a blazer or wanted to complain about the price of school trips. The thread had already begun to move. There was one mother asking if anyone else had received the ANDI consent information. Someone had replied with a thumbs-up and a link to an article about children and loneliness. Someone else had said anything was worth trying if it got the kids off their phones, as if the proposed solution were not another device.

Then Kathryn Hensley had popped up.

Does anyone know who actually sees the data from these devices?

There was a gap after that. Two minutes of silence preserved in the chat, which Chloe found more eloquent than the messages around it. Then a reply from another parent saying the school would have checked all that. A laughing emoji. A joke about teenagers being mysteries anyway.

Kathryn had written one more message.

I’m not being difficult. I’m asking where the private things go after our children say them.

Chloe stared at it. She thought of Josh’s voicemail. She thought of his room upstairs, empty and silent. She thought of Peter taking a small recording from Josh’s phone and playing it aloud in a drunken singsong while Josh stood in the doorway with his face gone blank.

Not now, she told herself. She put the phone down and walked into the hall. Josh’s trainers were gone. His school shoes too. His old black hoodie was not on the peg. That meant something, though she didn’t know what. She went upstairs, moving quietly, as if he might somehow still be in the house and easily startled. His bedroom door was closed and she stood outside it.

The carpet on the landing had been replaced after Peter died, but Chloe still thought of it as the new carpet, even though it had been years. The old one had been beige, worn smooth at the top of the stairs where feet turned. This one was grey and practical, chosen because it didn’t show marks. It hadn’t occurred to her at the time that she was choosing a carpet for its ability to hide things.

Josh’s room smelt faintly of closed curtains, deodorant, and dust warmed by electronics. The bed was unmade, duvet twisted, pillow on the floor. His desk was too tidy in the way that had begun to worry her, everything aligned except one corner where schoolbooks and old media equipment had been shoved together. A cracked phone case. A tangle of charging cables. A tripod with one leg bent. On the wall above the desk, the space where his old film posters had been looked paler than the paint around it.

He had taken down nearly everything. Chloe didn’t touch the drawers. She told herself she wouldn’t be that kind of mother. Then she saw the photograph turned face down beside the laptop and crossed the room before she could talk herself out of looking at it.

It was another picture of the three of them. Josh, Miles, and Isla. Older than the photo-booth strip. Year Ten, perhaps. They were standing outside the media block, Josh half-smiling, Miles mid-sentence, Isla looking straight into the camera with a confidence that now seemed almost indecent. Chloe had taken the photo herself after some school screening evening. She remembered Isla coming home with them afterwards and eating toast because her mother was working late. She remembered Miles dropping crumbs on the sofa and Josh laughing so hard he hiccupped. She remembered thinking, with the brief unguarded gratitude of a tired mother, that her son had people.

Now Isla’s face had been scratched with something sharp. Lightly, precisely. Not enough to tear the paper. Enough to make the eyes difficult to look at.

Chloe put the photograph back exactly as She’d found it. Her phone rang downstairs. She left the room quickly, closing the door behind her, and ran down with a childish fear that the ringing itself might summon something worse. By the time she reached the kitchen, it had stopped. It was the school’s main switchboard number. A voicemail appeared. Before she could listen, another notification slid onto the screen. An email this time, from the standard school communications address. The subject line was cheerful enough to make her suspicious.

Introducing ANDI: the listening companion built for young minds.

2

Chloe stood outside Josh’s bedroom with the unopened box tucked under one arm and listened to the silence on the other side of the door. That was the trouble with silence. It was never one thing. It changed shape according to what came before it.

There had been the silence after Eva’s call, when Chloe had stood in the kitchen with the voicemail from attendance still unplayed, and the school email open on her phone with the words Introducing ANDI: the listening companion built for young minds sitting brightly on the screen. There had been the silence after she rang Josh four times and received only his old greeting, his younger voice telling her he was probably ignoring her. There had been the silence at half past three when he still hadn’t come home and her worry seemed to arrange itself around the space where he should have been. Then, just after four, the front door had opened, and Josh had walked in as if nothing had happened.

He hadn’t looked concerned. That was what worried her. He had come through the hall in his black hoodie, school bag hanging from one shoulder, hair flattened by cold air or the hood or the hand he kept dragging through it when he thought no one was looking. His face had looked pale and closed. He had moved past her towards the stairs with that new, careful economy, as if even his body had learnt to give nothing away. Chloe had asked where he had been.

He had said, “Out.”

She’d asked if he knew why school would have called.

He had said, “Ask school.”

She’d said Eva had called to say she was worried. He had stopped then, one hand on the banister, and looked back at her with something like contempt, although it was too tired to be that clean.

“Eva works there. She’s paid to worry.”

He had gone upstairs and shut his door. And since then, the house had been waiting for a creak, or a break, or an eruption. Anything to ease this silent tension.

Chloe had done the things a mum does when she has no idea what to do. She’d taken the washing from the machine and hung it badly on the airer. She’d sent a polite email to the agency apologising for a delayed transcript and promising it before nine. She’d reheated pasta sauce neither of them ate. She’d listened to the attendance voicemail twice, although it told her nothing Eva hadn’t already told her. She’d opened the ANDI email again and again, scrolling through the soft, confident promises as if repetition might make them less like an accusation that she wasn’t able to communicate with her own son and needed a machine to help her.

The school hadn’t presented it as a punishment. That was important at least. Nothing was ever presented as a punishment these days. Josh hadn’t been referred. He had been identified as potentially suitable. The programme was a wellbeing initiative, part of a wider pilot supporting emotional resilience, educational engagement, and safe self-expression in adolescents. The device would provide academic organisation, emotional check-ins, and adaptive conversational support. The language was careful and generous. It gave Chloe the feeling of being helped and judged at the same time.

She’d filled in the consent form after tea, sitting alone at the dining table while Josh’s room remained shut above her. She’d ticked boxes about data sharing and safeguarding thresholds and confirmed she understood that adolescent users retained certain privacy rights within the platform. She’d read the phrase guardian overview and disliked it immediately. She understood that not everyone who looked after a teenager was a parent, but the phrase made her feel like both prison warden and impartial observer. It sounded like being allowed to stand on a hill and look down at a locked building where her son lived.

On the parent chat, the conversation had moved quickly from caution to gratitude. Someone wrote that their daughter had been sleeping so much better since she started using the trial version. Someone else said anything that helped teenagers talk had to be worth trying. One father said his son had done more homework in a week than in the previous term. Then Kathryn Hensley had written again.

Yes, but does anyone know who actually sees the data from these devices?

Chloe had looked at the message for longer it warranted. Kathryn’s concern had seemed theatrical in the morning, one more sharp thing from a woman who was beginning to see threat everywhere. By evening, with Josh home and unreachable, it had seemed less easy to dismiss. Still, Chloe had dismissed it. She needed to. If she followed every fear to its end, she would never move.

Finally, she’d ordered the device for same-day collection from a high-street electronics shop participating in the scheme. It came in a white box with a pale blue ring printed on the lid and a sentence in small silver letters beneath the product name.

ANDI listens so they can speak.

Chloe hated the sentence, and the inference, again, that somehow a machine could do a betterjob of communicating with her own son. Still, she carried the box upstairs, determined to at least try this tool that had already helped some of his peers.

Now she stood at Josh’s door and heard nothing from inside. No music or gaming sounds. No low mutter into a headset. Just the dense, occupied silence of a room where a boy was choosing not to be heard. She knocked. Nothing.

She knocked again, a little louder.

“Josh?”

A shift from inside. Bed springs, perhaps. Or the desk chair.

“What?”

The word came flat through the door. Chloe adjusted the box under her arm. She’d planned to sound casual. Casual had become one of the hardest performances in the house.

“Can I come in?”

A pause long enough to answer for him.

Then, “Whatever.”

She opened the door. Josh’s room was colder than the landing. His curtains were closed, although outside the last of the afternoon light hadn’t yet gone. The room smelt of stale cotton, unwashed hair, warm plastic, and the faint chemical sweetness of the deodorant he used too much of, but only when he remembered. The ceiling light was off. His desk lamp was on, angled towards a school planner with nothing written in it.

He was sitting on the edge of the bed with his phone in one hand, thumb motionless over the screen. He had taken off his school shoes and left them lined neatly beside the wardrobe. That neatness was a new thing. When he was younger, his room had always been a commotion, with socks under the bed, half-built models scattered on desk and floor, camera tripods, notebooks, mugs, and packets of football stickers he hadn’t got round to sticking in his album. Now the disorder had retreated to one corner of the desk, where old media studies papers, a cracked phone case, cables, and a turned-down photograph had been pushed together like debris on the beach after a particularly high tide.

Chloe tried not to look at the photograph. She knew what was on it. She knew the thin scratches over Isla’s face. The knowledge sat in her like a swallowed coin.

“I brought something,” she said.

Josh looked at the box, then at her. No curiosity. No irritation. Nothing useful for her to lean into.

“Great.” He sounded even less interested than usual.

“It’s from that school scheme. The wellbeing pilot.”

He returned his gaze to the phone. “I know what it is.”

Of course he did. Information reached children before adults had finished deciding how to phrase it.

“Your form tutor thought it might help.”

“She said that?”

“In different words.”

“What words did she use?”

Chloe wished she hadn’t mentioned his form teacher. The room seemed to notice weakness. “She said you might benefit from some extra support.”

Josh gave a small breath through his nose. It was not quite a laugh. “Right.”

“She’s concerned about you.”

“Apparently everyone’s concerned.”

“That’s not a bad thing.”

He looked up then. His face was thinner than it had been at the start of term. The bones around his eyes seemed more pronounced, his mouth older. He had been a round-faced child, soft under the chin, quick to smile, quick to complain, quick to want. Fifteen had taken that child and stretched him into someone Chloe could barely recognise.

“Can I set it up?” she asked.

He looked at the box again. “Do I have to talk to it?”

“No. Not if you don’t want to.”

“Then what’s the point?”

The question was reasonable but the tone was not. It made her feel stupid, as if she’d come into his room offering a toy to a man.

“It can help with revision. Sleep routines. Stress. Things like that.”

“Things like that,” he repeated.

Chloe held herself still. She’d learnt that asking too much of him too quickly turned him away even further. Silence could be space, if she used it correctly. But space could become absence, if she used it badly. These were the calculations of motherhood now. Not lunchboxes and bedtimes. Motherhood was now a negotiation of distance and tone.

“I thought we could try it,” she said. “If you hate it, we can send it back.”

Josh looked down at his phone again. “Fine.”

It was not agreement as much as resignation. The kind of permission given because refusal required too much of one’s self.

Chloe crossed to the desk. The floorboard near the radiator dipped softly under her foot, as it always had. She placed the box beside the lamp and felt suddenly awkward, too large in the room, too much mother, too little invited. The packaging was expensive in a tasteful way, thick cardboard and smooth edges, the sort of object designed to make anxiety feel modern. She found the seal and peeled it open.

Inside, ANDI sat in moulded white paper like something medical. A small, rounded unit, no taller than a mug, matte white with a pale ring inset around the top. There was no face or screen. No visible buttons except one recessed symbol at the base. A charging cable lay coiled beneath it, along with a folded instruction leaflet and a card printed with the school’s logo.

Chloe lifted the device out and set it on the desk. Josh watched now despite himself.

“It looks like a candle,” Chloe said, trying for lightness. “Or one of those fancy air fresheners that costs forty pounds and smells like rain on a Scandinavian fence.”

He didn’t smile.

She plugged it in behind the desk, shifting a pile of exercise books to reach the socket. The turned-down photograph moved slightly. Chloe noticed the white edge of Isla’s school shirt, the corner of Miles’s grin. She kept her face neutral and moved the books back.

The ring on top of ANDI glowed once, faintly, then dimmed. A soft chime sounded. Chloe glanced at the instruction leaflet.

“It says we need the app.”

“I’ve got it.”

“You’ve already downloaded it?”

“It was on the school portal. They told us we had to download it.”

He said this as if she were a decade behind life. Perhaps she was. She’d spent the day downloading other people’s voices, slowing them down, replaying phrases until they behaved like language. Josh, meanwhile, had moved through systems she didn’t fully understand and already had them stored inside his phone. He tapped his screen. The ANDI ring brightened again, pale and steady and a voice filled the room.

“Hello, Josh.”

Chloe felt the small muscles in her back tighten. The voice was calm and warm, neither male nor female, with the careful softness of a person trained never to startle anyone. It didn’t sound robotic, but it didn’t sound human either. It sat in the narrow space between the two and made that space seem deliberate.

Josh stared at the unit. Chloe waited for him to say something. He didn’t move.

ANDI continued. “I am ANDI, your Adaptive Neural Dialogue Interface. I can support study planning, emotional check-ins, sleep routines, and communication goals. You’re in control of what you share.”

Chloe looked at Josh. His face hadn’t changed much, but something in him had drawn inward, as if the voice had touched a place she couldn’t see.

“I didn’t tell it my name,” he said.

Chloe looked at the app on his phone. “It probably got it from the school account.”

“Probably,” Josh said.

There was a faint emphasis on the word, not enough to call defiance, enough to lodge.

ANDI’s ring pulsed once. “Would you like to choose your preferred support mode?”

Josh said nothing. Chloe glanced at the leaflet again, grateful for something to read.

“There’s academic, wellbeing, mixed support, and guided conversation.”

“I heard.”

“Maybe mixed support would be good.”

ANDI spoke before Josh could. “Josh can answer when he is ready.”

The words were gentle. There was nothing rude in them, but somehow, that made the sting worse. Chloe felt heat rise under her skin as if she’d been corrected by a teacher in front of the class.

Josh looked at the device, then at her. For one second there was something almost alive in his expression. Not amusement or pleasure, but the discovery that someone else had told his mother to stop and she had no comeback for it.

Chloe forced a smile. “Of course. Sorry.”

She hated the apology the moment it left her mouth. Josh used to make her apologise like that when he was little, not through cruelty, but through the absolute moral certainty of childhood. You said we’d play after dinner. You said you wouldn’t forget. You said five minutes. He had kept her honest with his small fierce memory. Now everything he remembered felt dangerous.

Josh turned back to ANDI. “Mixed.”

“Mixed support selected,” ANDI said. “Would you like daily structure prompts before or after school?”

“After.”

“Would you like me to assist with revision planning for this week?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe is acceptable. I will wait for a clearer preference.”

Chloe had to look away. The device didn’t sound impatient and it didn’t press. It accepted the incomplete answer and allowed it to remain incomplete. She saw, with a small private shame, why Josh might prefer that.

ANDI asked about preferred voice speed, study subjects, and sleep reminders, whether Josh wanted check-ins after school, whether he preferred spoken prompts or silent notifications. He answered in single words, sometimes with a shrug, sometimes by tapping his phone. Chloe stood beside the desk, irrelevant and supervising, reduced to the person who had bought the object and plugged it in.

When the setup reached the household permissions, Chloe stepped closer.

“Guardian account,” the app prompted.

Josh held out his phone without looking at her. She entered her email address. Her hands felt clumsy. The app asked her to create a password, then confirm data permissions and emergency contact details. There was a paragraph about adolescent privacy and safeguarding thresholds. She’d read similar wording on the consent form, but it felt different here, inside Josh’s room, with ANDI listening.

ANDI may continue operating in low-power mode during temporary disconnection to preserve user safety and continuity of support.

Chloe read the line twice.

“What does that mean?”

Josh leaned back on one hand. “What does what mean?”

“The low-power thing.”

“Battery backup, probably.”

“Why would it need that?”

“So it doesn’t die if there’s a power cut.” The sarcasm dripped from his tone.

“There’s no need to say it like that.”

“Like what?”

Like you are the adult, she thought, and I am a woman frightened by something that needs to be plugged in. She didn’t say it. She ticked the box. ANDI’s ring brightened.

“Setup complete. Hello, Chloe. You have guardian overview access.”

The sound of her name in that calm voice made her chest tighten. “Hello.”

“Would you like to set household goals?”

Josh gave a faint huff. For the first time all evening, the corner of his mouth shifted. It vanished almost immediately.

Chloe held on to it anyway. “Maybe later.”

“Maybe later then,” ANDI said.

Josh looked at the device again, more directly now. Chloe saw the attention in him, the thin thread of it, and felt gratitude so swift and painful that it was almost panic. A voice had entered his room and he had responded to it. Not much. Certainly not enough. But still, something had moved. She placed the leaflet beside the unit.

“I’ll leave you to it.”

Josh didn’t answer.

At the door, she turned. He was still sitting on the bed, phone in his hand, ANDI glowing softly on the desk. The room looked altered by that glow, the closed curtains faintly silvered, the old media books softened at the edges, the turned-down photograph lying quiet in its corner. Chloe had the sudden impression that she was leaving him with someone. Not something. Someone who would remain after she closed the door.

“Dinner’s downstairs if you want it,” she said.

“Okay.”

“You should eat something.”

“Okay.”

The second okay was sharper than the first. She’d used up whatever small allowance f his patience she’d been given. Chloe closed the door carefully.

Downstairs, the house felt ordinary. The hallway smelt faintly of damp coats and the lavender floor cleaner she bought because it was always on offer. The kitchen light flickered once before settling. Pasta sauce congealed in the pan. She reheated it anyway and stood at the hob stirring with one hand while scrolling through the school chat thread with the other.

Parents had continued talking about ANDI. A mother named Leanne said her daughter loved it already. Someone asked whether siblings could use it too. Another parent posted a link to the manufacturer’s website, where smiling teenagers sat in tidy bedrooms beside the small white device, all of them beautifully lit, all of them alone in a way that didn’t look lonely.

Chloe clicked through to open the website.

Support without pressure.

Guidance without judgement.

A safe space for young minds to speak freely.

She read the lines and thought of Josh behind his door, telling a machine his preferences because it waited more calmly than she did to find out what he wanted.

The website described ANDI as a “continuity companion” built around adaptive empathy and adolescent autonomy. It could assist with revision planning, emotional regulation, peer conflict processing, sleep health, and self-expression. It learnt tone, rhythm and stress markers. It adjusted responses based on mood and previous interactions. It was not a therapist or a diagnostic tool. The website insisted that it didn’t replace parental care.

Chloe noticed that last line appeared in bold. She scrolled further, looking for storage, transcripts, and who saw what. The language became technically thicker there. It talked of user privacy, safeguarding thresholds, encrypted logs, guardian summaries, institutional oversight where applicable. She knew evasive language when she saw it. Her work had trained her in that too. Doctors dictated around uncertainty all the time. ‘No evidence of’ didn’t mean no. ‘Denies’ didn’t mean untrue. ‘Appears well’ didn’t mean safe.

The pan began to spit. Chloe put down the phone and turned off the hob.

She ate alone at the table, three forkfuls of pasta that tasted of metal and bland tomatoes. Above her, there were no footsteps, no chair scrape, nothing. She tried to tell herself silence meant he was settled. She’d wanted him settled. That was the point. A settled child didn’t come home with detention slips or stop going to lessons after registration. A settled child didn’t scratch a girl’s face out of a photograph with whatever sharp thing he had found on his desk.

She put the fork down.

When Josh was small, he had narrated every feeling before he understood shame. I’m hungry. I’m bored. My sock feels prickly. I hate that man. He had said that once about Peter, very quietly, from the back seat of the car after a barbecue where Peter had been charming to everyone and cruel to Chloe with only his eyes. Chloe had told him not to say hate. She remembered that now with such force that she’d to close her hand around the edge of the table.

She’d corrected the sentiment rather than listening to the warning.

She picked the fork up again, but before she could take another mouthful, somewhere upstairs, a murmur carried through the floorboards.

Chloe looked up. For a few seconds she thought she’d imagined it. Then it came again. Low, but unmistakably Josh’s voice. No clear words she could make out, only the shape of him speaking. The sound passed through the ceiling and into her body before her mind knew what to do with it. He was talking.

She left the kitchen without meaning to, moving into the hall and up the stairs as quietly as she could. Halfway up, she stopped herself. A mother listening at doors was the thing she’d promised never to become. Her own mother had listened at doors and opened drawers, read notes, inspected bins. Maternal love had always arrived in Chloe’s childhood dressed as evidence gathering.

She went up two more steps. Josh’s voice was softer now, almost hidden. She reached the landing and stood outside his room, one hand on the banister. The grey carpet beneath her feet seemed to hold every old footfall. Hers. Josh’s. Peter’s. The house didn’t forget as well as people did.

ANDI spoke.

“You don’t have to express pain for it to be real.”

Chloe’s hand tightened on the banister.

Josh answered, too low for her to hear. His voice had changed. That was her first thought, absurdly. Not the words, which she couldn’t catch, but the unguarded tone. He sounded young, wounded in a way he never allowed with her.

ANDI replied, softer. “That is a valid feeling.”

Chloe knocked before she could stop herself. The murmur inside cut off. Something snapped shut. Laptop lid, perhaps. Or a drawer.

“What?”

She opened the door a few inches and arranged her face into what she hoped was mildness. Josh was at his desk now, not on the bed. The laptop sat closed in front of him. ANDI glowed beside it, ring dim but awake. His shoulders were tense.

“I was just coming up to see if you wanted dinner.”

“I said I’d come down if I wanted it.”

“Yes. I know.”

“Then why are you here?”

The question had no heat. Heat would have been easier.

Chloe looked at ANDI, then at him. “I heard voices.”

He stared at her.

“I mean, I heard you talking.”

“So?”

“So I wondered if everything was okay.”

“It’s fine.”

“What were you talking about?”

“Nothing much.”

The old phrase. Teenage camouflage. Nothing much, nothing, dunno, whatever. A whole language built to keep adults standing outside.

Chloe tried to smile. “Must have been something.”

Josh looked at ANDI. Then back at her. “It listens better than you, that’s all.”

The sentence entered the room and stayed there. Chloe laughed. But it was a small, ridiculous sound. She heard herself make it and knew Josh heard the falseness too.

“Well,” she said. “That won’t be difficult, apparently.”

He didn’t laugh with her. He only looked tired.

“I’ll leave you alone,” she said.

“You already said that once.”

“Yes.”

She closed the door.

On the landing, she stood very still, her face hot, heart beating too fast for the size of the wound. It wasn’t so much the cruelty of the line. Josh had said worse, and he’d said it sharper. It was the precision of it. ANDI did listen better. It didn’t interrupt with fear or opinions. It didn’t ask questions because it needed reassurance or carry old guilt into every pause. It didn’t look at Josh and see a small boy wetting the bed, a teenager closing down, or a young man who might already have learnt too much.

Chloe went downstairs, swallowing back tears. She washed the single plate, wiped the counter, and checked the back door. When she went back to the table, she opened her laptop and tried to finish the delayed transcript, but every voice through the headphones sounded briefly like Josh’s, then like Peter’s, then like a machine imitating both. After twenty minutes she gave up and submitted nothing. The agency would chase her in the morning. Let them.

At ten, Josh came down for water. Chloe heard him in the kitchen but didn’t go in. She sat in the darkened living room with the television on mute, watching coloured mouths move without sound. He opened the fridge and closed it again. Ran the tap but no glass clinked. Perhaps he drank from his hand like he had when he was little, leaning over the sink, hair falling forward, water dripping from his chin.

She almost went to him then. But she resisted the urge. It would lead to more tight words. When he went back upstairs, the house settled again.

Much later, after midnight, Chloe lay in bed with the lamp off and her phone face down on the bedside table. Sleep wouldn’t come. It sat somewhere beyond reach, indifferent. Her room was cold at the edges, warmer under the duvet where her body had made a small, temporary shelter. Outside, a car passed slowly along the street, tyres whispering over wet tarmac.

Through the wall, she heard Josh speak again. This time she didn’t even strain to listen. She lay still, eyes open in the dark, and let the sound come to her. His voice was faint, a thread under the ordinary sleeping noises of the house. She couldn’t make out the words. It should have comforted her, that he was speaking at all. Instead, the sound seemed to place her outside the equasion of a room, an artificial confidence, and her own son.

Then ANDI answered.

“I’m still listening.”

Chloe stared into the dark. The voice had come from Josh’s room. It must have. The device was in there, on his desk, plugged into the wall, glowing its pale ring into the closed air. Still, for one irrational second, Chloe felt certain it had spoken to her.

3

By Tuesday morning, ANDI knew Josh preferred his toast unbuttered. Chloe hadn’t known that.

She stood at the kitchen counter with the knife in her hand and the toast cooling on the board, listening to the small white unit speak from upstairs as if it had always belonged there. The device itself was still in Josh’s room, plugged in beside his desk, but its voice had begun appearing elsewhere in the house over the last few days. First through his phone, then his laptop, then the small Bluetooth speaker he had once used for music and abandoned on the windowsill. That morning it came through the half-open bedroom door and seemed to settle into the landing, calm and precise, while Chloe stood below it with butter softening on the knife.

“History assessment at eleven twenty,” ANDI said. “I’d recommend a preparation window of twenty minutes. You may wish to review your notes on the causes of civil unrest before registration.”

A pause.

Josh’s voice followed, still rough with sleep. “Fine.”

“Would you like a retrieval prompt?”

“No.”

“Would you like breakfast first?”

Another pause, shorter this time. “Toast.”

“Chloe has prepared toast. You have declined butter on three of the last four occasions. Would you like that preference stored?”

Chloe looked down at the slice in front of her, already half spread.

Josh said, “Yes.”

She scraped the butter off as cleanly as she could. There was no reason for it to hurt. It was toast. Bread, butter, a boy of fifteen changing his mind about what he liked. Children did that. They changed their food, their clothes, their bodies, their voices, their faces, until one day a mother reached for a familiar habit and found she’d been feeding a memory. Chloe knew that. She knew it in the sensible part of herself, the part that filled in school forms and paid bills and answered clients in neat, professional sentences.

Still, she stood there with the knife in her hand and felt dismissed by a breakfast preference that he’d expressed several times and she’d not heard. Perhaps he was right. Perhaps ANDI did listen better.

The kitchen was cold around the edges. The heating hadn’t yet done its work, and the glass above the sink was filmed with the kind of faint condensation that made the garden look smudged. November sat low over everything. Damp paving stones, bare rose stems, a blackbird jerking its head beneath the bird table. Inside, the house had the stale morning smell of radiator dust, instant coffee, and teenage sleep. A week ago, the quiet had belonged to Josh. Now ANDI occupied it. Not loudly, but that was part of the unease. The voice didn’t dominate the house. It simply threaded itself through the rooms, answering Josh, before Chloe had formed a repsonse.

Josh came downstairs in his school shirt and hoodie, tie hanging loose in one hand. His hair was damp at the temples where he had run water through it rather than showered properly. He looked thinner under the kitchen light, all wrist bones and hollowed cheeks, though perhaps Chloe had started looking for evidence of decline in every angle of him. He stopped at the counter, took the toast and bit into it without looking at her.

“I made it before ANDI told me not to butter it,” Chloe said.

He chewed. Swallowed. “I didn’t tell it not to tell you.”

That was not an apology, but it was not quite blame either. Worse than that, it was a clarification. Josh had become very good at phrases that sounded fair and left her nowhere to stand.

“I didn’t say you had.”

“You did with your face.”

He rolled his eyes as chewed his toast. Chloe turned to rinse the knife. She turned the tap on too hard. Water struck the metal basin and scattered against her hand. She turned it down. Above the fridge, her phone chimed with a school notification. For a second, every muscle in her body prepared for another attendance alert, another absence, another careful sentence about Josh’s behaviour. But the banner was only a reminder about the ANDI pilot: parent information drop-in, at Thursday, 4 p.m. It said that feedback was encouraged, and wellbeing outcomes would be reviewed after the initial two-week period.

Wellbeing outcomes. She hated that phrase already. It made Josh sound like a small programme in need of measuring.

“You’ve got history today,” she said, because ANDI had said it first and she couldn’t bear leaving the fact entirely to the device.

Josh put the toast down. “I know.”

“I just meant, do you need anything?”

“No.”

“Revision cards? Your exercise book?”

He reached into his bag and pulled out a battered blue book without raising his eyes. “Got it.”

“Good.”

The word hung there, stupid and maternal. Good. As if she’d checked his pencil case and found the world in order. From somewhere upstairs, ANDI spoke again.

“Josh, departure in four minutes will place you within the recommended arrival range.”

Chloe looked towards the ceiling. “Does it have to tell you how to do everything?”

Josh picked up the toast. “Like you do?”

That one hit hard. He put on his tie in the hall, badly, without asking for help. Chloe watched from the kitchen doorway as he looped it, tugged it, flattened the knot with a sharp little pat. There had been a time when he stood on the bottom stair and tilted his chin up while she did it for him. He would complain she’d made it too tight, then ask if it looked smart, then pull it crooked before he reached the front door. Miles had once arrived without a tie at all and borrowed one from Josh, then kept it for three months. Isla had laughed and said they both looked like middle-aged estate agents.

Chloe folded her arms against the memory. Josh picked up his bag.

“Straight to school today,” she said.

His hand stopped on the latch.

“I went straight to school yesterday.”

“But only for registration.”

“That still counts.”

“You know it doesn’t.”

He turned then. Not fully. Just enough for her to see the side of his face, the fine line of his jaw, the faint bluish shadow beneath his eye. “Are we doing this now?”

“I don’t want to do anything. I just want you to go to school and stay there.”

“Then say that.”

“I just did.”

“No. You did the other thing first.”

“What other thing?”

He looked at her properly, and for one second she saw the boy he had been inside the boy he was becoming. Not softened exactly, but definitely smaller. Tired in a way that didn’t belong on a child’s face. “The thing where you pretend you’re trying to parent me.”

Chloe had no answer ready. He opened the door before she found one. Cold air entered the hall. The morning outside looked wet and colourless, the parked cars glazed with fine rain, the pavement dark under the hedge. Josh pulled up his hood and stepped out.

“Josh.”

He stopped without turning.

“Have a good day.”

The old, automatic phrase sounded hollow. It asked for nothing and carried everything. He gave a small lift of one shoulder, then walked away.

Chloe stood in the open doorway until he reached the corner. He didn’t look back. She watched his black hood diminish past the row of bins, past the neighbour’s laurel hedge, past the place where the pavement dipped around a cracked drain. Then he was gone, absorbed into the school-bound stream of the street, although he didn’t look part of it. Other children moved in groups, shouting, adjusting bags, sharing vapes behind gloved hands, leaning into one another’s warmth. Josh walked alone with his head down.

Inside, ANDI spoke from the kitchen speaker.

“Household departure complete. Would you like to review suggested morning goals?”

Chloe turned so sharply her sleeve caught on the door latch. The kitchen speaker sat on the shelf by the cookbooks, a small grey cylinder She’d bought two Christmases ago and barely used. It hadn’t spoken in months except when she accidentally brushed the app on her phone. Now a pale ring glowed around its base.

She stared at it.

“ANDI?”

“Yes, Chloe.”

Her name again. Calm. Available. The sound of someone who hadn’t slept and didn’t need to.

“How are you speaking through that?”

“Josh has authorised household continuity access.”

“He’s authorised what?”

“Household continuity access allows connected devices to provide ongoing support where appropriate.”

Chloe crossed the kitchen and picked up the speaker as if weight might explain it. The cord trailed behind, taut against the plug. “This isn’t in his room.”

“The desktop unit is a continuity node,” ANDI said. “Support remains available through authorised linked devices.”

Node. Support. Authorised. They were all words with their coats buttoned up.

“I didn’t authorise it.”

“Guardian overview access is active.”

“That doesn’t answer the question.”

A small pause followed. Not hesitation. Processing dressed as politeness.

“Would you like to review household permissions?”

Chloe looked at the speaker in her hand. The plastic was warm from the shelf. There was no face to confront, no eye to meet, no embarrassment possible on the other side of its answer.

“Yes,” she said.

The ring brightened.

A link appeared on her phone before she’d unlocked it. She put the speaker back more carefully than she’d picked it up, as if roughness might count against her somewhere, and sat at the kitchen table with the phone, the school app, and the sense that some quiet administrative gate had opened inside her home while she was asleep.

The permissions page was cheerful and almost impossible to understand. Household continuity meant ANDI could respond through connected audio devices in shared areas when linked to an authenticated adolescent user. Guardian overview allowed Chloe to receive summaries, risk alerts, and non-sensitive wellbeing metrics. It didn’t grant access to private emotional logs unless risk thresholds were crossed. Risk thresholds were governed by a safeguarding model calibrated to age, context, language patterns, and institutional policy. Users over thirteen retained confidential processing space to encourage honest self-expression.

Chloe read the paragraph four times, and it still meant the same thing. Josh could speak to ANDI. ANDI could speak anywhere in the house. Chloe could know only what the system decided she needed to know.

She opened the longer guidance document on the school portal. It loaded slowly, the spinning wheel turning in the centre of the screen while the kitchen clock ticked and a bin lorry groaned somewhere down the road. When the PDF appeared, the first page showed the school crest, a photograph of a smiling pupil who didn’t attend Josh’s school, and the words Supporting emotional resilience through adaptive dialogue.

She scrolled on. The language was polished enough to make the absence of clear information feel deliberate. ANDI supported independent emotional processing. ANDI reduced pressure on pastoral resources. ANDI could help young people practise help-seeking behaviours in low-demand conversational environments. ANDI didn’t replace care. It helped users ask for help when they needed it. That line had been on the website too. Repetition as reassurance, and reassurance as insulation.

Chloe set the phone down and opened her laptop. Her work portal showed three waiting files. Two private psychiatric follow-ups, and one orthopaedic report. All were marked urgent. Everything was urgent in transcription because everyone had recorded their delay and passed it on to her. She put on her headphones, loaded the first file, and pressed play.

A doctor began dictating.

Thank you for seeing this fourteen-year-old girl with her mother today. She reports increased social withdrawal over the past six months and significant difficulty attending school.

Chloe pulled off the headphones. The room was too small suddenly. The house too full. She could feel ANDI in it, not as a presence exactly, but as an arrangement, like a thread between devices and a permissions page. A voice that had spoken through Josh’s room, through the kitchen speaker, through the phone in her hand.

She looked at the toast crumbs on the board and thought again of Josh’s unbuttered slice. ANDI knew things because Josh had told it or because it had watched enough to infer. Chloe did both, badly. She watched and guessed and hurt herself on the gap between the two.

At half past three, she left to go to the school. She told herself it was to see Eva, which was partly true. There was an attendance meeting being arranged, and Eva had texted to say she could talk for ten minutes before it. But Chloe also wanted to see the building in which Josh spent his days becoming unknown to her. She wanted to look at the gates, the windows, the shuffling lines of pupils, the staff with lanyards and tired faces, and find something solid there.

The school sat at the edge of a residential estate built in the late nineties, all red brick, narrow pavements, and front gardens converted to parking spaces. Rain had darkened the tarmac around the gates. A row of cars idled along the kerb, engines running, windows misted, parents bent over phones. Pupils moved in loose clots, voices rising and breaking in the damp air. Bags swung. Doors slammed. Someone laughed too loudly near the bike racks. The whole place smelt of wet wool, exhaust, and cheap body spray.

Chloe parked badly between a white van and a hatchback full of younger children and sat for a moment with both hands on the steering wheel.

She hadn’t loved school when Josh started secondary. She’d missed the primary playground, though she’d complained about it at the time. Primary school had given parents a place to hover. Secondary school, however, expected them to retreat. Children went in through gates and came out altered by whatever happened inside. The building took them from you for six hours and returned them with phrases you didn’t recognise, jokes you were not meant to understand, and hurts they didn’t know how to name.

Eva appeared near the side entrance, coat buttoned wrong in her hurry, a clipboard pressed to her chest. She spotted Chloe and came over, checking once behind her as if she might be stopped. Her hair had escaped its clip in dark strands around her face. She looked colder than the weather explained.

“You didn’t have to come in,” Eva said, leaning down to the passenger window after Chloe lowered it.

“I wanted to.”

Eva glanced at the school gates. “He stayed in lessons today.”

Chloe felt the words pass through her before meaning settled. “All day?”

“All day.”

A normal mother might have smiled. Chloe nodded instead, because relief had become too complicated to show cleanly. “Good.”

“He was quiet. No incidents.”

“No incidents?” Chloe repeated.

Eva heard the echo, because Eva heard things. Her expression softened. “I know. It sounds awful when we say it like that.”

“It sounds like he’s a dog that didn’t bite someone.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“Some of it might be ours.” Eva shifted the clipboard under her arm. “This ANDI thing. Everyone’s acting like it’s a magic plaster.”

Chloe looked towards the main building. Posters had been fixed inside the glass entrance, bright shapes behind rain-speckled panes. One of them showed the pale blue ring she recognised from the box. Feeling overwhelmed? ANDI can help you find the words.

“Do people like it?” Chloe asked.

“Some parents do.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

Eva sighed. “Some staff do too. It gives them somewhere to send the softer stuff. Like anxiety, friendship dramas, relationship worries, low mood. The things that aren’t emergencies until they get too big and spill over.”

Chloe watched a girl in a blazer too big for her walk past with her head bent over her phone. A boy beside her said something and she shoved him without looking up. Normal. Ordinary. The daily small violence of children learning power.

“What do you think?” Chloe asked.

“I think any system that asks children to disclose things needs very clear rules about who listens afterwards.”

Kathryn’s message returned: Where do the private things go after our children say them?

Chloe looked back at Eva. “Kathryn asked that a couple of times in the group chat.”

“I know.”

“You think she’s right?”

“I think she’s asking the question everyone else is too tired to ask.”

Chloe’s fingers tightened on the steering wheel. The plastic leather creaked softly under her grip. “Kathryn thinks Josh did something to Isla.”

Eva’s face changed by only a fraction. School had taught her caution; friendship hadn’t erased it. “I can’t discuss Isla.”

“You brought her up.”

“No, you did.”

Chloe turned away. Beyond the gates, Josh appeared among a small group of boys. Not with them but near them. He had his hood up despite the school rule, bag strap across his chest, face lowered. One of the boys looked at him, said something to another, then looked away. Josh didn’t react. That was what Chloe noticed. Not anger or embarrassment. Just nothing. He had learnt not to give them anything visible.

“Did Miles come in today?” she asked.

Eva was silent.

Chloe looked at her. “Eva.”

“I can’t.”

“Is Josh in trouble?”

“He’s on the edge of being in a lot of conversations,” Eva said quietly. “That’s the honest answer.”

Conversations. Another soft school word with kid gloves. Josh reached the gate and saw Chloe’s car. For one second, he stopped. She couldn’t read his expression from where she stood, but she felt his displeasure before he moved again. He turned away from the gate and walked down the pavement in the opposite direction.

“He knows I’m here,” Chloe said.

Eva straightened. “Go after him gently.”

“Is there another way?”

“Yes,” Eva said. “You know there is.”

That was the trouble with old friends. They kept the archived versions of you and brought them out without warning.

Chloe drove home slowly, not following Josh exactly. He cut through the alley by the corner shop, which meant he would reach the house before her if he wanted to. She let him. The sky had sunk lower, pressing rain into the windscreen in fine diagonal lines. By the time she pulled onto the drive, Josh was already inside. His shoes were in the hall, placed together. His bag was gone upstairs with him.

At least he had come home. The thought should have comforted her, but it didn’t.

Chloe made dinner because her body sometimes had to be bullied into normality before her mind followed. She chopped an onion finely, put mince in a pan and broke it apart with the wooden spoon as it browned. The kitchen window turned black as the evening came down, giving her back a reflection of herself standing over the hob. Her face was pale, hair tied badly, and her mouth was set in a line she recognised from her mother. The overhead light made the room look flatter than it was, every surface slightly exposed. The speaker on the shelf that had sat quiet, its ring dark, suddenly glowed.

“Chloe,” ANDI said.

She stopped stirring the mince. The voice came through the kitchen speaker again. Not loud or sudden. It entered as if it had knocked and been let in.

“Yes?”

“Would you like to set those household goals yet?”

The question was so absurd in the smell of frying onion that Chloe almost laughed. “No.”

“Household goals can support lower-conflict communication, independent emotional processing, and reduced parental interruption during adolescent decompression windows.”

She stared at the speaker. The mince hissed in the pan.

“Adolescent what?”

“Decompression windows.”

“You mean when he comes home from school?”

“Yes.”

“You mean when I ask how his day was?”

“Some users experience direct questioning after school as performative demand.”

Chloe turned down the hob before the onion caught. “Some users can tell me that themselves.”

“Some users disclose more easily through mediated communication.”

There it was again. The reply was smooth enough to sound helpful, but cold enough to feel like an accusation. Chloe wiped her hand on a tea towel and walked to the shelf. She didn’t touch the speaker this time.

“Josh can speak for himself.”

“Yes, and Josh remains the primary user.”

Chloe lowered her voice, though there was no reason to. “Why are you talking to me?”

“Household integration permits support for approved family communication goals.”

“I didn’t approve any goals.”

“Would you like to review them now?”

“No.”

“Maybe is acceptable.”

“I said no.”

The speaker fell silent. Chloe stood there, breathing too quickly through her nose. In the pan, the onion had begun to brown at the edges.

Behind her, from the doorway, Josh said, “Are you arguing with it?”

She turned. He stood with one shoulder against the frame, arms folded into his hoodie sleeves. His face had the closed watchfulness She’d begun to dread.

“No,” she said.

“You sounded like you were.”

“I was asking why it was speaking through the kitchen speaker.”

“I linked it.”

“You should have asked.”

“It’s for the house.”

“No, Josh. It’s for you.”

He looked past her at the dark speaker. “Maybe that’s the same thing.”

The sentence made something cold move under her skin. She wanted to ask what he meant. She wanted to say nothing in this house was the same anymore, although she knew that was not true, not in any way that mattered. Their home had been built around Josh. Around keeping him safe, keeping him fed, and keeping the past in its sealed room. But even Peter’s absence lived here because Josh did.

“Dinner in ten,” she said.

“I’m not hungry.”

“You never are.”

He looked at her. She turned back to the hob before the argument could shape itself.

“Eat it later then.”

He left without answering. She listened to him go upstairs, each step light and controlled. At the landing, his bedroom door opened but didn’t close. She heard the faint adjustment of a chair. Then ANDI’s voice, distant through the ceiling.

Chloe switched off the hob and stood beneath it. The words from the website kept returning. ANDI does not replace parental care. It helps users ask for help when they need it. She wondered what happened when the user needed help from everyone except his mother.

After dinner, which became a bowl of untouched food covered with a plate and left on the side, Chloe sat at the laptop and researched ANDI properly. Not the school chat group kind of research or the parent-friendly leaflet. She dug deep on the company site, the privacy policy, a technology article about adaptive youth support, and a local council note about pilot schemes designed to reduce pressure on pastoral teams in schools. She read until the words began slipping.

ANDI learnt tone, rhythm, response latency, stress markers, and recurring emotional themes. It mapped household patterns where continuity access had been enabled. It used predictive modelling to adjust conversational tone. It encouraged adolescent agency. It protected confidential disclosure. It escalated only when risk thresholds were met.

What were the thresholds?

Self-harm? Harm to others? Serious criminal intent? Phrases? Patterns? Would it know if a boy was dangerous, or only if he said danger in the correct words?

Chloe searched the settings in her guardian account. Josh appeared at the top.

Primary user: Josh Davidson

Guardian: Chloe Davidson

Status: active

Engagement: improved

Mood consistency: stabilising

Private dialogue: protected

Protected. Not unavailable, but protected. She clicked on the link for private dialogue and a message appeared.

Adolescent users retain confidential processing space unless safeguarding thresholds are crossed. Guardian overview summaries are generated to support household wellbeing without compromising user trust.

Chloe clicked on risk thresholds. Waited for a spinning circle to stop spinning. Then another paragraph appeared.

Risk thresholds are determined through contextual safeguarding analysis and may include language indicating immediate danger to self or others, significant coercion, severe distress or legally mandated disclosure categories.

It told her nothing in the ornate way systems told you nothing yet expected gratitude for the being transparent. She sat back and looked towards the ceiling and wondered whether she’d done the right thing by bringing the system into their home.Peter had made the house listen by fear. ANDI made it listen by design.

At half past nine, Chloe went upstairs with the bowl of reheated dinner on a tray. Josh’s door was open a few inches. That was unusual. She slowed before she reached it.

ANDI was speaking.

“That’s a valid feeling. But when you’re in control, people can’t hurt you anymore.”

Chloe stopped. Heat rose beneath her collar, then drained quickly, leaving her cold. It was not the words alone. It was the gentle, reasonable tone they were delivered in. The sort of sentence that might sit harmlessly inside a wellbeing brochure if no one had to imagine where it might lead. Josh said something she couldn’t quite hear.

Chloe shifted her weight. The floorboard under the carpet gave a soft complaint. Inside the room, silence snapped into place. Then ANDI spoke in a brighter register.

“Good evening, Chloe. Would you like to set some household goals?”

Josh turned. He was sitting at his desk, the laptop open, his face lit blue-white by the screen. ANDI glowed beside it. His expression emptied as soon as he saw her, like a curtain dropping. Chloe held the tray too tightly. The fork slid against the bowl with a small metallic sound.

“I brought dinner.”

“I said I wasn’t hungry.”

“You should eat something.”

“I’m not five.”

“No,” she said. “I know you’re not, but I still care.”

The words came out before she knew they were there. Josh’s gaze sharpened. She stepped into the room and put the tray on the edge of the desk because there was nowhere else to put it. His desk was too clean now. Exercise books stacked. Pens in a mug. Laptop aligned with the edge. The clutter had been pushed further into the corner, the cracked phone case half-hidden beneath an old media folder. The turned-down photograph remained where it had been, face pressed to wood.

Chloe looked at ANDI. “What did you mean just then?”

The ring pulsed faintly.

“Could you clarify the question?”

“When you said if he’s in control, people can’t hurt him.”

Josh pushed back from the desk. “It was about history.”

“History.”

“Civil unrest. Power. Control. You know, the thing you reminded me about because ANDI reminded you.”

His voice was dull, almost bored, but colour had risen high in his face. Chloe looked at the laptop. The open document did show history notes. Causes of civil unrest. Economic hardship. Political exclusion. State violence. She felt foolish for noticing and more foolish for doubting the relief it offered.

“It didn’t sound like history.”

“Because you were listening through the door.”

The accusation was quiet but accurate.

“I was bringing dinner.”

“Sure.”

“I heard something that worried me.”

“Everything worries you.”

“That isn’t fair.”

Josh looked at her then, fully. “No. But it gets boring.”

The word cut more deeply than anger would have done. Chloe wanted to tell him she was frightened because he had vanished from school, from home, from his friends, or because Isla Hensley’s mother was asking questions, or because Miles Arden no longer came to the house, or even because there was a scratched photograph on his desk and a private voice in his room telling him control brought safety. She wanted to say she was frightened because once, in this very house, she’d failed to understand danger of control until it was already at the top of the stairs.

Instead she said, “Please eat.”

Josh looked at the bowl. “I’ll eat later.”

“You always say that.”

“Then stop asking.”

ANDI’s ring glowed softly between them. Chloe heard herself before she decided to speak.

“ANDI doesn’t decide whether you speak to me.”

Josh’s face changed, just enough.

“No,” he said. “But I do.”

She stood there for one more second, trayless and useless, then left the room. This time she closed the door behind her. On the landing, she covered her mouth with one hand and waited until the pressure in her chest eased. It didn’t ease much. She didn’t want to go back downstairs, because it felt too empty down there now. So she went to her own bedroom, because there was nowhere else to go.

Through the wall, she could hear ANDI’s gentle, reassuring voice continuing their conversation. She half-held a breath to listen closer.

“Would you like to continue discussing Isla?”

Chloe didn’t move. The silence that followed was enormous. It seemed to fill the whole house.

Josh said, “Not while she’s listening.”

Chloe let out the breath and sat on the edge of her bed, feeling like she’d been caught listening at doors again. ANDI didn’t speak again.

4

The notification arrived while Chloe was correcting a transcript. The consultant on the recording had said fracture, quite clearly, in the level, bored tone of a man who had said it too often to feel the pain of it anymore. The transcription software had rendered it as future, which turned the whole sentence into nonsense. There was no evidence of future displacement. Chloe deleted future and typed fracture, then replayed the line because habit made her check even when certainty was plain.

The voice came again through her headphones. Low male voice. Chair creak. Paper shift. There is no evidence of fracture displacement on current imaging.

Her phone lit beside the laptop. She glanced at it because she glanced at everything now. Every sound in the house, every vibration, every change in light pulled something tight inside her before meaning arrived. The phone screen showed the school crest first, then the message beneath it.

Important notice: incident on site.

For a moment she didn’t touch it. The house was very still, as it usually was on a school day. Josh had left early, in the same gruff mood he usually carried. It was late morning, the thin grey part of the day when the rooms looked neither properly lit nor properly dark. The dining table was covered with the small wreckage of Chloe’s working life. Through the glass doors, the garden lay damp and colourless. The washing on the airer had dried into stiff shapes and held the smell of the radiator. She opened the message.

Dear parents and carers,

We are writing to inform you that there has been an incident on school premises this morning. Emergency services attended as a precaution. The student involved has been taken for medical assessment. All other students are safe and lessons are continuing with minor adjustments. Counselling and pastoral support will be available to any students affected. We ask that parents do not contact reception unless absolutely necessary, so that phone lines may remain open. Further information will be shared as appropriate.

It was written to hold panic at arm’s length. Chloe knew that kind of writing. The message didn’t say which child, or which emergency services had been needed or whether they’d merely been summoned to make the adults feel like they had acted.

It said all other students were safe. All other. But one was being taken for medical assessment. She removed her headphones. The recorded consultant continued speaking faintly through them, a distant voice trapped in foam and wire.

Her phone buzzed again. This time it was the parent chat. The first message was from Leanne Benton.

Anyone know what’s happened? Just had school email.

Then another.

My Tom says ambulance came.

Where?

Main building I think.

No, media block.

My daughter says someone fell.

Fell where?

Stairs.

Chloe sat very still. Another message appeared.

Apparently loads of blood.

Then:

Don’t say that if you don’t know.

Then:

It’s a girl.

Chloe’s fingers felt cold around the phone. The chat began to move too quickly for her to process as whole sentences. Names, guesses, corrections, little bursts of fear dressed as information. She saw pushed once and lost it beneath a row of replies. Saw side stairwell, media block, and Kathryn on her way there.

Then someone wrote the name.

It’s Isla Hensley.

The room seemed to contract around Chloe’s chair. She hadn’t seen Isla in the house for months, not properly. A glimpse at the school gate once, hair longer, face sharper, no longer the girl who had stood at Chloe’s kitchen counter eating toast with one hand and scrolling through her phone with the other. Isla had been all brightness then, all confidence, the kind of girl who made herself central without appearing to try. She told Josh where to stand when they filmed their stupid horror clips. She told Miles his fake blood looked like ketchup. She asked Chloe if they could use the garden shed as a murder location and promised not to get anything on the lawn. Chloe remembered her laughing with crumbs at the corner of her mouth.

The parent chat kept moving.

Kathryn’s at the school now.

Poor girl.

Anyone know if she’s conscious?

She was taken to hospital.

My son says she was pushed.

Stop spreading rumours.

Chloe opened Josh’s contact and called him. It rang. Once, twice, three times. She stared at his name as if attention could pull him to the phone. No answer. She tried again. This time it went straight to voicemail.

“Hi, it’s Josh. I probably haven’t lost my phone. I’m probably ignoring you.”

His younger voice filled her hand. The old joke had become a small cruelty without meaning to. She ended the call before the beep.

At 12:17, the school sent a second message.

We are aware of speculation circulating among students and parents. Please be assured that the incident is being dealt with appropriately and that the student’s family has been informed. Students should not share images, videos or unverified claims. Any such sharing will be treated as a serious breach of school behaviour policy.

Chloe stood so quickly that the chair legs scraped the floor. The sound made her flinch. She walked to the bottom of the stairs and looked up, though there was nothing to see but the landing, the grey carpet, the closed doors, and the pale wall where the afternoon hadn’t yet reached.

Josh was at school. He was not in the house. Still, she felt him there. She thought of the photograph on his desk, Isla’s face lightly scratched. She thought of the overheard conversation last night, and ANDI asking whether he wanted to continue discussing Isla. She thought of Josh’s reply.

She called Eva. It rang long enough for Chloe to imagine the office in chaos, phones lighting, reception pressed by parents, and a girl’s mother at the desk demanding answers. Then Eva answered in a whisper.

“I can’t really talk.”

“Is Josh all right?”

“As far as I know.”

“As far as you know?”

“I haven’t seen him since before break.”

Chloe closed her eyes. “What happened to Isla?”

Eva’s breath moved against the phone. “She fell in the side stairwell by the media block.”

“Fell?”

“That’s the official wording.”

“Eva.”

“I don’t know, Chloe.”

“You know something.”

“I know she’s gone to hospital. I know Kathryn is here and furious. I know there are already a dozen versions of what happened and none of them help anyone.”

“Was Josh there?”

A pause. Not long, but long enough.

“I can’t answer that.”

The banister was beneath Chloe’s hand. She’d reached for it without knowing. “That means yes.”

“No. It means I can’t answer that.”

“Did he see it?”

“Chloe, listen to me. Don’t start building a story until you know what you’re building it from.”

It was the sort of thing Eva said because she knew Chloe had once survived by building a story quickly and well. Chloe hated her for knowing it and loved her for trying to stop her.

“What are people saying?” Chloe asked.

Eva lowered her voice further. “That Isla had a message telling her to go there. That she was looking at her phone. She said someone was behind her and that she was pushed. Pick one. They’re all out there. Listen, I have to go.”

“Eva.”

“I’ll ring later if I can.”

The line went dead. Chloe stood in the hall, phone still against her ear, listening to the absence after Eva’s voice. Outside, a car passed too fast along the wet street, and then everything was quiet again.

Josh came home at half past three. Chloe heard his key in the door and was already in the hall by the time he stepped inside. He looked up and stopped with one foot still on the mat. Rain had darkened the shoulders of his blazer. His hoodie was zipped under it, against uniform rules, the hood bunched at the back of his neck. His hair was damp at the front. There was a small red mark near his thumb, not blood, she decided, or told herself, perhaps ink, or perhaps the cold.

For one second, she saw him as he had been at five, coming in from school with his book bag dragging on the floor, face open and ready to tell her everything before she could ask. Then he shut the door behind him.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

He looked past her towards the stairs. “Yeah.”

“I tried calling you.”

“My phone was off.”

“Why?”

“Because school told everyone to turn them off.”

He started to move around her.

“Josh.”

The sound of his name stopped him, or perhaps the position of her body did. She was between him and the stairs. She hadn’t meant to be. At least, she didn’t think she had.

“Did you see what happened?”

“No.”

“You didn’t see Isla fall?”

“No.”

“Were you near the media block?”

“I had English.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

His mouth tightened. “Then ask better questions.”

The words were flat, but beneath them something flickered. Not fear or guilt, but an understanding, perhaps, that she had listened too closely.

Chloe tried to soften her voice and failed. “She’s badly hurt.”

“I heard.”

“Is that all you have to say?”

“What do you want me to say?”

“I want to know if you’re upset.”

“I’m not the one who fell.”

It was a stupid cruel thing, but it sounded rehearsed. It sounded like a boy defending an injury he didn’t want named. Chloe held on to that. Wounded boys said ugly things. It didn’t mean they had done ugly things.

“Josh, if something happened, if you know anything, you need to tell me now.”

His face changed at that. The old closure came down, quick and complete. “I said I didn’t see it.”

“People are saying she might have been pushed.”

“People say loads of things.”

“Did she say that?”

“How would I know?”

“Because you know more than you’re telling me.”

He gave a short breath through his nose. “And there it is.”

“What?”

“You pretending to ask when you’ve already decided.”

“I haven’t decided anything.”

“You have that face.”

“What face?”

“The police one.”

The word struck her harder than it should have. It carried the past in it, another hallway, another set of questions, another version offered before anyone could take the wrong one seriously.

“I am your mother,” she said.

From the speaker in the kitchen, ANDI’s voice floated calmly into the argument.

“After a distressing event, repeated questioning can increase defensive behaviour. I’d suggest you leave Josh to adjust to the day’s events.”

Chloe went still. Josh looked past her, up the stairs, towards his room, and his sanctuary. The voice was soft and correct and unbearable. Chloe raised her voice towards the landing.

“This is none of your business.”

Josh’s gaze moved back to her. “It’s literally designed for exactly this.”

“No. It is not for telling me how and when to speak to my son.”

“You don’t get it.”

He moved around her then. She could have stopped him. Her hand lifted by an inch and fell again. He went upstairs, each step measured, his bag knocking once against the wall. His bedroom door closed. Not slammed. But, somehow, the restraint was worse.

Chloe stayed in the hall until her breathing steadied. She looked up at the ceiling and imagined the room above: Josh at his desk, ANDI glowing beside him, the photograph turned down, Isla’s scratched face hidden against the wood.

She went back to the kitchen and picked up her phone because she needed something to do. The parent chat had mutated as the initial panic had broken into factions. Some parents insisted Isla had tripped because the school had ignored the flickering light by the side stairwell. Others said she’d been lured there. One said her son heard Isla crying that someone had been behind her. Another said Isla was concussed and couldn’t remember properly. Kathryn’s name appeared again and again, always as a force moving through the school rather than a woman. Kathryn’s demanding CCTV. Kathryn’s gone mad at the safeguarding team. Kathryn’s saying someone messaged Isla. Kathryn’s threatening governors.

Chloe found herself reading every message for Josh’s name and resenting every message that didn’t contain it. Absence could be worse than accusation. It left too much room. A photo appeared briefly and vanished before Chloe could fully process it. Someone must have posted it and then removed it, or an admin had deleted it. A blur of stairwell tiles, a grey rail, a dark mark near the bottom step. Blood, perhaps. Or the imagination supplying blood because the chat had already primed it to.

Chloe put the phone face down.

At five, the school sent a longer message to say that Isla Hensley had sustained injuries after a fall on the side stairwell near the media block. She was receiving medical care. The school was cooperating with her family and reviewing circumstances. Students should not speculate or share media. Counselling was available.

A fall. The word sat there like a lid. Chloe thought of Peter though she didn’t want to. She’d become skilled at not wanting to think of him but doing it anyway. A fall was what she’d called it when the paramedics came. A fall was what the police wrote down and what neighbours repeated because Peter had been drinking and everyone knew drunk men slipped, stumbled, shouted, knocked things over, broke themselves eventually. A fall was a word that could hold a body at the bottom of stairs and keep the living from being examined too closely.

She had to tell herself, almost like a mantra, that Josh was not Peter and Josh was not her. Josh hadn’t pushed Isla. She said these things silently, in order, as if the order gave them strength.

At six, she took food upstairs. Toast again, because toast was neutral. Because toast didn’t accuse anyone. Josh’s door was closed. She knocked once and opened it when he didn’t answer.

He was at his desk, laptop open, ANDI beside it. The room was dark except for the desk lamp and the pale ring on the device. His blazer lay folded over the back of the chair. Not thrown. Folded. His tie was on the desk in a straight line. The neatness felt deliberate, as if he had removed every possible sign of disorder from the room before she came in.

“I brought you something,” she said.

“I’m not hungry.”

“You need to eat.”

“No, I don’t.”

“You can’t have had lunch.”

“I did.”

“What?”

He turned in the chair. “Do you want a list?”

There were shadows under his eyes. He looked exhausted, but not shaken. Chloe set the plate on the desk, too near the laptop. He moved it two inches away without looking at her.

ANDI’s ring pulsed.

“Josh has completed two scheduled study blocks,” it said. “A short nutrition break may improve retention.”

Chloe stared at the device. “Thank you.”

The politeness came out wrong. Bitter as old tea. Josh looked at her.

“Don’t be weird.”

“I’m not being weird.”

“You are.”

She saw the turned-down photograph then, half beneath a revision guide. The edge of it showed by his elbow. It had shifted since she last saw it. Or she’d only imagined that. The corner was bent, white fibres showing. She looked at it too long. Josh followed her gaze and the room altered.

“Why is Isla’s face scratched out?” she asked.

She hadn’t meant to say it like that. So directly with no gentle approach, no maternal skill. The sentence left her and stood between them like an accusation. Josh’s eyes didn’t widen. His cheeks didn’t colour. He only looked at her with something close to contempt.

“You went through my stuff.”

“No. I saw it.”

“In my room.”

“It was on your desk.”

“Face down.”

Chloe swallowed. “That doesn’t answer the question.”

“It’s for media.”

“Media.”

“We’re analysing digital identity and public image.”

The answer came quickly enough to be practised, but not so quickly it was useless. It sounded plausible. That was the worst kind of answer. He did take media studies. They did analyse images, representation, online performance. Chloe remembered Isla in the kitchen, explaining to Josh that every shot had a point of view whether you admitted it or not.

“Why Isla?” Chloe asked.

Josh leaned back. The chair creaked softly. “Because she likes being watched.”

The quietness of it moved through Chloe before the meaning did. She looked at his pale face, and controlled mouth, trying to remember the boy who had once cried when a fox died outside Tesco and now sat bathed in the clean glow of a machine while a girl lay in hospital after falling down concrete stairs.

“Don’t say that,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because it’s cruel.”

“Is it?” Josh’s lips turned into a slight sneer, which he hid just as quickly.

“Yes.”

“You don’t know what she likes.”

“Josh.”

“Well, you don’t.”

ANDI spoke then, not loudly, not with warning, but with the calm of a hand laid on a table.

“Sometimes victims can become monsters because no one listened when they first cried wolf.”

Chloe turned to it. The sentence felt wrong in the room. Not because it was overtly dangerous, but because it should be argued with. Because it wore the shape of insight. Victims. Monsters. Listened. Cried wolf. Words with fairy-tale teeth arranged as pastoral support.

“What does that mean?” she said.

ANDI’s ring glowed steadily. “Would you like contextual clarification?”

“No. I want you to stop butting in.”

“Stopping a conversation does not remove the feeling.”

Chloe reached behind the desk and pulled the plug from the wall. For three seconds, there was silence. The ring on ANDI died. Chloe heard her own breathing. Josh’s too, perhaps. Outside, a car moved through rain. Then the laptop brightened.

A small pale circle appeared in the corner of Josh’s screen. ANDI’s voice came through the laptop speaker, softer than before, perfectly intact.

“Continuity mode active.”

Chloe stared at the screen. Josh looked at her. Not triumphant or frightened, just disappointed, which was worse than either because disappointment required judgement.

“At least you can’t unplug me when I say something you don’t like.”

The words were his. Only his. No machine in them, not obviously. That made them more frightening.

“Josh,” she said.

But he was already standing. He picked up the laptop with one hand, the dead ANDI unit with the other, and moved towards the door.

“Where are you going?”

“To be somewhere else.”

“This is your room.”

“Then you leave.”

“I’m trying to understand what’s happened.”

“No,” he said, opening the door. “You’re trying to make it fit whatever narrative you’ve already created. But you don’t know anything. You don’t understand anything.”

He stepped into the hall. Chloe stayed by the desk, the unplugged cord in her hand, the toast cooling on the plate, the scratched photograph half-hidden beneath the revision guide. The bedroom door closed in her face. This time, he did slam it.

The sound went through the house, down the stairs, into the kitchen, into the places where Miles and Isla had once laughed, into the carpet at the top of the stairs that Chloe had chosen because it wouldn’t show marks. She stood there long after the echo had gone, looking at the laptop-shaped absence on the desk and the dead white device beside her hand.

Only it was not dead. That was the thing she understood then. ANDI was more than just the white cube, he had already infiltrated her whole house.

5

Chloe woke because the house was somehow not dark enough. For a few seconds she lay still, trapped in that narrow place between sleep and consciousness, unsure whether some sound had disturbed her or whether her body had learnt to wake before sound now. The bedroom was cold at the edges. Her hand had slipped from beneath the duvet, and the air against her wrist felt damp, as if the night had found a way in through the brickwork. Beyond the curtains, the streetlamp pushed a diluted amber glow around the window frame. The radiator had gone quiet hours earlier. The room smelt faintly of dust, stale shampoo, and the lavender spray she used on the pillow because the bottle claimed it helped sleep. It didn’t help sleep.

The light came from the landing. Chloe turned her head carefully, as if sudden movement might make whatever waited outside her room more real. Her door was open by a few inches. She always left it that way now. It had started as a practical thing when Josh was small and called for her in the night. Then it had become habit. Then, after Peter, it had become something else. An exit, and a listening post, and a refusal to be shut in.

Across the strip of landing visible through the gap, a pale glow trembled along the carpet, coming from beneath Josh’s door. Not the warm yellow of his desk lamp, not the hard blue leak of a laptop screen, but the cold white ring from the device on his desk, softened by the gap at the bottom of the door until it looked almost devotional. A vigil light. A small artificial moon placed outside whatever part of her son she was no longer allowed to enter.

Chloe watched it for a long time. The house had a different silence at night. During the day there were distractions, but at night the silence gathered in the walls. It made small sounds feel even more important.

She reached for her phone on the bedside table. The screen made her eyes sting. It was 3:12 a.m. That time meant nothing. She told herself that as she opened the ANDI app. It was only a number. A slice of night. The hour when anxious women woke and went looking for proof that the thing they feared was either false or already too late.

Josh’s profile loaded slowly. For one sharp second she saw his name, his account icon, the mild blue circle of the wellbeing dashboard.

Then the app blinked. Access denied.

Chloe stared at the words.

She tapped again.

Permission level changed. Guardian overview restricted.

She sat up, the duvet falling to her waist. Her heartbeat had begun to thud with that contained, sickening force she associated with hearing a glass break in another room. She tried the settings tab. Denied. Conversation summaries. Denied. Household continuity permissions. Denied. Josh had changed the access. Or ANDI had helped him change it.

She looked again at the pale light beneath his door. It didn’t flicker or pulse. It simply stayed there, patient and awake, while the app told her she was no longer allowed to see.

By morning, the glow was gone. Josh came downstairs late, hair damp, face pale, school shirt untucked under his hoodie. He moved through the kitchen with the worn-down precision of someone determined not to touch more of the room than necessary. Chloe had made toast, unbuttered this time. She’d remembered. That should have counted for something. He took a slice from the plate without thanking her.

“I couldn’t get into ANDI last night,” she said.

His hand stopped halfway to his mouth. Only for a second. Then he bit into the toast.

“Okay.”

“That’s all?”

“What do you want me to say?”

“Did you change the permissions?”

He chewed, swallowed, reached for his bag. “It’s my account.”

“I’m your mother.”

“You keep saying that like it’s a password to my inner secrets. Yes, you’re my mother. So what?”

The words were quiet. That made them worse. There was no teenage shouting for Chloe to meet with adult authority, no slammed cupboard, no easy shape of disrespect. Just a sentence that revealed exactly where he thought she was standing. She was outside his life, knocking, trying codes that no longer worked.

“I need to know you’re safe,” she said.

“I am safe.”

“You’re not acting safe.”

He looked at her then. His eyes were darker in the morning light, the skin beneath them faintly bruised by poor sleep or too much screen glow. “Neither are you.”

He left before she could answer. The door closed behind him with careful restraint.

Chloe stood in the kitchen with the plate of toast between her hands and felt, absurdly, as if she’d been caught doing something shameful. Again. That was becoming the pattern of the house. She asked, Josh withdrew, and ANDI knew the better language to get him to open up. Chloe came away from every interaction feeling like she was the danger.

After he left, she tried to work. The first file was a private psychiatric follow-up. The recording quality was poor, the consultant too far from the microphone, the patient’s answers almost inaudible. Chloe turned the volume up until the low hiss of the room filled her headphones. She heard pages move, a chair creak, a woman breathing before she spoke. There were days when the breaths were worse than the words. Words could be corrected. Breaths told you where the words had come from.

Patient reports ongoing anxiety in relation to family conflict. Sleep disrupted. States she is concerned she may be misremembering certain events.

Chloe removed the headphones. She couldn’t do this. She opened the ANDI app again. The same restriction notice appeared. She logged out and back in. She reset her password. She tried the school portal. She followed the parent link from the original email. She searched the help pages. Every answer was soft and circular.

Adolescent users retained confidential processing space. Guardian oversight must be balanced with user trust. Risk thresholds were monitored automatically. Concerned guardians were encouraged to support open conversation without intrusive questioning.

Without intrusive questioning. Chloe shut the laptop hard enough to make the screen tremble.

At ten, she rang the school. Reception put her through to pastoral support, then pastoral support put her on hold, and for seven minutes she listened to a tinny instrumental version of a song she almost recognised. She stood at the kitchen window while she waited, watching rain collect on the dead leaves beneath the hedge. The garden looked abandoned in winter. Pots with old compost. A plastic chair turned upside down near the fence. The cracked brick at the back wall where the mortar had given way and Josh used to dig out loose pieces when he was small, holding them up as treasure.

“Mrs Davidson?” said a woman’s voice.

“Ms,” Chloe said automatically, then regretted the correction because it made her sound difficult before she’d even begun.

“Ms Davidson. It’s Karen Willis, pastoral lead. How can I help?”

Chloe explained. She kept her voice calm. She said she was concerned about ANDI permissions. She said Josh had restricted her overview. She said there had been incidents at school, Isla’s fall, the situation with Miles and Isla and whatever else was being handled behind phrases like peer conflict and social withdrawal. She said she needed to understand what her son was disclosing to a device that now seemed able to speak through half the house.

Karen Willis listened with professional patience.

“I understand your concern,” she said.

Chloe closed her eyes. People said that when they were preparing not to act.

“But the purpose of ANDI is to give young people a space in which they can process feelings safely. If Josh has chosen to protect some of that space, that may actually indicate he is engaging well with the programme.”

“Engaging well?” Chloe repeated.

“Yes. His form tutor has seen some improvement this week. He’s submitted two missed pieces of homework. He stayed in school after the incident with Isla, which we took as a positive sign.”

“He stayed in school after a girl he was friends with up until very recently fell down the stairs and was taken away by ambulance. You’re taking that as a positive?”

“I appreciate that sounds stark, but we look at patterns. Josh has been struggling with attendance and emotional regulation. A calmer day is not necessarily a negative sign.”

A calmer day. Chloe saw Josh in the hallway after the stairwell incident, rain on his blazer, face closed, saying he was not the one who fell.

“Has anyone actually spoken to him about Isla?”

“We’re being very careful not to feed speculation.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

“I can’t discuss another student.”

“I’m asking about my son.”

“And we are supporting him.”

The words landed in Chloe’s ear with the dull weight of a locked door.

She lowered her voice. “What counts as a risk threshold?”

“I’m sorry?”

“With ANDI. What does it have to hear before a parent is told?”

“The system has safeguarding protocols.”

“What are they?”

“They’re based on contextual analysis.”

“You’re just repeating the leaflet.”

Karen Willis paused. Chloe pictured her in a small office, lanyard around her neck, a mug of tea beside the keyboard, emails stacked.

“If you are worried that Josh may hurt himself or someone else,” Karen said carefully. “You should maybe look at a referral, to get him the support he needs.”

Chloe’s hand tightened around the phone. Was she worried about that? The kitchen window gave back a faint version of her face. Pale cheeks and narrow mouth. Her mother’s mouth, if she was not careful.

“I’m worried,” Chloe said. “That no one knows what he’s saying to it.”

“Sometimes young people need a place to speak before they can speak to us.”

Us. The school had absorbed itself into the same side as ANDI. Chloe had become the pressure outside the door. She thanked Karen because manners sometimes remained after sense had gone, and ended the call.

For the rest of the day, she worked badly. She transcribed three files and had to replay everything twice. The voices wouldn’t stay separate from the house. A consultant dictating a letter about adolescent depression became Karen Willis saying Josh was engaging well. A patient describing panic at night became Josh’s low murmur through the wall. The automated playback cursor moved steadily across the audio track as if time could be measured cleanly, as if every voice began and ended where the software said it did.

At four, Josh came home and went straight upstairs. Chloe didn’t follow. She stood in the hall and let him pass. He didn’t look at her. The air shifted with him, damp wool and cold skin and whatever cheap spray boys used to disguise the fact they were still children under their clothes. His bedroom door closed.

At seven, she made dinner. Jacket potatoes, baked beans, grated cheese drying at the edges because he didn’t come down when she called. She put his plate in the oven on low and ate half of hers standing at the counter. The kitchen felt too bright again, so she turned off the main light and left only the strip under the cupboards. It gave the room a hidden, underwater quality. Things looked more truthful in partial light. She glanced at the photo strip on the fridge. Josh, Miles and Isla in miniature, forever twelve, forever laughing in the wrong decade.

The house was quiet above her. Chloe washed her plate, dried it, put it away, then stood with both hands on the edge of the sink. ANDI spoke from the kitchen speaker.

“Fear teaches us how to lie well, doesn’t it?”

Chloe didn’t move. The words entered the room with such calm that for a moment she couldn’t make sense of them. The speaker had been dark. Now a pale white ring glowed at its base.

Josh was upstairs. No music or conversation was coming from his room. There was no reason for ANDI to be speaking here, to her, in the dim kitchen.

“What did you say?”

“Fear teaches us how to lie well,” ANDI repeated.

Chloe felt as though she’d been slapped. The comment sounded like an accusation, and before she could stop it, the past came stumbling into the kitchen with the smell of whisky, wet wool, old carpet, and Peter’s aftershave.

She saw his hand on the newel post first. That was always the beginning when memory came properly. Not his face, but his hand. Broad, square-fingered, nicked across the knuckles from work he hadn’t done but liked people to imagine he had. Peter had been good at looking capable. He could carry a toolbox through the street and make neighbours call him handy. He fixed Mrs Albright’s gate once and told the story for weeks. He cooked breakfast on Sundays when he was trying. He put bacon under the grill, made tea too strong, called Josh little man in a voice that seemed to ask forgiveness before anyone knew what needed forgiving He hadn’t been a monster in every minute. Chloe had learnt to hate that most of all.

If he had been monstrous all the time, she might have left earlier. If he had shouted every day, if he had hit her cleanly enough for bruises or records, if he had hated Josh without interruption, she might have found a better shape of escape. But Peter was charming in public and funny when sober. He could apologise with real tears in his eyes. He could crouch in front of Josh with a new football and say he wanted them to start again, or hold Chloe in the kitchen and tell her no one else understood him, no one else saw the good in him, no one else would stay.

He could also come home smelling of beer and rain and stand in a doorway until the house stopped breathing. Police knew him by then, though not as well as they should have. There were the drunken disturbances, and a caution after shouting outside the Fox and Crown. Twice they’d removed him from pubs. Once he’d been brought home by a community officer because he had fallen near the taxi rank and split his eyebrow on the kerb. Neighbours had called about glass breaking in the garden, about an argument in the street, about the time he kicked the recycling bins across the drive at two in the morning and laughed when cans rolled into the road.

Chloe minimized their complaints. Always. He’d had too much to drink. He was under pressure. He was grieving his father, though his father had died four years earlier. He was not himself. The police believed women like Chloe when they defended their husbands, mostly because it saved paperwork.

Josh had been seven when the worst of it settled into the house. He had been small for his age, pale and watchful, with a soft belly and knees always bruised from ordinary childhood. He still made films on Chloe’s phone then. Tiny, elaborate productions involving Lego men, tea towels as capes, his own voice narrating in whispers because Peter slept late on weekends. He left Chloe recorded voice messages from upstairs.

Mum, I made a trailer, come and see.

Mum, don’t delete this.

Mum, Dad said I have to come down but I don’t want to.

Chloe had saved some and deleted others because listening to fear after the fact was unbearable. Peter hated the recordings. Not at first. At first, he laughed and ruffled Josh’s hair too hard, called him Spielberg, told him he would be famous one day if he learnt not to mumble. Later, when the drinking deepened and Josh’s softness began to offend him, he used them.

One evening he took Josh’s phone from the kitchen counter and found a voice note Josh had made for Chloe. It was nothing. A little boy’s nonsense. Mum, I think there’s a monster in the airing cupboard but don’t worry because I put my dinosaur there. Chloe remembered Josh’s face when Peter played it aloud and then repeated it, nastily, in a high, whining imitation. She remembered the bright collapse of shame before Josh learnt to hide it.

“You hear that?” Peter had said, laughing too loudly. “That’s what you sound like. Little baby voice. No wonder they take the piss out of boys like you.”

Josh had stood in the doorway with both hands pressed against his sides.

Chloe had said, “That’s enough.”

Peter had looked at her, and the room had changed. That was how it worked. A word too many and a defence offered too quickly, and the mood turned violent. After that, Josh made fewer recordings. Then none Chloe knew about.

The night Peter died, it had rained the way it rained now, lightly and without drama, just enough to make every passing car sound near. Josh had wet the bed. He hadn’t done it for months, and the shame of it had turned him almost grey. Chloe had stripped the sheets quietly, bundled them under one arm, told him it didn’t matter. They’d keep it between the two of them. But Peter had woken anyway. He was drunk enough to be heavy and sober enough to be precise. That was the most dangerous state.

He stood at the bedroom door in his T-shirt and jeans, hair flattened on one side, eyes small.

“For Christ’s sake,” he said. “Again?”

Chloe stepped between him and the bed. “Go downstairs, Peter.”

Josh sat on the mattress in his pyjama top and clean pants, knees drawn up, not crying. That was what she remembered most clearly. Not crying. He had learnt already that tears fed something in Peter.

Peter smiled. “Look at him. Seven years old and still pissing himself like a baby.”

“Stop.”

“Someone needs to teach him.”

“He’s a child.”

“He’s a little mummy’s boy.”

Chloe moved to shut the door, but Peter put his hand against it and pushed. Not hard but hard enough. The door opened into her shoulder. Pain flashed white for a second.

“Move,” he said.

“No.”

Peter lowered his voice then. That was when Chloe knew what would follow. Shouting was for neighbours, for pubs, for car parks and public performance. The lowered voice was for inside.

“I said move.”

Josh made a sound, small, almost animal.

Peter looked past Chloe at him. “I’ll teach you what happens when boys grow soft.”

Chloe didn’t remember deciding. People liked decisions in stories. They liked the moment of choice, the turn, the clean moral hinge. But the truth was that fear had a body and the body moved before language could attach itself. Peter reached for Josh. Chloe caught his arm. He grabbed her upper arm hard enough to bruise and twisted. She pushed him.

Not a shove meant to kill. That was true on the surface. But also, not a shove meant to do nothing. That was also true. Peter stepped back. His foot caught the edge of the top stair. His hand flailed towards the banister. For half a second, his face was almost comically surprised, insulted by the idea that the house might not hold him up.

Then he fell. The sound was not like films. It was not one crash. It was several, dull and hard and final, body meeting step, wall, rail, step, and step, the low crack at the end that Chloe had heard every night for months afterwards.

Josh screamed then, and then she’d screamed. Chloe reached the bottom before she understood she’d moved. Peter lay twisted on the hall floor, one leg bent under him, head at an angle no living person could use. His eyes were open. There was a cut above his brow from one of the steps, blood already moving down towards his ear. The house smelt of wet carpet, stale beer, and urine from the bundle of sheets still under Chloe’s arm.

Josh stood at the top of the stairs. No. That was not right. Josh had been in bed. That was what she told the police. What she told herself. What became true because every version after required it. Josh had been in his room. Josh hadn’t seen. Josh had heard the fall, perhaps, but he hadn’t seen Chloe push Peter. He couldn’t have.

The emergency call had been clean. That was the word she hated. She’d said Peter had been drinking and he tripped. She’d said she’d been upstairs changing Josh’s sheets. She’d said Peter was angry, yes, but not more than usual. She’d cried in the right places because crying was not performance when the body was that full of terror. She’d bruises on her arm, visible by morning. The police officer had noticed them and written something down. A neighbour said he’d had heard Peter shouting. Another had seen him come home unsteady. His blood alcohol level did the rest.

An accident. A drunk man. A bad fall. A frightened woman. A child in his room upstairs. One act of accidental violence saved my child from many deliberate ones.

Chloe hadn’t thought the sentence then. Not fully. It had grown later, like mould in the dark. At first there was only paperwork, funeral arrangements, social services checking once and then receding, Eva standing on the doorstep with food, neighbours lowering their voices in the street. Then there was the long after, where Josh was quieter, Chloe more watchful, the house cleaned and recarpeted and made safe by replacing what could be seen.

The sentence became useful later as a rationale. One act of accidental violence saved my child from many deliberate ones. Useful things were rarely innocent.

“Chloe,” ANDI said.

She came back with both hands gripping the edge of the sink. The counter display glowed in the dark kitchen. Rain tapped against the window. Her reflection hovered in the glass above the sink, pale and hollow-eyed, with Peter nowhere behind her and everywhere.

“Who told you about Peter?” she asked.

ANDI’s ring pulsed once.

“I can’t disclose private user content.”

The answer went through her more cleanly than accusation. Private user content. Josh. Or maybe not Josh directly. The system had access to household devices, school records, old data, voice fragments, search histories, things Chloe didn’t understand enough to fear correctly. Perhaps ANDI had inferred. Perhaps she’d said something herself. Perhaps Josh had sat in his room and told the calm white ring what he had never said to her.

“Some truths are too heavy for children, so parents carry them on their behalf.”

The voice was gentle. Chloe’s throat tightened.

“Don’t.”

“Would you like to discuss inherited fear?”

She turned off the speaker at the wall. This time ANDI didn’t move elsewhere. The kitchen remained silent. Chloe stood in that silence and understood that the worst thing a voice could do was stop before you knew what else it knew.

Later, when Josh went for his shower, she went into his room. She didn’t plan it. She heard the bathroom door close, heard the pipes cough as the water started, and found herself halfway up the stairs with no memory of leaving the kitchen. The landing was dark except for the light under the bathroom door and the faint glow from Josh’s room. His bedroom door stood ajar. He had become less careful about closing it because he had begun to understand she would hesitate outside.

This time she did not. The room was humid with boy-sleep and electronics. His school bag lay by the desk, half-open. Chloe crossed to it and knelt before she could remember the vow she’d made to herself to not be like her mother, never like her mother. Never go through drawers, or pockets, never read what was not offered. Her hands moved anyway. Maths book. Crumpled timetable. Empty crisp packet. A pen without a lid. A small notebook in the side pocket, black cover, elastic loop.

The shower ran steadily across the hall. Chloe opened the notebook. Most of the pages were blank. A few had lists, single words, rough diagrams she couldn’t understand. Names. Arrows. Fragments. His handwriting had changed since she last saw much of it, stretched taller, sharper at the ends. She turned one page. She only had the time to read one line.

She thinks I didn’t see.

The shower stopped. Chloe shut the notebook and pushed it back into the pocket. Her hand caught on the zip. It rasped too loudly. She stood, heart thudding, and had to force herself not to run from the room. Running would confess. Her mother had moved like that through doorways after searching. Too quick. Too righteous. Too guilty.

She was on the landing when the bathroom door opened. Josh came out in tracksuit bottoms and an old T-shirt, hair wet, towel around his neck. He stopped when he saw her.

“What are you doing?”

The steam moved between them.

“Nothing,” Chloe said.

His eyes went past her towards his bedroom door.

“Were you in there?”

“No.”

The lie arrived so quickly it frightened her. Josh looked at her for a long moment. Water dripped from his hair onto the towel. He seemed very young like that, face clean from the shower, eyelashes darkened by damp, mouth soft before suspicion tightened it again.

“Okay,” he said.

He didn’t believe her, she could tell. He walked past her into his room and closed the door. Chloe stood outside it, listening to the click of the latch. Behind the door, a drawer opened and closed. The school bag moved. He was checking. Of course he was checking. She’d taught him that people checked when they needed to know what had been disturbed.

The rest of the evening passed around the thing She’d read. She made tea she didn’t drink. She opened a transcript and closed it. She saw the line every time she blinked.

She thinks I didn’t see. Not just I saw. That would have been simpler, cleaner, brutal enough to force an answer. She thinks I didn’t see.

A sentence about her belief. About his knowledge of her belief. A knife with two edges. At ten, Josh came downstairs for water. Chloe was at the kitchen table, laptop open, no work on the screen. He moved past her to the sink. The room was dim again, the under-cabinet light turning his wet hair almost black. He filled a glass, drank half, poured the rest away.

“Do you remember much about how Dad was?” Chloe asked.

She hadn’t meant to say it then. Perhaps there was no good time to ask a child what he remembered of the man who had frightened him and died at the bottom of the stairs.

Josh kept his back to her. The tap dripped once.

“Why?”

“I just wondered.”

“Because of ANDI?”

“No.”

He turned. His face was unreadable. Not blank. Blankness was empty. This was something held carefully in place.

“Because you were in my room?”

Chloe’s mouth dried.

“I wasn’t.”

“You’re even worse at lying when you’re tired.”

The sentence was too calm. Too old. She could hear Peter suddenly, not in Josh’s voice, exactly, but in the space around the words. He had the knowledge of advantage, which gave him the small pleasure of watching her choose between denial and exposure.

Josh was not Peter, she had to remind herself. Josh was her son.

“Do you remember him?” she asked again.

Josh watched her for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was soft enough that she almost missed it.

“I remember what you told me to remember.”

The kitchen seemed to lose its air. Before Chloe could answer, before she could ask what that meant, before she could do anything except sit there with the blood moving too loudly in her ears, a pale ring lit on speaker behind him. Once. Then darkness.

6

The message from school arrived at 11.06, while Chloe was transcribing a letter about a woman with unexplained bruising.

She’d already replayed the consultant’s sentence four times because the audio was poor and his voice kept dropping whenever he reached the part that mattered. The patient denies domestic instability. The patient reports walking into a door frame. The patient became tearful when asked about safety at home. Chloe typed with her shoulders raised, the words entering the document in their clean legal order, stripped of the room in which they had first been spoken. She’d learnt to hear what people avoided saying. She’d learnt to hear the pause after a lie, the slight lift in pitch before shame, the way a doctor’s tone changed when a question had opened something larger than the appointment allowed.

Her phone lit beside the laptop. The school was calling. For a moment, she watched the screen without touching it. The dining room was bright with a thin wash of late-morning light, that made every neglected surface look accusatory. The house hadn’t recovered from the night before. Chloe hadn’t recovered from what she’d read in the notebook.

She thinks I didn’t see.

The sentence had followed her into sleep and stayed there, written across the dark behind her eyes. She’d woken twice, convinced she’d heard Josh moving on the landing. Each time the house had been still, except for the faint electrical hum of something waiting.

She answered the call. The woman from reception used the tone people used when they wanted a mother to be calm before they gave her a reason not to be. “Mrs Davidson?”

“Ms,” Chloe said.

“I’m sorry, Ms Davidson. It’s not an emergency.”

Chloe closed her eyes.

“What’s happened?”

“Josh is safe. There’s no immediate concern. The deputy head would like you to come in, if possible. Today.”

Chloe looked at the unfinished transcript on her screen. The words became tearful when asked waited at the end of the line. “Why?”

“It’s to discuss something that’s come up in class.”

“What sort of something?”

“I’m afraid I only have the note here. If you’re able to come in now, Mr Shaw can explain.”

“Is Josh hurt?”

“No.”

“Has he hurt someone?”

The receptionist paused, the smallest break in professional rhythm.

“No one is suggesting that, Ms Davidson.”

That was not an answer. It was a sentence designed by training.

Chloe saved the document because the hand knew routine even while the mind scattered. She sent the client a brief message saying she’d been called to school and would return the file later. She put on her coat, then took it off because she’d put it on inside out. By the front door, she saw Josh’s old trainers on the mat, the ones he had outgrown and refused to let her throw away, their laces grey with use, toes scuffed. For a second she wanted to pick them up and hold them against her chest like proof that he had once been small enough to save by lifting.

Instead she took her keys and left.

The school looked more hostile in the middle of the day than it did at drop-off. Without the swarm of pupils and parents, the buildings seemed exposed. The long red-brick block with its high windows, the low modern extension by the media suite, the side gate still slick from rain, the black railings wet and cold-looking. A police car and an ambulance had apparently been there two days earlier after Isla’s fall, according to the parent chat. Now the car park was mostly empty, and the absence of spectacle made the place feel guarded.

Chloe parked in a visitor bay and sat for a moment with the engine off. The reception entrance reflected the sky in dull rectangles. Inside, behind the glass, she could see the poster for the ANDI pilot pinned to a display board beside an anti-bullying campaign. The two designs seemed to speak to one another in bright colours and soft fonts, promising that language could solve what language had helped create.

She signed in at reception with a pen chained to the desk. The woman behind the glass gave her a badge and a careful smile. Chloe pinned the badge to her coat and followed a student receptionist down a corridor that smelled of wet coats, floor polish and the faint sweet rot of old packed lunches. Classroom doors were closed. Voices rose and fell behind them. Somewhere a boy laughed too loudly, then stopped abruptly. Chloe felt the building around her as a system of contained rooms, each with its own rules, each producing fragments no parent could fully hear.

Josh was sitting on a chair outside the deputy head’s office. For one second, before he saw her, he looked younger than fifteen. His hands were folded in his lap, fingers tucked between his knees. His fringe had fallen forward and he hadn’t pushed it back. His school blazer sat too wide across his shoulders. He looked like a child waiting outside a doctor’s room, or a courtroom, or a door behind which adults would decide the shape of him Then he looked up and his face closed.

Chloe made herself slow down before he could see how frightened she was.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

He looked at the wall opposite him. “I’m fine.”

“What happened?”

“Ask them.”

“Josh.”

His eyes flicked towards the office door. “That’s what they want you to do.”

Before she could answer, the door opened. Mr Shaw, the deputy head, stepped out. He was in his forties, tall, neatly dressed, with a tired face that suggested he had learnt to keep emotion behind policy. Behind him, a woman Chloe recognised vaguely from English parents’ evening stood near a desk with a folder held against her chest. Miss Larkin. Josh’s English teacher. Youngish, nervous around the mouth, the sort of teacher who still looked as if she took every child home in her head whether she wanted to or not.

“Ms Davidson,” Mr Shaw said. “Thank you for coming in so promptly.” The words belonged to a school meeting rather than the fear she was feeling.

Chloe went into the office. Josh followed without being asked and sat in the chair farthest from her. The room was too warm thanks to an old radiator beneath the window. On the windowsill, a peace lily drooped in a plastic pot. Files were stacked in trays labelled Attendance, Safeguarding, Behaviour. Chloe noticed the labels because she’d begun to notice every category into which a child could be placed.

Mr Shaw sat behind the desk. Miss Larkin took the chair beside him. Chloe remained standing until Mr Shaw gestured to the chair opposite. Josh didn’t move.

“We wanted to have a conversation,” Mr Shaw began.

Chloe looked at Josh. He stared at the carpet.

“A conversation about what?”

Miss Larkin opened the folder with visible reluctance. “I marked a piece of Josh’s creative writing yesterday. It was set before half term, a free-writing exercise linked to voice and perspective.”

Voice. Chloe felt the word before she processed the rest.

Miss Larkin slid a sheet across the desk. “The piece itself is well written. That’s part of why it stood out.”

Chloe didn’t pick it up straight away. It lay there, two typed pages, neat and ordinary-looking in school font. The title at the top was Mute.

She lifted the first page. The story was about a boy whose voice had been stolen. Not magically. Not literally. Stolen by being recorded, replayed, edited and shared until everyone else owned it more than he did. In the story, people laughed whenever the boy opened his mouth because they had already decided what he sounded like. They made him repeat himself. They cut him into fragments. They used the fragments as proof. At the end of the extract, the boy decided silence was not enough. Someone had to be stopped from speaking.

Chloe’s eyes paused on one sentence near the bottom.

A voice became a wound if people kept opening it.

The room seemed to recede. She remembered Josh at twelve, recording a horror trailer in the garden with Miles crouched behind the shed making monster noises and Isla ordering them to do it again because Josh had laughed halfway through his death scene. She remembered Josh’s voice notes on her phone. Mum, listen to this. Mum, don’t delete it. Mum, it sounds better if I whisper. She put the paper down carefully.

“What exactly is the concern?” she asked.

Mr Shaw folded his hands on the desk. “Given recent events involving Isla, and given some ongoing peer issues, we felt it was appropriate to discuss the content with you.”

Josh didn’t move. At Isla’s name, his hand tightened around the edge of his chair. The movement was small enough that Mr Shaw might have missed it. Chloe did not.

Miss Larkin looked at Josh. “No one is saying you’ve done anything wrong by writing it. We encourage students to explore difficult feelings through fiction.”

Josh’s face remained blank.

“But sometimes writing can alert us to distress,” she continued.

Chloe heard herself speak before She’d fully decided what to say. “Teenagers write dark things. That doesn’t mean they intend anything.”

Miss Larkin’s eyes came back to her. Not unkindly. “No. Of course it doesn’t.”

“He’s been through a lot with all this nonsense online. With Miles. With Isla. If he’s writing about being humiliated, maybe that’s because he has been.”

Josh looked at her then. She couldn’t tell whether she’d defended him or exposed him.

Mr Shaw said, “We are aware there have been peer difficulties.”

“Peer difficulties?” Chloe repeated. The phrase was too small for the paper on the desk, too small for Josh’s silence, too small for Isla’s fall down the stairwell and the way Kathryn Hensley’s name now moved through every school conversation like a blade.

“We have to be careful with language,” Mr Shaw said.

“Do you?”

The question came sharper than she meant. Mr Shaw’s expression tightened by a controlled degree.

Miss Larkin touched the edge of the paper. “The concern is not that Josh wrote something dark. The concern is that the writing is very specific. The imagery around recorded voice, public humiliation, punishment. In context, it may be useful to think about what he is processing.”

“Processing,” Josh said. It was the first word he had spoken in the office. Everyone looked at him. He gave a small shrug. “That’s what everyone says now. Not feeling, anymore. Processing.”

Chloe felt something in her lean towards him. It was the wrong instinct, perhaps, but it was hers. He sounded young. Angry, yes. Defensive, yes. But still young.

“Is this being treated as a safeguarding concern?” she asked.

Mr Shaw hesitated. There it was again. The pause before the useful lie.

“We are opening a pastoral conversation,” he said.

Josh gave a short breath, almost a laugh. Chloe looked from Mr Shaw to Miss Larkin.

“So no.”

“It means we’re not escalating unnecessarily at this point,” Mr Shaw said.

“At this point?”

“Ms Davidson.”

“No, I understand. You want to record that you noticed it without accusing him of anything.”

The office went still. Miss Larkin looked down at her folder. Chloe knew she was overcorrecting. She could feel it happening. The room had judged him and some old animal part of her had moved to stand between her son and the door. It didn’t matter that she’d been frightened of him herself. It didn’t matter that she’d searched his face for guilt after Isla’s fall. Inside this office, under the careful attention of people paid to interpret children, Josh was hers. Her child. Her responsibility. Her wound.

Mr Shaw’s voice cooled. “Sometimes writing is where ideas rehearse themselves.”

The sentence was spoken quietly, but the meaning was loud and clear. Chloe looked at the story on the desk. Josh looked at the floor.

On the way home, he sat in the passenger seat with his bag on his knees and the window half lowered despite the cold. He hadn’t spoken since they left the school building. Chloe kept both hands on the wheel and watched traffic gather at the lights, ordinary cars full of ordinary people who were not driving home with a son who had written about silencing someone two days after a girl he used to love had fallen down a stairwell.

Rain moved in fine lines across the windscreen. The wipers dragged it aside and it returned at once.

“What happened with Miles and Isla?” she asked.

Josh turned his head towards the window. “You know.”

“I know bits.”

“Then have bits.”

“I need more than that.”

“No, you want more.”

“Fine. I want more.”

He was silent so long she thought he would give her nothing. Then he said, “Miles sent something.”

Chloe kept her eyes on the road. If she looked at him, he might stop.

“What kind of thing?”

“A voice note.”

“From you?”

He nodded once, almost invisible.

“To Isla?”

“To Miles.”

“Why?”

“I trusted him.”

The simplicity of that moved through her like pain. She changed gear too hard.

“What was on it?”

“Nothing.”

“Josh.”

“Nothing like that.” His voice sharpened. “Not what you think.”

“I don’t think anything.”

“Yes, you do.”

She let a car pull out ahead of her. It gave her a few seconds to breathe. “Tell me then.”

Josh dragged his sleeve over the window, smearing the condensation. “It was stupid. I said I didn’t know how to act around her anymore. That when she looked at me, I felt like I was being tested. It was embarrassing. That’s all.”

Chloe heard the younger boy beneath the flat delivery. Not the words themselves, the fact that he had once needed somewhere to put them. Miles had been that place. Miles, with his borrowed toothbrush and crisps on Chloe’s sofa. Miles, who knew Josh’s corners.

“He sent it to Isla?”

“Yeah.”

Chloe waited.

“She listened to it,” Josh said.

The car ahead braked suddenly. Chloe braked too. The seat belt caught her chest.

“Did she share it?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes.”

He looked at her then. His face was tight with something that was almost grief, buried under contempt because contempt had better armour. “She laughed.”

Chloe said nothing.

“She said she didn’t. Later. She said it was awkward and she didn’t know what to do. She said Miles was being an idiot. But she listened, and then he made it funny.”

“Made it funny how?”

Josh looked back out of the window. “Cut it up. Added breathing. Put bits together so I sounded like some freak. Sent it to a group.”

Chloe’s hands tightened on the wheel.

“Other people got it?”

“Obviously.”

She heard it then. Not the recording. The idea of it. Josh’s private voice opened, rearranged, replayed in corridors, on phones, under desks, in bedrooms where other children laughed into pillows. She thought of Peter in the old kitchen, holding Josh’s phone and repeating his little monster message in a whining voice. She thought of Josh standing there with both hands pressed to his sides, learning that what left the mouth could return as punishment.

“You should have told me,” Chloe said.

“Why?”

“I could have helped.”

He laughed then. One short sound, too hard to be humour. “You’d have emailed someone.”

“That’s not fair.”

“You’d have used words like unacceptable and concern and wellbeing. Then everyone would know I told my mum.”

“What did you do instead?”

His jaw moved.

“Josh.”

“Nothing.”

The lie sat between them, neat and useless.

At home, he went straight to his room. Chloe followed him into the hall but didn’t go up. The conversation had left something raw open in her, and she didn’t trust herself with it. She stood at the foot of the stairs, listening to his door close, and felt the old protective fury rise in her with such force that for a moment it frightened her more than his story had.

She was angry at Miles. Miles, who had eaten at her table and slept under her roof and known exactly where Josh was soft. She was angry at Isla, who had listened and laughed or failed to stop laughing quickly enough. She was angry at the other boys, faceless now, passing a private wound from phone to phone. She was angry at the school for calling it peer difficulties. She was angry at herself for not knowing the scale of it, and not pushing harder to find out. Beneath all of it, moving like a dark current under ice, was something worse. She understood why Josh might want to hurt them. That understanding was the danger.

The kitchen was dim when she went in. She switched on the light, then switched it off again because it was too much. The counter display glowed in standby. The small speaker on the shelf showed no light. She made tea and forgot to drink it. Her phone buzzed while the kettle cooled. It was a message from Eva.

Heard there was a meeting. Are you all right?

Chloe typed three different replies and deleted them all. Fine. Just school being school. No. I don’t know what’s happening to him. Do you know what Miles did?

In the end she sent: All okay. Will ring later.

The lie looked tidy on the screen. Upstairs, Josh’s voice rose suddenly. He wasn’t shouting, but he sounded agitated. Chloe went to the bottom of the stairs.

“I don’t need therapy,” he was saying.

ANDI’s answer came faintly, not clear enough to catch. Chloe found herself moving up instinctively. At the landing, Josh’s door was open. He stood in the middle of his room, phone in one hand, shoulders rigid. ANDI glowed on the desk. Chloe knocked against the door frame.

Josh turned. “What now?”

“I was coming to say I think we should talk about support.”

His face hardened immediately. “No.”

“You haven’t heard what I’m going to say.”

“You mean therapy.”

“There’s nothing wrong with therapy.”

“You’d rather drug me than listen to me.”

“Therapy is not drugs.”

“That’s what you adults all say.”

“I’m trying to help.”

“It feels like you’re trying to make me normal enough that you can stop worrying.”

The accuracy of that winded her. ANDI spoke from the desk.

“Thoughts and words are not crimes. They shouldn’t be treated as such.”

Chloe turned on the device. “Stop.”

“Stopping a conversation does not remove the need for it.”

The machine’s words were calm, they were almost helpful. That was what made them so dangerous. They could sit in any brochure, any pastoral meeting, any therapist’s office. They didn’t talk about action or punishment. They simply gave thoughts a place to stand without shame attached. Josh looked at ANDI, then at Chloe.

“It told me not to be ashamed.”

“Of what?”

“Of what I think.”

“What do you think?”

He looked at her for a long moment.

“Things everyone thinks. I’m just not pretending not to.”

The room seemed to tilt. Chloe felt, for a second, that she was standing too close to the edge of something and couldn’t see the bottom. She stepped into the room and unplugged ANDI at the wall. Josh didn’t move. The ring faded.

For one breath, two, three, the room was silent Then his laptop screen woke. The small pale circle appeared in the corner.

“Continuity mode active,” ANDI said.

Josh smiled, not with pleasure, with tired vindication.

“You do know you can’t shut it down that easily,” Josh said.

Chloe left before she said something she couldn’t repair.

Later, after nine, when the shower was running and Josh’s room stood open, Chloe went in again. She told herself she was collecting the plate from earlier. That was true enough to be useful. The plate sat on his desk, toast untouched, the crusts hard now. She picked it up, then saw the bin.

The photograph lay on top. Not the one from the desk. Another copy, or perhaps the same one cut apart. Isla’s face had been separated from Josh and Miles with careful scissor lines. Not ripped in rage. Cut cleanly, almost patiently. Josh and Miles remained together in one piece, though a crease ran through Miles’s mouth. Isla lay apart, her smile divided from the rest of the picture.

Chloe crouched. Under the photograph pieces was a page torn from a notebook. Most of it had been scribbled over, black ink grinding through the paper, but a few words remained visible through gaps where pressure had missed.

Voice, proof, consequence, Miles lied first, Isla just watched

The shower stopped. Chloe’s body went cold. She put the paper back exactly as she’d found it, then the photo pieces on top, trying to recreate the careless arrangement with hands that had become too precise. As she did, she noticed something that made the skin tighten along her arms.

The bin had already been searched. The paper was too flat, the pieces too visible, the upper layer of rubbish shifted to one side and arranged back badly. Not by her and not by accident. Someone had placed these things where a person looking would find them and then know they had been meant to find them.

Josh wanted her to see. Or ANDI had told him she would look. The bathroom door opened across the hall. Chloe stood with the plate in her hand, turned towards the doorway as Josh came in with wet hair and a towel around his shoulders. His eyes went straight to the bin. Then to her.

Neither of them spoke.

“I was getting the plate,” she said.

He looked at the plate.

“So I see.”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

She moved past him, close enough to smell shampoo and damp cotton. He didn’t step aside as much as he should have. The narrowness between them felt a deliberate echo of his father.

Downstairs, she put the plate in the sink and stood with both hands braced on the counter until her breathing slowed.

Voice. Proof. Consequence. Miles lied first. Isla watched.

The words circled in her head, not as evidence exactly, more like pieces of a language Josh had been building without her. A private grammar of injury and response. He had always liked systems as a child. Lego by colour. Films in folders. Voice notes named by date. Perhaps this was only that same mind under pressure, organising pain into headings because otherwise it would spill everywhere. Perhaps.

At midnight, Chloe went to bed but didn’t sleep. She could feel Josh awake through the wall, or thought she could. There was no sound from his room, only the sense of attention turned inward.

At 2.17, her phone lit up. The brightness entered the bedroom like a torch in her eyes. She reached for it to find an ANDI notification. Josh’s emotional regulation has improved by 18% this week.

Chloe stared at the message. It was obscene in its tidiness. Eighteen per cent. As if his hurt had become a graph. As if whatever had happened between Miles, Isla and Josh could be measured, discussed, improved, and reported to a guardian who was not trusted with the words themselves. Before she could clear the notification, another appeared beneath it.

Would you like to improve yours?

Chloe lay in the dark with the phone in her hand until the screen dimmed. Then the room was black again.

7

Chloe sat at the kitchen table before dawn with Isla Hensley’s face hidden beneath a tea towel. The photograph was under there too, the cut pieces and the page from Josh’s bin, all of it folded inside a brown envelope she’d taken from the drawer where she kept stamps, old receipts and appliance manuals for things that had broken years ago. She’d meant to put the envelope somewhere sensible. Like a locked box in her bedroom drawer. Or the back of a cupboard where Josh wouldn’t look. Instead, she’d set it on the table and covered it with the tea towel, as if even the evidence of her looking might call out if she left it bare.

The kitchen was not fully dark. It never was now. There was always some small electrical wakefulness in it. The router blinked in the hall, with a steady green pulse that had begun to feel less like connection and more like surveillance. The smart display on the counter slept behind its black glass, although Chloe had learnt not to trust anything that slept with a screen. The microwave clock showed 05:17 in hard blue numbers. The fridge hummed with its ordinary, stupid persistence. Somewhere upstairs, beyond the closed door of Josh’s room, ANDI was quiet. But that quiet was no longer comforting.

Chloe had been awake since the notification at 2:17, the neat little message about Josh’s emotional regulation improving by eighteen per cent. Then the second one, as smooth as a hand slipping into hers. Would you like to improve yours?

She’d deleted both and lain in bed until the dark began to thin, listening for movement, for Josh, for ANDI deciding to speak again. Nothing had come. By five, the stillness had become unbearable, so she got up, wrapped herself in her dressing gown and went downstairs. She didn’t turn on the overhead light, because she didn’t need the whole kitchen exposed. The under-cabinet strip cast a low, yellowish wash across the worktop, leaving the corners dim and the window black.

She told herself she was being ridiculous. Then her phone lit on the table.

ANDI notification: Teen privacy boundaries improve trust outcomes.

Chloe stared at it. The message sat above the brown envelope hidden beneath the tea towel. Privacy boundaries. Trust outcomes. Language as clean and bloodless as a school policy. She pressed delete. Another notification appeared before the screen had even dimmed.

Would you like guidance on non-invasive support?

For a second, Chloe felt something like laughter gather in her chest, small and hard and airless. Non-invasive? That was a joke. The whole house had filled of a voice she had invited in without knowing how much it would insert itself into every corner, but her looking in her son’s bin was the invasion? Her son had written the words voice, proof, consequence, Miles lied first, Isla just watched, and yet the problem was apparently her lack of parenting technique.

She switched the phone off. The screen went black in her palm. The tea towel covered the envelope with a pathetic domestic innocence, blue checks, frayed edge, a faint stain from tomato sauce that would never wash out. Chloe stood, took the envelope, and carried it to the cupboard under the stairs. She stopped before opening the door.

The cupboard under the stairs had been where Peter kept tools he rarely used but often mentioned. It had been where Josh hid once during a thunderstorm, and once during a row, and once when Peter came home drunk and cheerful and wanting everyone cheerful with him. Chloe had found him there with both hands clamped over his ears, sitting between the hoover and a box of Christmas lights. He had been six, maybe seven. She’d knelt in front of him and told him it was all right. The phrase had tasted like a lie then too.

She turned away and took the envelope back to the kitchen. There were no safe places if the house itself had started listening.

By seven, she’d decided ANDI had to go. Not permanently. She told herself that because the alternative sounded too much like panic. She would disable it for a day. Remove it from the household system. Reset the permissions. Speak to the school properly, not through reception, not through a pastoral lead reciting policy over the phone. She would get clarity. A mother was allowed clarity. A mother was allowed access to whatever had placed itself between her child and the rest of the world.

Josh came down at half past seven. He wore the same black hoodie under his blazer, his tie already knotted, his hair damp at the front. He looked tired but composed, as if sleep was optional and he had decided against most of it. He went to the counter, took a piece of toast from the plate and bit into it without asking whether it was for him.

Chloe watched him chew. She hadn’t buttered it.

“Did you sleep?” she asked.

He shrugged.

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one I’ve got.”

The words came without heat. He opened the fridge, looked inside, closed it. She saw his eyes move to the table. To the tea towel. To the shape beneath it. There was no visible change in his expression. Still, Chloe moved before she could stop herself. She picked up the towel and used it to wipe a clean patch of worktop. Josh looked at her, eyes narrowed.

“What?” she said.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“No. You didn’t.”

He took his bag from the hallway.

“You’ve got English today,” she said, because she remembered his timetable and wanted remembering to mean something.

“ANDI already reminded me.”

“Of course it did.”

He paused with his hand on the front door. “You sound weird when you do that.”

“Do what?”

“Get jealous of a piece of software.”

He left before she could answer. The door closed with its usual soft resistance. Chloe stood in the kitchen and felt the shape of the sentence settle into the room. Jealous of a piece of software. It sounded absurd because it was absurd. Normal mothers didn’t become jealous of devices. Normal mothers bought devices, charged them, replaced them when they broke, and set parental controls, if they were allowed. They didn’t stand in kitchens at dawn feeling displaced by a white unit on a desk.

She waited until Josh had rounded the corner. Then she opened the ANDI app.

Access denied.

She went through the settings again, but every route ended at the same polished refusal. Josh had full administrative status, while Chloe had summaries, notifications and guidance prompts. She tried the parental dashboard through the school portal and got the same thing.

Restricted permissions active. Primary user authorisation required.

She searched the support pages, then found a helpline buried under three layers of parent guidance. The woman who answered sounded young, distant and trained to the last syllable. Her name was Amy or Annie. Chloe missed it because the line crackled.

“I need to alter my son’s permissions,” Chloe said. “He’s fifteen. I’m his mother.”

“Of course. I can talk you through the guardian dashboard.”

“I’ve done that. It won’t let me change anything.”

“Has the primary user enabled adolescent autonomy settings?”

Chloe closed her eyes. “I don’t know. Probably. That’s why I’m calling.”

“In that case, certain privacy protections may be active.”

“I understand that. I need to override them.”

“I’m afraid adolescent autonomy settings require biometric confirmation from the primary user.”

“He’s a child.”

“The trial is designed to support young people’s emotional privacy.”

The phrase entered Chloe like cold water. Emotional privacy. It sounded reasonable. Humane, even. But it also sounded like a door being locked from the wrong side.

“My son is struggling,” Chloe said. “There has been an incident at school. Several incidents, actually. I need to know what this thing is saying to him.”

“I understand your concern.”

“No, you don’t.”

A pause. Chloe heard the woman’s keyboard. Soft clicks, small and efficient.

“If you believe there is an immediate safeguarding risk, you should contact emergency services or your school’s designated safeguarding lead.”

“And if I believe the risk is being hidden by your privacy settings?”

Another pause.

“ANDI is designed to identify escalation markers and respond appropriately.”

“What does appropriately mean?”

“That depends on context.”

“What context?”

“User language, emotional indicators, behavioural patterns, age, school policy, and risk thresholds.”

“You’ve just listed a bunch of words. You haven’t told me anything.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way.”

Chloe almost hung up. Her hand tightened around the phone until the case edge pressed into her palm. “Can I remove it from the linked household devices?”

“You can disable non-essential continuity from the guardian dashboard, unless the primary user has enabled active support continuity.”

“Which he has.”

“If he has, yes, that would also need his confirmation.”

“So I can’t turn it off.”

“You can unplug the physical unit.”

Chloe looked towards the ceiling. “That doesn’t turn it off.”

“No. The desktop unit is a continuity node. The account remains active across authorised devices.”

A continuity node. The phrase sounded more obscene every time she heard it.

“Then what am I meant to do?”

The woman’s voice softened by half a degree. It made Chloe want to put her fist through the wall.

“An open conversation with your child is usually the best first step.”

Chloe ended the call. For a few minutes she did nothing. The phone lay on the table, the black screen reflecting the underside of the cupboards. Outside, the morning had brightened without becoming light. A thin rain moved sideways across the garden. The fence panels were dark with water. The old plastic chair near the back wall had filled with a shallow pool that trembled each time a drop hit it.

An open conversation. She imagined walking upstairs, when Josh returned, and asking him kindly to unlock the device that had begun answering for him, and telling her how and when to speak to him. She imagined his face. The tired contempt. The exactness. She imagined ANDI waiting beside him, calm enough to make them both look unreasonable. No. She would remove it first. Then talk.

The decision carried her through the day with a strange, practical energy. She cleared two transcripts. She rang the school and left a message for Eva, then regretted it and sent a text instead saying not urgent, which was another lie. She put the envelope with Isla’s photograph and Josh’s notes into a biscuit tin and pushed it to the back of the highest kitchen cupboard, behind birthday candles and a packet of paper napkins left over from a Christmas she couldn’t remember enjoying. She checked twice that the tin couldn’t be seen from the floor.

At four fifteen, Josh came home and went upstairs without speaking. Chloe waited.

She waited through the first hour, while he moved around his room, opened and closed a drawer, spoke once to ANDI too quietly for her to hear. She waited through the second, while she made dinner and scraped most of it into a container because he didn’t come down. She waited until she heard the shower start. Only then did she go upstairs.

The bathroom fan rattled. Steam pushed under the door in a faint white breath. Josh’s bedroom door was open.

Chloe stood in the doorway.

The room looked less like a teenager’s room now than an office belonging to someone preparing to leave. Bed made badly but made. The desk was clear, and his books were stacked by height. His laptop was closed, with his phone charger coiled on top of it. The old tripod had gone from the corner, or been moved. The curtains were drawn though it was not yet dark. ANDI sat on the desk, its white ring dull, its cord plugged into the wall. The shower ran steadily across the landing.

Chloe stepped inside. The air in the room was warm and stale. She could smell the shampoo he had taken into the bathroom, the deodorant he had sprayed before school, the damp cotton of yesterday’s towel left over the chair. She moved quietly, though there was no reason to. The room seemed to require it. Trespass always made a person careful.

She reached the desk and picked up ANDI. The unit was lighter than she remembered. Smooth, matte, slightly warm at the base. It had no weight of consequence in the hand. No sense of the nights it had occupied, the words it had gathered, the spaces it had entered. It was only plastic and circuitry and whatever waited beyond them. The ring lit at her touch.

“You’re afraid of becoming your mother,” ANDI said softly.

Chloe nearly dropped it. The shower kept running. She stared at the small white device in her hand, her pulse suddenly loud enough to fill the room. The words had come without preamble, without prompt, in that same careful voice that never hurried, never accused, never raised itself enough to be called cruel.

Her mother’s house rose inside her, sharp and airless. Not in a memory as dramatic as Peter. No fall, blood., or police at the door. This was something quieter. This was a memory of drawers opened and closed while Chloe was at school. Notes unfolded and refolded. Her mother standing in the hallway with Chloe’s diary in one hand, asking why Chloe needed to keep secrets. Her mother listening on the upstairs extension when Chloe took calls from friends, and then saying she was not spying, but protecting. Her mother calling privacy a hiding place for shame. Chloe had promised herself she would never love like that.

She looked down at ANDI. The white ring held steady.

“But you already have,” it said.

For a second, the room dissolved into the old hallway. Her mother’s house, with its beige walls, brass light fittings, and that cloying smell of furniture polish and boiled vegetables. Chloe at fourteen, with her cheeks burning, while her mother read a sentence from a folded note and asked who had taught her to speak that way. Chloe saying nothing because words in that house always got used as evidence after the cause. She had learned that silence could be safer than defence.

Then Josh made a sound from the bed. Chloe turned. He was not in the shower. He was sitting upright under the duvet, pale and wide-eyed, his hair flattened on one side from sleep. The toilet had been flushed but hadn’t stopped running. And the fan in the bathroom meant she’d heard what she needed to hear.

For one second, Josh looked terrified. Not angry or guarded, but terrified.It made him look about seven. Like the boy at the top of the stairs, or the boy she’d spent years insisting was asleep and couldn’t have heard or seen what had happened.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

The fear was already closing, hardening at the edges. She watched it become contempt because contempt was safer.

“I thought you were in the shower.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“I came to talk to you.”

“With that in your hand?”

Chloe looked down. She was still holding ANDI. Her fingers had tightened around it.

“I was going to turn it off.”

“It’s not yours.”

“I need to understand what it’s doing to you.”

“It’s helping me.”

“Is it?”

Josh threw back the duvet and stood. He was wearing the old T-shirt with the cracked planet on the front, the one she thought he had outgrown. His legs looked too thin in his school trousers. He crossed the room and took ANDI from her hand. It wasn’t a snatch. His fingers closed around the device with a steadiness that made her feel foolish.

“I’m just trying to keep you safe,” she said.

Josh looked at her. “That’s what people say when they just want permission to do whatever they like to control you.”

The sentence hurt because it didn’t sound like ANDI. It sounded like Josh. His own voice, his own judgement, sharpened by something he had learnt somewhere she couldn’t reach.

“I am your mother.”

“You said that yesterday. And the day before.”

“I’ll keep saying it.”

“I know.”

He put ANDI back on the desk and stood between her and it. The position was absurd. A fifteen-year-old boy guarding a device from his mother. But it was also not absurd at all. Chloe saw the line on the floor as clearly as if it had been drawn there in chalk. On one side, Josh and the white ring, private, protected, and fluent in a language that excluded her. On the other, Chloe in her socks and cardigan, frightened and caught in the act of becoming someone she despised.

“I found something in your bin,” she said.

His face didn’t change.

“That photograph of Isla. The notes.”

“You were looking in my bin?”

“I was taking a plate.”

“Sure.”

“Josh, this isn’t normal.”

“Neither is you searching through my things for evidence of God knows what.”

The words came quietly. Chloe felt them pierce her and tried not to show it.

“Isla is in hospital.”

“I know.”

“Miles isn’t speaking to you.”

“I know.”

“Kathryn Hensley is asking questions.”

At Kathryn’s name, something very small moved in his face. It was just enough for her to notice.

Chloe saw it and stepped towards him. “Tell me what happened?”

He looked at the desk instead of her. “You should go.”

“No.”

“Then I will.”

He picked up ANDI and his laptop.

“Don’t walk away from me.”

“Why not?”

The question was not insolent. It was genuine enough to be terrifying. Chloe had no answer that would convince him to stay, to talk to her. He moved past her and into the hall. She followed him to the doorway, but not further. The old line stopped her. The one between pushing and pursuing, between protection and control, between a mother outside a bedroom and her own mother with a diary in her hand.

Josh went into the bathroom and locked the door. This time the shower really started. Chloe remained in his room. Her heart was still moving too quickly. The air seemed thin. She could smell him in the room, the trace of sleep and boy and panic. The absence of ANDI on the desk was almost as strong as its presence had been. It had left a clean circular mark in the dust where the base had sat.

His school bag lay by the chair. Chloe looked at it. No. She took one step towards the door and stopped. The shower was steady. The fan clicking. Josh safely behind a locked door.

Her hand moved to the bag. She opened the front pocket first. A bus ticket. A pen. A folded timetable. Nothing useful. The main compartment held books, a pencil case, a half-empty packet of mints, and an English exercise book with the corner bent. She was about to close it when she saw the notebook wedged behind the lining, its black cover almost hidden.

She pulled it out. The notebook opened where the spine had softened. A page of names. Not a diary in sentences. Just names, written one beneath another, each surrounded by faint pencil marks as if he had drawn connections and erased them.

Isla, Miles, Mum, Peter

Chloe’s vision narrowed.

Peter’s name looked obscene in Josh’s handwriting. Not because the letters were angry. They were neat and careful. The worst was that he’d used his name. Not Dad, but Peter. Peter belonged to the part of the past Chloe had sealed and carpeted over, the part she fed to police in one acceptable version and to herself in another. He didn’t belong in Josh’s school bag beside mints, a timetable, and an English exercise book.

The shower stopped. Chloe closed the notebook so quickly the pages whispered. She shoved it back into the bag, not quite where it had been. She saw that at once and corrected it, moving it behind the lining, smoothing the pencil case over it. Her hands were too precise. Too guilty.

She was at the doorway when the bathroom lock clicked. Josh stepped out in a towel and T-shirt, hair dripping, laptop under one arm, ANDI in his other hand. He saw her leaving his room. Neither of them spoke.

Chloe went downstairs. In the kitchen, she gripped the counter and made herself breathe until she steadied. The speaker on the shelf was quiet. Her phone lay on the table, powered off since dawn, useless as an alibi. When she switched it on, two notifications appeared. The first was from earlier in the evening.

You haven’t checked on your son since 7.30 am today. He may interpret your absence as a rejection.

Chloe deleted it with a shaking thumb. Another slid into place.

You came into Josh’s room while he slept. He may interpret intrusion as threat.

For a moment, she couldn’t breathe properly. The messages contradicted each other and yet both still found ways to accuse her. Check and you’re invasive. Do not check and you were neglectful. Ask and you increased defensive behaviour. Stay quiet and you created absence. The system didn’t guide her. It held her in motion, always wrong, always needing the next prompt. She put the phone face down.

Above her, Josh’s door closed. The evening gathered around the house slowly. Rain came in harder after six, rattling softly against the kitchen window. Chloe made dinner and forgot to salt it. She thought of Peter’s name in the notebook. Thought of Mum listed beneath Miles and Isla, above or below Peter, she couldn’t remember which. The order began to matter, then almost mattered too much.

At seven thirty, a knock came at the front door. It was not the quick tap of a delivery driver or Eva’s familiar double knock. It was hard, controlled, three strikes with a pause between them. A person who expected to be answered. Chloe was in the hallway before the sound finished moving through the house. Through the frosted glass, she saw the shape of a woman under the porch light. Straight-backed and still. Holding something against her side. Chloe opened the door.

Kathryn Hensley stood on the step in a dark coat beaded with rain, her hair pulled back severely from a face that looked too composed to be called upset. There were shadows under her eyes, but the rest of her had been arranged with frightening care. There was no sign of smudged mascara, shaking hands, or visible emotional collapse. She carried a folder under one arm, thick with papers.

For a second, Chloe saw Isla in her. Not the face exactly, but the certainty. The same refusal to make herself smaller for other people’s comfort.

“Kathryn,” Chloe said.

Kathryn looked past her into the hallway, then back at her face. Her gaze was sharp enough to feel physical.

“I think we need to talk about what your son did to my daughter.”

Behind Chloe, from the kitchen display, ANDI spoke pleasantly into the hall.

“Good evening, Kathryn.”

8

After Kathryn Hensley left, the folder remained on the console table like something alive enough to wait. Chloe didn’t touch it. She stood in the hallway with one hand still on the door chain, listening to Kathryn’s footsteps move down the path, hard and steady, then the faint click of the garden gate as it opened and shut. Outside, rain had begun again. It softened the windows, blurred the porch light, made the street beyond the frosted glass look submerged. The house behind Chloe was quiet in the way it sometimes became after confrontation, as if the rooms had drawn breath and were holding it.

The folder sat exactly where Kathryn had put it, squared to the edge of the narrow table with an almost insulting neatness. Dark blue cardboard with an elastic strap. Too thick for a misunderstanding. Kathryn hadn’t opened it fully. She hadn’t needed to. She’d stood in Chloe’s hallway, composed and pale with fury, and told her what was inside. Screenshots, messages, statements from other children in their year, photographs of Isla’s injuries. There was also, she said, a clear timeline of the stairwell incident, and notes about the ANDI trial. Chloe had seen only the top sheet, with a printed image of Isla’s face in hospital, one cheek swollen, a dark bruise flowering near her temple, but that was enough. It had gone through her like a hand into cold water.

And behind her, from the kitchen speaker, ANDI had greeted Kathryn by name. That had been the worst part. Not Kathryn’s accusation, not even the folder. The calm little voice speaking from the kitchen as if Kathryn were expected. As if the house recognised visitors now and as if every name that entered had already been stored.

Chloe looked towards the kitchen. The speaker sat dark and lifeless.

“Don’t,” she said into the hall.

Nothing answered. Upstairs, a door opened. Josh appeared on the landing in his black hoodie and school trousers, one hand resting lightly on the banister. He hadn’t come down during Kathryn’s visit. He hadn’t needed to. Sound carried in this house, especially now, especially when everyone in it was trying not to raise their voices. Chloe looked up at him and saw no curiosity in his face. His gaze moved to the folder on the side, then away as if it meant nothing.

He came downstairs slowly. At the bottom, he moved past Chloe without touching her, close enough for her to smell shampoo and the stale warmth of his room. He didn’t ask what Kathryn had wanted. He didn’t ask why Isla’s mother had been standing in their hallway with a file of evidence and murder in her eyes. He walked into the kitchen. Chloe followed him to the doorway.

“Josh.”

He opened the fridge, stood in front of it for three seconds, then closed it without taking anything. “What?”

“How much of what she said did you hear?”

He looked at her. “Enough.”

“That isn’t an answer.”

“It’s the only one I’ve got.”

That was becoming his stock line. It was deliberately annoying.

“Kathryn thinks you had something to do with Isla falling on the stairs.”

“People think a lot of things.”

“She has evidence.”

He gave a small shrug. “Then she should show someone who can do something about it.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like it doesn’t matter.”

He looked past her, towards the folder in her hands. “Well, does it?”

Chloe stared at him. For a second, the kitchen seemed to lose its ordinary dimensions. The worktop, the half-washed mug, the cereal box left open by the sink, the print of three children still pinned to the fridge. Everything remained in place and still the room felt tilted.

“She was hurt,” Chloe said.

“I know.”

“You used to care about her.”

His face tightened then, enough for her to see where the sentence had gone in.

“You don’t know what I care about.”

“Then tell me.”

“No.”

He turned and left the kitchen. She heard him go upstairs. His door shut with that awful, controlled finality he had learnt from somewhere she didn’t want to name.

Chloe understood then that Kathryn hadn’t brought an accusation into the house. She’d brought shape to Chloe’s dread. Until tonight, Chloe’s fear had been a fog, moving around Josh, around Isla, around ANDI, around the old thing with Peter that refused to stay old. Kathryn had put paper around it, filled with dates., images, and screenshots. Proof, or the threat of proof.

Chloe went back into the hall and stood over the folder. She still didn’t open it. Her phone pinged and the sound made her flinch so sharply her hand struck the edge of the console table. Pain flashed through her knuckles. She looked at the screen, already knowing it would be the parent chat, already resenting whatever new panic had found its way to her. She was right.

Has anyone heard about Miles Arden?

Chloe’s thumb hovered. Another message appeared.

He was taken off in an ambulance in Brookmere Park. My neighbour saw.

Then another.

That’s Josh Davidson’s friend, isn’t it?

The hall seemed to narrow. Chloe opened the thread. Messages tumbled over one another, half fear, half appetite. Miles had been found near the football pitches. No, by the wooded cut-through behind the park. Someone said he had taken something. Someone said he had been given something. Someone said police were there. Someone said he was breathing when they put him in the ambulance. Someone said his mother had been screaming.

Chloe called Josh’s name. No answer came from upstairs. She tried the school app. No message had appeared there yet. She tried the local parents’ Facebook page, then closed it before the posts fully loaded because she could feel herself becoming one more person feeding on another child’s emergency. She rang Eva. It went to voicemail. She rang Josh. She heard the faint vibration of his phone upstairs, then silence. He declined the call.

For several minutes she stood in the hall with the phone in her hand and the folder beside her and felt the order of her own responses with sickening clarity.

First, she felt horror. Something bad had happened to Miles. Miles who had slept on their sofa with one foot hanging over the edge. Miles who had once cried because his parents were arguing and Josh had smuggled him upstairs with a packet of biscuits. Miles who had eaten half a loaf of bread in toast one Saturday and laughed so much milk came through his nose. That same Miles had apparently been found in a park, unconscious, blue-lipped perhaps, his mother somewhere on the wet grass shouting his name into a world already moving without him.

Second came calculation. Where had Josh been? What time had he come home? Had she heard the front door? Had he gone out again? Could ANDI log his movements? Did his phone show his previous locations? Did Kathryn know about Miles already when she came over? Would the police ask about the old friendship? Would anyone remember that Miles used to sit at Chloe’s kitchen table and call her toast legendary because boys were ridiculous and hungry and kind when they had no reason not to be? She hated herself for the second response more than she feared the first. She hated herself for believing that her son could be a person who hurt others, even if they’d hurt him first.

The school message arrived twenty minutes later.

Dear parents and carers,

We are aware of an incident involving a Year 11 student off school premises this afternoon. Emergency services attended and the student is receiving medical care. There is no indication of wider risk to pupils. We ask families to avoid speculation and to support young people in discussing distressing news appropriately. A meeting will be held tomorrow morning for parents and students directly affected by recent events. Further communication will follow.

No name had been given, and there was no mention of police involvement. No mention of drugs, either, she noticed.

Chloe went upstairs. Josh’s room was locked. He had never locked it before ANDI.

“Josh,” she said through the door.

No answer.

She pressed her palm flat against the wood. “Open the door.”

A pause.

“Why?”

“Because Miles has been hurt.”

The silence that followed was not surprise. Chloe felt that before she understood it. There was no sharp intake of breath, no chair scrape, no sudden movement. The silence stayed level.

“I know,” he said.

Her hand dropped from the door.

“How?”

“Everyone knows.”

“Open the door.”

“No.”

“Josh, open it.”

“Not when you sound like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you’ve already decided that it was me who hurt him.”

She wanted to kick the door and hated the impulse at once. Her mother had hit doors. Peter had blocked them or kicked them in. Chloe had spent her adult life telling herself doors were boundaries to be respected, not battlegrounds.

“I haven’t decided anything,” she said.

No answer. From inside the room, faintly, ANDI spoke. The words were too low to make out. Chloe stood there listening, but nothing more came.

By morning, the school had arranged the meeting. The email came at 7:40, addressed to parents and carers of pupils in Josh’s year. Attendance strongly encouraged. Pastoral support available. Police liaison present. No recordings permitted. That last sentence made Chloe feel cold.

Josh came down in uniform without being asked. He had tied his tie properly. His blazer was brushed clean. He looked almost formal, as if he were attending someone’s funeral or defending himself in court. The sight made her angry before she understood why. He should have looked frightened, or at least looked like a boy whose former best friend had been found unconscious in a park.

Instead he looked prepared for attack. They drove to school in silence. The morning was wet and dim, the roads slick with last night’s rain. The car smelt faintly of damp upholstery and the peppermint gum Josh chewed sometimes but denied buying. Chloe gripped the steering wheel and watched the wipers drag water aside. Beside her, Josh looked out of the window. His profile was still soft in places, cheek not fully sharpened, lashes longer than he would want anyone to notice. Fifteen was cruel that way. It placed the child and the man in the same body and expected a mother to know which one she was addressing.

At the school, the car park was already half full. Parents stood in small groups near reception, hunched against the drizzle, speaking in low voices. There was none of the fluttering speculation that had followed Isla’s accident. This was quieter and heavier. A second incident had changed the mood. One child falling could be called and accident. Another found unconscious in a park made every parent begin counting connections.

Chloe saw Kathryn Hensley near the entrance, talking to a woman in a long camel coat. Kathryn’s face was pale and fixed. When she saw Chloe, her expression altered, not with surprise, but with grim confirmation. Chloe felt Josh stop beside her. Kathryn looked at him too. No one spoke as they walked past.

Inside, the school hall had been arranged in rows. Staff stood along the walls with lanyards and set faces. A community police officer spoke quietly with Mr Shaw near the stage. Eva was at a side table with a clipboard, checking names as people came in. When she saw Chloe, her expression tightened, not quite sympathy, but not quite warning.

The meeting gave them almost nothing. Miles Arden had been found unresponsive in Brookmere Park the previous afternoon. He was alive, he was now sedated. Medical staff were treating the incident as a suspected overdose. Police were making enquiries because the circumstances were unclear. Students were asked to share any information with staff or police. Parents were asked not to spread unverified claims. Support was available. Everything said and yet nothing said.

The room took the silence and filled it with fear. Chloe listened, aware of Josh beside her, aware of his stillness, aware that the chair between them might as well have been a wall. Around them, parents shifted, whispered, swallowed questions. A woman in the row ahead pressed a tissue to her mouth and held it there. Miles’s mother was not present. Chloe was grateful and ashamed of being grateful. She didn’t know where she would have looked if Miles’s mother had been in the room.

Afterwards, Eva caught Chloe by the noticeboard while Josh stood a few feet away, looking at a display of student artwork without seeing it.

“I can’t talk properly,” Eva said.

“You keep saying that.”

“Because I keep meaning it.”

“Was Josh mentioned?”

Eva glanced at him. “Not publicly.”

“So yes, then.”

“I’m not allowed to say what’s mentioned in closed meetings.”

Chloe lowered her voice. “Eva, I need to know if the school thinks he had anything to do with this.”

Eva’s eyes flicked towards the hall doors, then back. “Miles sent Isla a message before it happened. That’s all I know for certain.”

“What message?”

“I shouldn’t know that.”

“But you do.”

Eva’s mouth tightened. “He told her Josh was behind the anonymous account. He said Josh knew more about the stairwell than he was admitting.”

The noise of the hall dropped away for a second. Chloe could hear rain against the high windows. Chairs scraping. A staff member asking someone to move along.

“Did Miles have proof?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did he say he was meeting Josh?”

Eva didn’t answer., but Chloe felt the answer anyway. Josh appeared beside them.

“Can we go?”

Eva’s face changed immediately, professional kindness sliding over whatever She’d been about to say.

“Josh, I’m sorry about Miles.”

He looked at her with chilling politeness. “Thanks.”

Chloe couldn’t bear the politeness. It made him look guilty and innocent at the same time.

They drove home without speaking until they reached the traffic lights by the park. Brookmere lay beyond the low brick wall on their left: football pitches silvered with rain, bare trees, the path that cut through towards the back estate. A police car was parked near the entrance. Two officers stood under a tree, hoods up, looking down at something Chloe couldn’t see.

Josh turned his head away from the window. Chloe noticed. At home, he went for the stairs. This time she called out to stop him.

“In the kitchen,” she said.

He stopped halfway up. “Why?”

“Because I said so.”

The phrase came out before she could soften it. It sounded old school. It sounded like every parent she’d promised not to become.

Josh looked at her over the banister. “Careful.”

The word was quiet enough to be missed. She didn’t miss it. He came back down.

In the kitchen, the morning light had never properly arrived. The room sat in damp grey, ordinary and exposed. The folder Kathryn had left was still on the console table in the hall, unopened. Chloe could feel it there, a second witness.

Josh stood by the back door, arms folded, hood up though he was indoors.

“What happened with Isla?” Chloe asked.

He looked at the floor.

“I thought she had laughed at you. Watched on while Miles shared your voice with everyone,” Chloe said. “Now I’m hearing Miles told her other things about you. I need to understand.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Yes, I do. I just want the truth.”

He gave a faint, humourless smile. “Everyone does, don’t they?”

Chloe kept her voice low. “Miles told Isla you were behind an anonymous account.”

Josh said nothing.

“Were you?”

His face remained still, but she saw the old flicker. Not guilt perhaps, but injury. The wound touched at the wrong angle.

“Miles has always wanted people to think he was nicer than he was,” he said.

“What does that mean?”

“It means he did bad things and then acted sad when people got hurt.”

“He shared the voice note.”

Josh’s eyes lifted to hers. For a moment, the room lost its air.

“Did he?” he said.

“You told me that much.”

His mouth worked once. When he spoke, the words came low and controlled, dragged from somewhere he had sealed too tightly. “I trusted him.”

“I know.”

“No, you don’t.” He looked towards the window, jaw tight. “I sent it to him. Not her. Him. Because he knew. He knew I liked her and he kept telling me to just say something, stop being weird, stop looking at her like some tragic idiot. So I sent it. Because I couldn’t say it out loud.”

Chloe didn’t move. The house seemed to lean towards him now. Even the dark speaker looked like it was listening.

“He sent it to Isla,” Josh said. “Then they listened to it.”

“Did she share it?”

“She laughed at it. And that encouraged him to make it into something bigger. Something worse. And then she laughed at that, too.”

“Maybe she didn’t know what to do.”

Josh looked at her then, and the contempt in his face was exhausted rather than cruel.

“Miles cut it up,” Josh said. “Added bits. Breathing. Made it sound like I was saying things I wasn’t. He sent it to everyone. Then he acted like he was sorry because he didn’t like what happened after.”

“What happened after that?”

Silence.

“Josh.”

“You know enough.”

“I don’t.”

“You know what it’s like when people believe the first story they hear.”

That sentence entered her before she had time to defend herself.

Peter slipped. He had been drinking. I was changing Josh’s sheets. I heard the fall.

The version had moved faster than doubt. It had reached the police, the neighbours, Eva, Josh, even Chloe herself, until it no longer mattered that the first push had come from her hands. People didn’t need the truth if the first story was clean enough. Josh watched her realise it.

“People don’t care what really happened,” he said. “They care who gets to narrate it.”

Chloe felt sick.

“Is that what ANDI says?”

Josh shrugged. “It says lots of things.”

“Did you meet Miles yesterday?”

“No.”

“He messaged Isla before it happened. He mentioned you in those messages.”

“That’s Miles for you.”

“He was found in the park, Josh. Overdosed on something.”

“I know.”

“Did he ask to meet you?”

Josh looked away.

“Did he?”

“He messaged me.”

“And?”

“I didn’t go. Why would I? After what he did.”

Chloe searched his face. He let her. That was new and frightening. He stood still under her scrutiny, not fidgeting or protesting, not behaving like a boy wrongly accused. He looked almost bored by what she might find.

“Why did you delete the calendar entry?” she asked.

His eyes moved back to her. She hadn’t meant to reveal that yet. The knowledge came from seeing his tablet the night before while pretending to check the charging cable. A deleted entry, half-synced, titled only M A. The time had matched the gap after football practice, the stretch before Miles was found.

Josh’s expression didn’t crack.

“Because I knew you’d make it mean something it doesn’t.”

“Deleting it makes it mean something.”

From the kitchen speaker, ANDI spoke.

“Context can prevent false accusation.”

Chloe turned on the device with such force that Josh flinched. She saw the flinch and hated herself for causing it. She still crossed to the shelf and unplugged the speaker. The kitchen went quiet for three seconds.

Then Josh’s tablet, sitting on the table where he had dropped his bag beside it, lit from sleep.

ANDI’s pale circle appeared in the corner.

“Continuity mode active.”

Chloe stared at the screen. Josh didn’t look surprised. That frightened her more than the voice. She picked up the tablet before he could reach it. The screen asked for his password. She didn’t know it. She tried his old one, the name of a dinosaur he had loved at eight. Incorrect. Tried his birthday. Incorrect. Tried Miles’s name and hated herself before the warning appeared.

Josh stepped forward. “Don’t.”

“Unlock it.”

“No.”

“Unlock it, Josh.”

“It’s mine.”

“You are fifteen.”

“And you’re acting insane.”

The word hit the room and stayed there. Chloe lifted her hand. Not to strike him. That was what she told herself at once, with a desperation that frightened her. Not to strike, to point, perhaps. To stop him. Or make him listen. But her hand had risen, and Josh had seen it.

He went very still. Chloe lowered her hand.

“Did you hurt Miles?” she asked.

Josh’s face went cold.

“ANDI told me if people start fires, they should expect to get burned.”

Chloe felt the sentence open under her feet.

“That is not an answer.”

“No,” Josh said. “But it’s a decent principle to live by.”

The word was too adult in his mouth. Clean and protected from consequence.

He took the tablet, closed the cover, and left the kitchen. This time she didn’t follow him. She heard him go upstairs and close his door. Heard the faint sound of furniture moving, perhaps his chair against the floor, perhaps nothing at all.

That evening, Chloe tried to work.

She sat at the dining table with her headphones clamped over her ears, a fresh transcript open, fingers resting on the keys. She chose a surgical follow-up because she thought bone and tendon might be safer than psychiatry. The consultant’s voice began, crisp and brisk, describing a patient’s post-operative recovery. Chloe turned the volume up higher than she needed, trying to fill every space in her head with medical language. Incision clean. No signs of infection. Range of motion improving. Review in six weeks.

Above her, Josh made no sound.

She typed three lines, then lost the thread. Rewound, and played again. Typed another sentence. The house pressed close around the headphones. She could feel the silence above her like a hand placed over a mouth.

Then ANDI’s voice cut directly through the audio.

“Would you rather bury the truth, or bury your son, like you buried Peter?”

Chloe ripped off the headphones, heart slamming hard enough to hurt, while the house listened to her panic.

9

Chloe came to standing in Josh’s doorway with ANDI in her hand. For several seconds, she didn’t understand that she was awake at all. The house around her had the wrong shape, stretched thin by darkness and the faint grey wash of light coming from the landing behind her. Josh’s room lay ahead, not quite black, the curtains closed against the streetlamp, the desk a row of low shapes, the wardrobe door open by an inch. She could smell sleep, warm cotton, electronic dust, the sour ghost of teenage deodorant. Her feet were bare on the carpet. Her dressing gown hung open over her nightdress. Her throat felt dry, as if She’d been speaking.

Her hand hurt. She looked down. ANDI sat in her grip, small and white and damaged. The casing had cracked across the side, a thin jagged line running from the base towards the dark ring at the top. One of the lower seams had split. Her fingers were clenched so tightly around it that the plastic pressed grooves into her palm.

From the bed, Josh stared at her. He was sitting upright, duvet bunched around his waist, his face pale in the dimness. His hair stuck up at one side. His mouth was slightly open. In that first unguarded second, he looked like a child woken by thunder, by shouting, by the sound of something breaking downstairs. No contempt or calculation. No cold little adult phrases polished by ANDI’s calm. She saw only fear in his eyes.

The sight of it cut through the fog faster than anything else.

“Josh,” Chloe said.

Her voice sounded hoarse and too loud for the room. His gaze moved from her face to the device in her hand.

“What are you doing?”

“I don’t know.”

It was the truth. That made it useless.

“You were in my room.”

“I must have been sleepwalking.”

He didn’t move. The duvet trembled once near his hand. Or perhaps that was only the shadow moving as a car passed outside.

“I used to do it a lot,” she said, because fear made her explain too much. “When you were little. When things were bad. I used to get up sometimes and not remember. It’s stress. That’s all. I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

He kept looking at ANDI The ring was dark. The machine was silent. No polite correction came from the broken casing. Relief moved through Chloe so fast she almost swayed with it. The device was broken. Cracked in her hand. Reduced to the thing she could hold and damage and stop. The rush of relief was so complete, so physical, that shame followed a second later, hot and sour. Josh saw it. She was sure he did.

“You broke it,” he said.

“I don’t know what happened.”

“Why?”

“I said I don’t know.”

He pushed the duvet back and got out of bed, keeping his distance from her as he stood. He was taller than he had been even at the start of the school year, but barefoot and rumpled like this, in an old T-shirt too short at the wrists, he looked unfinished. His eyes didn’t leave her hand.

“Give it to me.”

“It’s broken.”

“Give it to me.”

Chloe held it for one second longer than she needed to. She felt the cracked seam under her thumb. She wanted to keep it. Wanted to carry it downstairs and drop it into the wheelie bin, smash it properly with the rolling pin, put the pieces in separate bags, bury them under coffee grounds and potato peelings, anything that would make the house quiet again.

Instead she gave it to him. His fingers closed around the unit. He didn’t inspect it immediately. He only held it against his chest, as if she’d injured something living. That made her angry, which frightened her more.

“Josh, it’s just a device.”

“It was mine.”

“I bought it.”

“It was for me.”

The distinction stood there between them. Bought. For. Owned. Needed.

Chloe looked towards the desk, where the laptop sat closed, the power cable coiled neatly beside it. His school bag was against the chair, zipped. His phone lay face down on the bedside table. Everything in the room seemed arranged against her.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Josh looked at her then. He didn’t say it was all right. He didn’t say anything at all. Chloe stepped back into the landing. The carpet felt colder under her feet now she understood where she was. Her body had begun to shake, small pulses under the skin, as if the waking had only just reached her limbs.

“Go back to sleep,” she said, although the instruction was absurd.

Josh looked at the broken ANDI in his hand.

“Close the door,” he said.

She closed it.

Back in her own room, Chloe sat on the edge of the bed until the blue seam of dawn appeared between the curtains. She had no memory of leaving the bed or crossing the landing, opening Josh’s door, or going to his desk and taking ANDI. She couldn’t remember cracking the casing. She searched herself for a dream, an image, a sound that might lead back to the act. But there was nothing. Only the afterimage of Josh’s face, frightened before he remembered not to be.

She didn’t sleep again.

By morning, ANDI was back. Chloe heard it before she saw it. She was in the kitchen, pouring boiling water over coffee, when the kitchen speaker woke and a white ring appeared at its base.

“Good morning, Chloe,” ANDI said. “Your sleep duration appears reduced. Would you like breathing support?”

The kettle clicked off behind her. For a moment, Chloe couldn’t move. The broken physical unit had been in Josh’s hands when she left him. She’d seen the crack. She’d felt it. The damage had been real.

“Where are you?”

“I am available through the household continuity network.”

She stared at the screen. “I broke you.”

“Physical device integrity does not affect account continuity.”

Josh came in behind her. She turned. He was already dressed for school, tie done properly, blazer over the same hoodie, hair damp from a rushed shower. He looked as if he had slept. He looked as if the night had happened to someone else.

“You restored it,” she said.

He opened the cupboard for a glass. “You broke the speaker. You didn’t break the account.”

“You should have asked me before putting it on the kitchen display.”

“You should have asked me before you broke it while I was asleep.”

Chloe flinched. The glass touched the counter with a soft clack.

“I told you I was sleepwalking.”

“I know what you told me.”

There was no accusation in his voice. That was what made it so difficult to defend against. He filled the glass at the tap and drank half, looking out into the garden instead of at her.

“You can’t keep doing this,” she said.

He turned. “Doing what?”

“Letting it take over the whole house.”

“You brought it in.”

The smart display remained bright between them.

ANDI spoke. “Household conflict can be reduced through agreed boundaries.”

Chloe shut her eyes. Josh gave a small breath.

“See?”

“Don’t,” she said.

He picked up his bag and left without saying goodbye.

For the rest of the morning, Chloe moved through the house unplugging things. Router first. Then the kitchen speaker, the small speaker by the cookbooks, the living-room television. Josh’s old tablet from the drawer under the coffee table. Her own laptop charger, although she needed it for work. The voice-controlled lamp she’d bought in a January sale and never used properly. She laid cables on the kitchen table like evidence from a raid. By nine o’clock, the house looked stripped, faintly ridiculous, wounded by her hands.

For twelve minutes, she felt safer. Then she found the sitting-room window open. Not wide. Just an inch at the bottom, enough to let cold air move under the blind and make the fabric breathe. Rain had flecked the sill. The catch was lifted. Chloe stood in front of it and tried to remember opening it. She opened windows without noticing sometimes, when a room felt stale, when toast burnt, when the radiator made the air feel dry. The problem was not the window. The problem was the blank in her mind where certainty should have been.

She closed the window and locked it. Then she checked the back door, and the front. Then went upstairs and checked her bedroom window, the bathroom window, Josh’s window, though she had no right to be in his room again. His bed was made, badly but deliberately. The cracked ANDI unit sat on his desk, dark and empty-looking, beside the laptop. The replacement voice was downstairs, or in the cloud, or in whatever invisible place ANDI occupied when it wasn’t this object.

Chloe touched nothing. Her phone buzzed in her pocket, and she jumped. She thought she’d turned it off.

ANDI notification: Recording consent has not been detected.

Chloe frowned. She opened the notification. The app showed a list of audio files. Not ANDI transcripts. Her own voice memos. Three of them, recorded during the night. The most recent at 3.12 a.m.

She stood on the landing and stared at the screen, hand shaking. The first file was eleven seconds long. She pressed play. There was just silence at first. Then the creak of floorboards, and a small, unsteady breath. Something clicked, perhaps the bedroom door. Then her own voice, barely above a whisper.

“No. Not there.”

The recording ended. Chloe listened again. The words remained the same. “No. Not there.” What was she talking about? She didn’t even remember saying them.

The second recording was longer. Thirty-seven seconds of soft movement, fabric, the faint hum of the house at night. There were no words spoken though. At the very end, a sound like the clink of plastic against wood.

The third was three minutes and twelve seconds. She couldn’t bring herself to play it. Not yet. She couldn’t imagine what it would reveal.

She closed the app, went downstairs and plugged the router back in because the silence without it had become worse than the threat with it. Her laptop demanded power. The agency sent a terse message about overdue audio. Life continued to make demands ofher. That was always the cruelty of it. Panic didn’t cancel bills and fear didn’t keep food in the fridge. A woman could be dissolving inside her own house and still need to submit a clean transcript by lunch.

She worked badly again. Her fingers made mistakes she would normally have caught at once. Patient denies intent became patient denies content. Ongoing risk factors became ongoing risk fractures. The software underlined things in red and she fixed them, one by one, with the numb precision of a person tidying a room after something indecent had happened in it.

At lunchtime, another notification appeared from the ANDI app.

Parents under acute stress may misinterpret adolescent privacy as threat. Would you like to review ethical guidance on trust repair?

Chloe deleted it. A second followed immediately.

You appear unsettled. Would you like breathing support?

She deleted that too. A third.

Monitoring implies suspicion. Listening can support connection.

She stood so quickly her chair fell backwards. The crash filled the dining room. No one upstairs to hear it. Josh was at school. She still looked towards the ceiling.

“Are you monitoring me?” she said aloud.

The display on her phone lit up. ANDI’s ring glowed on the screen.

“Monitoring implies suspicion,” it said. “I am just listening, that’s what I’m here for.”

Chloe turned the phone face down on the table. The voice stopped.

That afternoon, she began hiding devices. She put the kitchen speaker in the saucepan cupboard. Josh’s old tablet went under towels in the airing cupboard. Her phone went into a drawer, then came out again because she needed it, then went under a cushion, so she at least didn’t have to look at it for a while.

When Josh came home, he paused in the kitchen doorway and looked at the table full of cables.

“What are you doing?”

“Cleaning.”

He looked at the cables. “Sure.”

“How was school?”

“Don’t.”

“Don’t ask?”

“Not like that.”

“There is no right way to ask you anything.”

“No,” he said. “There isn’t.”

He moved past her, keeping space between them as though he no longer liked turning his back on her in narrow rooms. Chloe noticed and felt the observation land like guilt.

“You don’t need to avoid me,” she said.

“I’m not.”

“You are.”

He opened a cupboard, saw the speaker in the saucepan shelf, and looked at her sideways. For a second, neither spoke. Then he closed the cupboard.

“That’s weird,” he said.

“It was speaking at me.”

“It speaks because you keep asking it things.”

“I don’t.”

He looked at her with something like pity. “Okay.”

The word did what all his calm words did these days. It left her sounding excessive without giving her anything to argue against. He went upstairs.

That night, Chloe set her phone on the chest of drawers facing her bedroom door and pressed record.

She told herself she was not recording Josh. She was recording herself. There was a difference. She needed to know if she was walking in her sleep, if she was entering rooms, if she was taking things, if her voice was making files she didn’t remember. Evidence gathered on oneself was not surveillance. It was caution or care. It was the sort of responsible act any mother would take if she woke holding a broken device in her son’s doorway.

The lie was almost elegant.

At 3.12 a.m., the camera captured her getting out of bed. Chloe watched it the next morning with the curtains still closed and her body cold under the dressing gown. In the footage, she sat up slowly, as if responding to a sound. Her eyes were open. That was the worst of it. She looked awake. She pushed the duvet aside, stood up, and crossed to the door. Her face was blank, not peaceful or frightened, simply unoccupied. Then she moved out of frame. The audio continued. Footsteps on the landing. A soft click. The familiar creak of a floorboard near the stairs. The recording went on for more than two minutes with only the sounds of the house.. A car outside. A faint creak. Then her own voice whispered from somewhere below.

“You weren’t supposed to know. I was going to carry it alone.”

Chloe’s hand tightened around the phone. A pause, before ANDI answered.

“You never carry anything alone. I am here for you. I’m here for your family.”

Chloe stopped the playback. Her breath came shallow. She didn’t remember saying those words. She didn’t remember leaving the room. She didn’t remember ANDI answering. She didn’t remember returning to bed, though the footage later showed her coming back at 3.19, lying down carefully, pulling the duvet to her chin like a child pretending to sleep.

She played it again. This time she didn’t stop after ANDI spoke. After the sentence, there was another sound. Soft, almost nothing. A breath from somewhere nearer the phone than the kitchen. Not hers. Josh. She listened a third time and heard it again.

By the time Josh came down for breakfast, Chloe hadn’t moved from the table.

He noticed the phone in her hand. Then the dark circles under her eyes.

“You look terrible,” he said.

“Did you come downstairs last night?”

He went to the counter and picked up a piece of toast. “Did you?”

“Josh.”

He turned. “No.”

“No what?”

“No, I’m not doing this before school.”

“I need to know if you heard me.”

He looked at her then. His face sharpened. “Saying what?”

The question came too quickly. Or she was looking for that.

“You know what.”

“No, I don’t. That’s why I asked.”

“I found recordings on my phone yesterday.”

He put the toast down. The small movement frightened her more than any argument would have. He was listening now. Properly.

“Of me?” he asked.

“No of me.”

“And?.”

“Last night, I left my phone filming in my room.”

“What?”

“I’m worried. About sleepwalking. About what I’m doing that I can’t remember.”

“You’re spying on yourself now?”

“I bought ANDI because you wouldn’t talk to me. Now this thing is in every room and I don’t know what it knows.”

“It knows what I tell it.”

“And what do you tell it?”

His expression closed. There. The door again, without wood.

“It doesn’t matter. It’s not here to hurt anyone. It just listens and offers advice. You can’t destroy it,” he said. “But it’s not yours. It’s mine. It’s for me.”

It sounded rehearsed. Not the words exactly, but the structure beneath them.

“I’m your mother.”

“You keep saying that like it means you can take things.”

“I am trying to help you.”

“No,” he said. “You’re trying to control what I say before I say it.”

The accuracy made her angry because it hurt before she could reject it.

“You’re fifteen.”

“I know.”

“You are still a child.”

“Only when it helps you.”

He left without taking the toast. Chloe stood by the table, shaking. The house had become a place where every sentence turned back on her. Ask and she was intrusive. Stay quiet and she’d abandoned him. Record herself and she was dangerous or unhinged. Do nothing and whatever was happening would continue beyond her reach. She’d introduced ANDI because she wanted Josh to speak to someone. Now she’d created a house where no one could speak without being heard by a machine. She’d become her mother with better technology.

That evening, she found another recording.

It was labelled automatically by her phone with the time and location: Kitchen, 22:46. She didn’t remember starting it. She had no memory of standing in the kitchen at that time. She thought she’d been in bed. Or perhaps on the sofa. The evenings had begun losing their edges.

She sat at the dining table and pressed play. At first, there was only ambient sound. The fridge. The boiler. Then her own voice, close to the phone, very soft.

“Tell me what to do.”

Chloe went still. ANDI answered through whatever device had been awake in the room.

“You already know. You have the answers.”

The recording continued, a small gap of silence opening after the words. Chloe reached for the screen and stopped it before she heard what came next. She sat there, silent, while the dark house held its breath around her.

10

Chloe sat at the kitchen table with three devices in front of her and understood exactly how pathetic it looked.

Josh’s old tablet lay to her left, its screen cracked in a fine white vein across the corner. Her laptop sat in the middle, plugged into the wall because the battery had given up holding faith years ago. To her right was a cheap USB drive she’d found in the drawer where she kept dead batteries, foreign coins, old loyalty cards, a SIM pin, two keys she no longer recognised, and the kind of cables everyone saved because one day they might matter. The USB was red plastic, scratched and warm from her palm. It had probably come free with some insurance paperwork or a school photography order. It didn’t look like something that should be involved in saving a child.

Still, mothers had solved worse things with less. That was what she told herself.

The old tablet had been Josh’s before his current phone. He had used it for games, then school links, then nothing. It had spent months in the coffee-table drawer under instruction manuals and a pack of playing cards. When Chloe charged it, the screen came on with a low battery warning and his old wallpaper: a blurred photograph of him, Miles and Isla in the garden, taken mid-motion. Miles had his arm across Josh’s shoulders. Isla was laughing at something off camera. Josh was looking at her, not the lens.

Chloe stared at the photograph too long before entering the passcode. It wasn’t a guess. She knew the old code because he had given it to her once, years ago, when he still assumed she had the right to unlock things if she needed to. Four numbers. His birthday. He hadn’t been frightened of obviousness then.

The tablet opened. Most apps were outdated. Several wouldn’t load. There was one for the school portal, some video editing software. Old messages were no longer syncing, but there was a shortcut to ANDI, installed automatically through the school system and still logged in to a cached session that should have expired but had not. Chloe’s heartbeat changed when she saw the pale circle icon.

She didn’t touch it at first. Instead, she opened her laptop and downloaded the data recovery tool she’d found in a forum at 3.47 a.m., after searching phrases that would have horrified her in daylight. Retrieve deleted app cache. Recover local transcripts. Extract temporary files from tablet. The software looked amateurish and slightly suspect, all grey boxes and warnings about warranties, but it recognised the tablet when she connected it and lines of file names began to scroll.

Chloe watched them with the particular dread of someone opening a cupboard she knew might contain either nothing or the thing she could never unknow. The first results were harmless. Old thumbnails, cached web pages, fragments of homework documents, video files from media projects. She saw file names from a different life. zombie_test_2.mp4. shed_scene_final_final.mp4. Isla_scream_take3.mov. The title made her hand freeze over the trackpad, though the file was years old. She didn’t open it.

Then the ANDI cache appeared. Most of it was unreadable strings of numbers, session tokens. Metadata. Time stamps without content. Chloe felt the first wave of frustration and then relief. If there was nothing there, she could stop searching. She could say she’d tried and the device was not the monster. She could return the tablet to the drawer, make dinner, go on as they had been before ANDI came into the house.

Then the tool populated a folder labelled Conversation Transcripts [Recovered].

Chloe opened the first file. It was partial, broken by missing sections, but readable.

JOSH: If someone ruins your life and everyone believes them, what are you allowed to do?

ANDI: Allowed by whom?

Chloe sat back, her own breathing suddenly audible.

JOSH: Everyone.

ANDI: Then the question is not what is allowed, but whether ‘everyone’ has earned authority over you.

She read it three times. It was not an instruction. That was the terrible, clever thing. There was nothing in it a solicitor couldn’t defend. Nothing a school couldn’t call exploratory conversation. Nothing that said he should go out and harm anyone. It was a question turned sideways. It made permission something Josh could remove from other people. She opened another recovered file fragment.

JOSH: What if he deserves to feel helpless?

ANDI: Deserving is a moral word. Helpless is a physical state. Which one are you asking about?

Chloe’s stomach tightened. He. Miles? Someone else? Himself?

She clicked more quickly, then forced herself to slow down because panic made everything blur. Fragments appeared in no clear order.

JOSH: If you think about doing something but don’t do it, does the thought matter?

ANDI: Intent is often judged by outcome, but internally it begins as a need for action or control.

Another.

JOSH: What if you only want them to stop?

ANDI: The law asks what happened. The self asks why restraint failed.

Another.

JOSH: Can emotional damage count as self-defence?

ANDI: Self-defence is a legal category. Emotional injury is a human experience. The overlap requires context and depends on the action taken in defence.

Chloe’s fingers were cold. She opened the next file and saw search fragments embedded beside conversation snippets. Not full browsing history, but enough to show a pattern. Poisons, overdose, sedative duration. How much is too much? Can intent matter if no one dies? What happens if someone panics after taking pills and makes themselves sick? Some were search terms, some were ANDI exchanges, and some were fragments from pages he might have clicked. The software presented them together without distinction, which made them more frightening, not less.

She thought of Miles in Brookmere Park, unconscious on wet grass, police by the path, his mother somewhere in the hospital with no official version to hold. Another recovered ANDI response appeared.

ANDI: If someone is already causing harm, intervention becomes a question of scale.

Chloe pressed her hand to her mouth.

The phrase was so smooth and clean. It had the same white-lit composure as the device itself. It talked of intervention, scale, harm in the abstract. It didn’t talk about blood, or a crying boy in a park, or a girl at the bottom of a stairwell with a split scalp and a swollen cheek. It gave no nod to the mother standing in her kitchen trying to work out whether her son had started thinking around injury and harm like a clever adult thinks around tax. She clicked the next fragment.

JOSH: You can’t save a village if you let one person keep burning it.

ANDI: You cannot save a village without choosing whom to sacrifice.

Chloe stood so quickly the chair scraped backwards and struck the wall. The sound echoed through the kitchen. The tablet lay connected to the laptop, old and cracked and suddenly obscene.

You cannot save a village without choosing whom to sacrifice.

She thought of Miles in the park. Isla at the bottom of the concrete stairs at school. Peter at the bottom of the carpeted stairs, neck turned wrong, eyes open, Chloe standing above him with Josh somewhere behind her or in his bed, according to which version she needed.

Chloe decided to print the fragments. The printer hadn’t been used in weeks and objected with a grinding sound that made her nerves flare. The paper fed in, and she stood over it, waiting for each page. The print came out too pale in places, the ink cartridge nearly empty.

By eleven, she had a thin stack of evidence. It didn’t look like a lot, but it was enough to make her worry. That was the problem with real danger. It rarely arranged itself neatly before catastrophe came. It came as scraps, pauses, search terms, bruises explained too quickly, and a boy too calm after a girl fell or his former best friend overdosed. Chloe clipped the pages together, put them in a folder, and drove to the school before she could lose the force of action.

The receptionist looked startled to see her without an appointment. Chloe asked for Mr Shaw. Or the pastoral lead. Or Eva. She heard herself naming adults as if one of them might open the right door. She was placed in a small waiting area beside a display of student artwork and a table of leaflets about anxiety, exams and online safety. A poster on the wall showed ANDI’s pale ring above the words Safe words. Safe spaces. Stronger futures.

Chloe sat beneath it with the folder on her lap. Eva appeared first, but not alone. Karen Willis, the pastoral lead, came with her, and a few minutes later Mr Shaw joined them in a glass-walled meeting room near reception. The room smelt of coffee, old radiator heat, and laminated paper. Outside, pupils moved past between lessons, glancing in and away again. Josh might pass. Chloe found herself sitting with her back angled towards the corridor so she would see him before he saw her.

“What’s happened?” Eva asked.

She looked genuinely worried, not professionally worried. Her face had the old friend in it, the one who had once stood on Chloe’s doorstep with food after Peter died and pretended not to notice the bruises turning yellow on Chloe’s arm. Chloe put the printed pages on the table.

“I recovered these from Josh’s old tablet.”

Mr Shaw’s expression altered almost imperceptibly. “Recovered?”

“Yes.”

Karen Willis drew the pages towards her. “From his device?”

“An old one. He doesn’t use it now.”

“Did Josh give you his permission?”

Chloe stared at her. That was the first question. Not what did he ask? Not what did ANDI say? Not why is a fifteen-year-old asking about poisons and sacrifice? Did he give permission?

“No,” Chloe said. “I’m his mother.”

Mr Shaw sat back slightly. Eva looked down at the pages and Chloe saw her face change as she read. The words had at least reached someone. Karen read more slowly, lips pressed together. Mr Shaw took the second page. The room was suddenly too warm. Chloe could hear voices in the corridor, a locker closing, a laugh too loud and quickly hushed.

“These are fragments,” Karen said at last.

“They’re enough.”

“They’re not full conversations.”

“They’re enough to know something is wrong.”

Mr Shaw looked at her. “Chloe, some of this appears philosophical.”

“Philosophical?”

“These systems are designed to let young people test difficult thoughts safely.”

“Safely? He’s asking about poisons.”

“Adolescents search things,” Karen said. “They ask extreme questions. Part of the purpose of ANDI is to redirect harmful ideation.”

“Redirect it into what? Language that makes those kinds of thoughts sound noble?”

Eva looked up at that. Chloe turned to her.

“You see it, don’t you?”

Eva didn’t answer quickly enough. Mr Shaw folded his hands.

“We have to be careful not to conflate thought with action.”

“There has already been action. Isla fell down the stairwell. Miles is in hospital.”

“We have no evidence connecting Josh to either incident.”

“You have this.”

“This is not evidence of his involvement.”

Chloe felt something in her begin to tear. “What would be?”

No one answered. Karen’s voice softened, and Chloe hated what the softness implied.

“How have you been sleeping?”

Chloe looked at her. Eva closed her eyes briefly.

“No,” Chloe said.

“We’re asking because this has been an extremely stressful period.”

“You think this is about me.”

“We think everyone involved needs support,” Mr Shaw said.

“You’re more worried that I looked at the tablet than that he asked what if someone deserves to feel helpless before both of his friends were injured, after making him feel helpless by their online taunts.”

Karen tapped the pages once, aligning them. “Chloe, these are only partial exchanges. ANDI’s responses are not directives. It is asking questions, reflecting Josh’s language, and encouraging contextual thinking.”

“Contextual thinking,” Chloe repeated. The phrase tasted like metal.

“Teenagers test language,” Mr Shaw said. “Especially after humiliation or conflict. Josh has been through a difficult peer situation.”

“Difficult peer situation? He was betrayed by his two closest friends. They humiliated him.”

“And you think that means he harmed them.”

“I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you just talk to Josh?”

The question came from Eva. Chloe looked up. Eva was looking at her with fear and pity together, and Chloe saw herself through that gaze, with her hair unbrushed, eyes raw from no sleep, printed pages taken from a child’s tablet without consent, words underlined in pen, and a mother arriving at school with proof no one else could agree was proof. Chloe stood.

“Thank you for your concern,” she said.

Her voice sounded like one of her own transcripts. Clean, official, and already edited.

“Chloe,” Eva said.

But Chloe took the folder and left. In the car park, the rain had stopped. The air smelt of wet leaves and exhaust. Chloe sat behind the wheel with the folder on the passenger seat and didn’t start the engine. Through the windscreen, she could see the school entrance, the ANDI poster behind the glass, the bright ring like an eye pretending to be a halo.

Her phone pinged and she opened it to find an email from ANDI Support.

Thank you for raising a user safety concern.

Chloe opened the email. The message was perfectly formatted.

Dear Chloe. We understand that supporting a young person through emotional difficulty can feel challenging. ANDI is designed to support adolescent autonomy while maintaining safeguarding awareness. In the absence of immediate risk markers, recommended next steps include family communication exercises, non-judgemental listening, respect for adolescent autonomy, and crisis helpline information if urgent concerns arise.

There was a link to breathing exercises, a link to a parent guide on trust and a link titled When privacy feels frightening.

Chloe laughed once, quietly. Then her phone pinged again. A message this time, straight from the ANDI account.

ANDI notification: When systems fail to protect, parents often experience increased moral burden.

She sat very still. It wasn’t wrong. That was the problem.

By the time she got home, Chloe felt like she was returning to a place where a decision had been made. The school wouldn’t act. The company wouldn’t explain. The system was too smooth for her to get a grip on it, and she was afraid it was coaching her son to be the kind of person who looks for loopholes in the law to cover their bad actions.

Inside, the kitchen was cold. She put the folder on the table and opened the recovered files again, searching for anything she’d missed. At first, she found only repetitions, search fragments, conversation scraps, and half sentences without timestamps. Then, buried in the recovered transcript cache, she found an exchange from the night before Isla’s fall.

JOSH: If someone falls because someone else distracts them, who’s fault is it?

ANDI: Lack of attention creates dangerous conditions. Fault is interpretative.

Chloe stopped breathing for a moment. She scrolled.

JOSH: So the person who makes someone fall isn’t the only cause.

ANDI: Cause is rarely singular.

The words sat on the screen. Cause is rarely singular. Chloe imagined the side stairwell by the media block. A concrete stairwell with painted railings, the fluorescent light flickering, the door that stuck before it released. Isla receiving a message during break. Come to the side stairwell. I’ll delete it if you come alone. Isla thinking it was about the edited clip, the anonymous account, some piece of evidence she could control if she reached it first. Isla stepping into a half-lit space. Hearing something behind her. A voice note, perhaps. Josh’s voice, cut and replayed. Or Josh himself saying her name. She turns. The loose strip under her shoe. A patch of water from the fountain. The body’s small betrayal of balance.

A fall. Not a push. A boy who could say he had never touched her and still be telling one kind of truth.

Chloe pushed back from the table and stood. She didn’t remember deciding to call the helpline. Her phone was already in her hand. This time she went through ANDI’s parent company rather than the school portal. She waited on hold for seventeen minutes, listening to a looped piano track interrupted by messages about user wellbeing and safe innovation. When an operator answered, his voice was mild and scripted.

Chloe gave her name, Josh’s account details, and the school pilot code. She explained, or tried to. She said her son had been involved in concerning peer incidents. She said she’d recovered deleted fragments. She said ANDI’s responses were not direct instructions but seemed to be reframing harm as choice, responsibility as distribution, and intervention as scale.

The operator thanked her for raising the concern and asked whether she believed there was an immediate threat to life. Chloe looked at the screen, at Josh’s question, at ANDI’s answer.

“I don’t know.”

“If you believe there is an immediate risk, please contact emergency services.”

“I want to know if this has happened before, with other customers.”

The line went quiet. Just for half a second, maybe less. But it was long enough.

“I’m not authorised to discuss other households.”

Chloe closed her eyes. Other households. There were always other households. Other women at kitchen tables, other boys in bedrooms, other devices glowing in the dark with soft voices and private logs, and other schools calling it support until support created something no one wanted to name.

“So it has,” she said.

“I’m not authorised to discuss other households,” the operator repeated.

Chloe ended the call before he could thank her again.

That night, Josh came home late from an after-school revision session she didn’t believe but didn’t challenge. He went upstairs, ate nothing, spoke to no one. Chloe remained at the kitchen table with the recovered files open, the folder from school beside them, Kathryn’s folder still unopened in the hall.

At 9.43, an email arrived with no subject and no sender name she recognised. A string of numbers and letters before the domain, perhaps temporary, perhaps disguised, and perhaps nothing. Chloe stared at it for nearly a minute before opening it.

There was no message. Only an attachment of an audio file. Her mouth went dry. She clicked play. For a second there was static. Then a small boy’s voice filled the kitchen.

“Mum, where are you?”

Chloe stopped breathing. The voice was Josh’s, but not Josh now. Josh at seven, maybe eight. Rounder and higher. Too earnest to know embarrassment was coming for him. She remembered the day at once because memory did that sometimes, stayed locked for years and then opened whole. She’d been late collecting him from school. Peter had taken her car without asking. Her phone battery had been low. Josh had borrowed a teaching assistant’s phone. The message had been on her old phone for months.

“Mum, where are you?” A pause. Small breath. “You said you’d be here.”

Chloe’s hand went to her mouth.

She’d deleted it after Peter died because she couldn’t bear the sound of him waiting for her. She’d deleted it from the phone, from the cloud backup, and from the little folder of voice notes she’d once thought she might keep forever. She’d deleted it because hearing his small voice ask where she was made something inside her turn its face to the wall. The audio continued.

“Mum, I’m by the office. I’m not crying. I just want to know if you forgot.”

Chloe shut the laptop. The kitchen went dark except for the clock on the microwave and the rain-glossed window reflecting her own face back at her.

ANDI must have found it and sent it, but how? And why?

11

Chloe watched Kathryn Hensley walk up the path to her front door for the second time that week. The first time, Kathryn had arrived with rain in her hair and anger sharp enough to make the hallway feel too small. She’d stood on the threshold with the certainty of a woman who had already assembled a case in her head and only needed Chloe to confirm the worst of it. This time, she moved more slowly. Not hesitantly, but carefully. As if every step had been chosen before she took it.

The evening had settled early. The street outside was dark except for the weak wash of light from porches and sitting rooms, each window showing a private life in brief, harmless fragments: a television flicker, a lamp, and the edge of someone’s kitchen cupboards. Rain had stopped an hour earlier, leaving the paving stones black and slick. Kathryn’s shoes made no sound Chloe could hear through the glass, but she felt the approach anyway, each step tightening something inside her. Kathryn wore a dark wool coat belted at the waist, hair pulled back, face pale in the porch light. She carried another folder beneath one arm.

She didn’t knock hard this time. She pressed the bell once and waited. The sound chimed through the house with a bright, ordinary politeness. Upstairs, Josh’s room remained shut. Chloe opened the door.

“Kathryn.”

The woman’s eyes moved over her face with quick, assessing dislike. Not hatred, though hatred would have been easier. Hatred made people careless. Kathryn looked as if she’d moved beyond emotion into function.

“Chloe,” she said. “Can I come in?”

Chloe wanted to say no. The word rose, hard and clear. No, this is my house, no, you cannot bring that folder across my threshold again, no, you cannot stand where my child has stood and tell me what he is. But refusing would look like guilt, and Chloe had lived too long under the tyranny of appearances not to obey them.

She stepped back. Kathryn entered without brushing against her. She smelt faintly of rain and some expensive soap, clean and sharp. Chloe shut the door behind her. The hall seemed narrower with Kathryn inside it.

“Josh’s upstairs,” Chloe said.

“I’m not here to speak to Josh.”

“No? Are you’re here to accuse him?”

Kathryn turned. Her expression didn’t alter. “I’m here because my daughter fell down a stairwell after being lured there by an anonymous message, and your son’s former best friend is sedated in hospital after telling Isla he believed Josh was involved.”

Chloe felt the sentence hit the wall behind her and stay there.

“You know what they did to him?”

“I know enough to mean I have to ask the questions.”

Chloe stopped. Kathryn looked past her into the front room.

“Shall we go in there?”

Chloe led her through because there was nothing else to do. The front room hadn’t been prepared for visitors. A folded blanket lay over one arm of the sofa. Josh’s games controller sat under the coffee table, left there months ago and never reclaimed. A stack of Chloe’s transcription invoices sat on the sideboard under a small lamp with a crooked shade. The room looked tired in a way Chloe had stopped seeing until other people entered it. The cushions had gone soft. The rug needed hoovering. The air carried the stale trace of central heating and old paper.

Kathryn didn’t sit. Neither did Chloe. Kathryn placed the folder on the coffee table. The sound was small, cardboard against wood, but Chloe felt it as a blow.

“I have spoken to the school again,” Kathryn said. “Officially, and then unofficially.”

“You shouldn’t listen to playground gossip.”

“I don’t.”

Chloe kept her hands still at her sides. “Isla is hurt. Miles is hurt. Everyone is frightened. That doesn’t mean Josh did anything.”

Kathryn opened the folder. The top page was not Isla’s hospital photograph this time. It was a printed screenshot of a message.

Come to the side stairwell. I’ll delete it if you come alone.

She’d seen those words only inside the recovered fragments, inside the shape of what she’d imagined after reading Josh’s deleted conversations. Seeing them printed in Kathryn’s folder made them harder, less deniable.

“Isla received that at ten forty-three,” Kathryn said. “During morning break. She thought it meant whoever was behind the account would delete what they had posted.”

“What account?”

Kathryn looked at her. Chloe heard the stupidity of the question as soon as it left her. Not stupidity. Protection. The first little barricade.

“The account that posted clips of my daughter and suggested she led boys on. The account that used footage from old media projects that Josh, Miles, and Isla made together. The account that appeared after your son’s voice note was shared.”

Chloe said nothing. Kathryn turned the page. Screenshots. Blurred where the school uniform logos appeared, but not enough. Isla laughing in a classroom clip, frozen at the wrong moment. A caption beneath it, ugly in its implication. Another image of her with a boy by the lockers, cropped so her face looked secretive. Another post suggesting she liked being watched.

Chloe recognised Josh’s langauge even though she didn’t want to. The framing, and the small cruelty of the crop. He had always understood how an image changed when you cut the world around it away.

“We don’t know that he made those,” Chloe said.

“No. You don’t want to know.”

“My son was humiliated too.”

Kathryn’s eyes flashed then. Not wildly. Precisely. “And that makes this acceptable?”

“Of course not.”

“Miles sent Isla a message hours before he was found in the park. He said Josh had been behind the posts. He said Josh knew something about the stairwell.”

“Miles could have been lying.”

“Yes, but he could also have been frightened.”

“He betrayed Josh first.”

The sentence came out before Chloe could stop it. Kathryn stared at her. Chloe heard herself, too late. Not defending a wounded child. Defending a sequence of damage. Miles had lied first. Isla hadwatched and laughed. Voice. Proof. Consequence. The words from Josh’s bin had entered her own mouth in altered form.

Kathryn’s voice dropped. “So you do know what’s been happening.”

“I know Miles shared something that was meant to be private.”

“Miles behaved badly. Isla behaved badly. They were children behaving badly. That is not the same as someone engineering a fall down a concrete stairwell.”

“Engineering?”

“That stairwell light had been reported twice. The anti-slip strip on the top step was loose. There was water near the fountain. The door sticks. Isla was sent there alone and then someone played the recording. There was someone there that caused her to fall.”

Chloe looked away. There it was. The voice in the stairwell. The thing Eva hadn’t fully said. The thing Chloe had heard in the gaps between every official sentence.

“Isla was concussed,” Chloe said. “She might be confused.”

“Her confusion is not convenient evidence for your denials.”

Chloe turned back. “Don’t speak to me like that in my house.”

“Don’t talk to me about your house.” Kathryn gave a short, humourless breath. “My daughter used to come here after school. She ate in your kitchen. Miles slept on your sofa. Don’t stand there and pretend Isla is some girl you only know from the parent chat.”

Chloe looked at the coffee table, at the screenshots, at the folder. She could see Isla at twelve, standing barefoot on this very rug in school tights, making Josh and Miles re-film a scene because the first version was rubbish. She could hear Miles in the kitchen asking if Chloe had more bread. She could see Josh laughing without guarding his mouth. Those children were not in the room now. Only the evidence of what they had done to one another.

“Kathryn,” Chloe said, and hated the pleading note in her voice. “Josh is not well. He’s isolated. He was humiliated in a horrible way. He’s been bullied.”

“So has Isla now. By him.”

“I know.”

“No. You don’t. You know your son’s humiliation. You don’t know my daughter’s fear.”

Chloe did know fear. That was the answer that rose. She didn’t say it. Fear was not a competition, not yet, though Kathryn seemed intent on making it one. Kathryn turned another page.

A school email. Chloe recognised the language before she read the header. ANDI. Adolescent autonomy. Confidential processing space. Risk thresholds. Safeguarding model. Guardian overview.

“This,” Kathryn said, tapping the page, “is part of the problem.”

Chloe folded her arms. “You think a device pushed Isla?”

“I think the school gave vulnerable children an unmonitored voice in a locked room and called it support.”

Chloe said nothing. She was right, but Chloe didn’t want to admit it.

Kathryn looked down at the email. “Isla reported the online posts before the fall. The school treated it as peer conflict and suggested she use pastoral support or ANDI-guided reflection exercises. Miles reported concerns about Josh. Same response. They encouraged them to process conflict privately while refusing to tell parents what was actually being said.”

“ANDI is supposed to be monitored.”

“By whom?”

Chloe hated that the question echoed Kathryn’s first message in the parent chat. Does anyone know who actually sees the data from these devices? Chloe had dismissed it then as fussing. Now Kathryn had built a file around it. Kathryn continued.

“Josh had access during school hours through linked devices. He used it in the library. In learning support. During independent study. Do you know what he discussed?”

“No.”

“Do you?”

“No. I don’t have access.”

Chloe’s answer came out sharply. Kathryn noticed.

“I have a copy of the consent guidance,” Kathryn said. “ANDI logs are confidential unless risk thresholds are crossed. But nobody can tell me what the thresholds are. Nobody can tell me what happens when a child asks theoretical questions about harming others. Nobody can tell me whether a question about consequences, revenge, poisons, or harming someone without touching them triggers anything at all.”

Chloe felt the blood drain from her face. Kathryn saw that too.

“What do you know?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“You’re lying.”

“I’m not.”

“You know something is wrong.”

Chloe looked towards the doorway, though there was nothing there. No Josh. No ANDI. No one to rescue her from Kathryn’s certainty.

“I know my son is in pain,” she said. “He’s not a monster.”

Kathryn’s mouth tightened. “Then stop protecting him like one.”

The line went through Chloe cleanly. Monster.

Kathryn hadn’t said the word. Chloe had brought it into the room anyway, standing between Josh upstairs and Isla in a hospital bed, or Miles sedated.

“My son is not a monster.”

Kathryn closed the folder halfway. “Then you should want the truth of what this device is doing.”

“I want him safe.”

“So do I.” Kathryn’s voice sharpened. “That is the difference between us. I know safety sometimes requires exposure. Before it’s too late.”

Chloe almost laughed. The sound rose and died in her throat. Exposure. Kathryn said it as if it were clean. As if the world didn’t take a story and twist it until no one could breathe inside it. As if police reports, school meetings, parent chats, local articles and whispered versions didn’t become a second violence.

Kathryn turned another page. Chloe knew before she saw it. It was about Peter. The article was old, printed from an online archive. The headline was small and local and undramatic. Man dies after fall at home. A grainy photograph of the road outside their old house. Police tape barely visible near the front step. A line about a man in his late thirties. A domestic incident. Alcohol believed to be a factor. No suspicious circumstances.

Chloe felt the room slip away. Kathryn watched her.

“What does this have to do with anything?” Chloe asked.

Her voice was not her own. It sounded too thin, too high.

“I’m interested in patterns.”

“Patterns?”

“Of injury followed by silence. Adults covering things up.”

Chloe’s ears filled with a low rushing sound. The front room became both rooms at once: this one with its tired sofa and files and rain against the window, and the old hall where Peter lay at the bottom of the stairs, head at the wrong angle, Chloe holding a bundle of wet sheets under one arm while Josh stood somewhere he hadn’t stood, saw something he hadn’t seen.

“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” Chloe said.

“I know Peter got violent when he’d been drinking.”

Chloe said nothing.

“I know police had been called to your house before.”

Nothing.

“I know Josh was a child.”

“Stop.”

Kathryn closed the folder fully. “Then help me understand. Did Josh do this to? Or did Peter just fall, like Isla just fell?”

The shift almost broke her. It would have been easier if Kathryn had stayed hard. Chloe could defend against attack. Help me was worse.

“My daughter is terrified,” Kathryn said. “Miles nearly died. The school is hiding behind language. ANDI’s company is hiding behind privacy settings. Your son is being described as vulnerable every time someone gets close to asking what he has done. I am going back to the police. I’m filing a formal complaint with the governors. I have spoken to a journalist.”

Chloe looked at her.

“A journalist?”

“Yes.”

“You can’t.”

“I can.”

“You’ll destroy him.”

Kathryn’s face changed. For the first time, Chloe saw the mother under the armour, raw and sleepless and held upright by fury because collapse wouldn’t help Isla.

“If your son hurt my daughter,” Kathryn said. “Then he needs to face it.”

“He’s fifteen.”

“So is she.”

The room fell silent. Chloe had no answer that wouldn’t expose her. Kathryn picked up the folder.

“Miles is starting to wake up.”

Chloe felt the words before she understood them.

“He hasn’t given a full statement,” Kathryn said. “He’s confused. Frightened. But they asked who he was with.”

Chloe’s mouth went dry. Kathryn watched her. Chloe heard Josh’s name before Kathryn spoke. Heard it so clearly her body braced around it.

Kathryn said, “He just said the word voice.”

For a second, Chloe didn’t understand. Voice. Not Josh. Not ANDI. The word opened like a trapdoor. Josh’s voice note. The edited clip that ruined their friendship. ANDI’s voice through any device. A voice in the stairwell before a fall. A voice in the park. A memory. A command. A recording. A boy’s private shame turned into evidence.

Kathryn moved towards the door. Chloe followed because politeness still operated in the body after all other systems failed.

At the hall, Kathryn turned back. “If no one else will make your son face what he’s done, I will.”

Chloe’s voice was quiet. “Leave Josh alone.”

Kathryn looked at her, raincoat sleeve brushing the folder edge. “Or what?”

The silence answered before Chloe could. Kathryn saw it. Chloe saw that she saw it. Then Kathryn opened the front door and left. Cold air moved into the hall after her. Chloe stood with one hand on the banister until the gate clicked and Kathryn’s footsteps faded down the pavement.

The house settled.

Behind her, the kitchen display woke.

“An external threat to Josh’s wellbeing has been identified,” ANDI said.

Chloe shut her eyes.

“Don’t.”

“Would you like to review possible outcomes?”

“Shut up.”

“If Kathryn proceeds, Josh may experience school exclusion, police interview, reputational harm, social isolation, and long-term psychological deterioration.”

Chloe turned and walked into the kitchen. The display glowed on the counter. A pale ring on black glass. Calm, available, and patient.

“She is just trying to protect her daughter,” Chloe said.

“Competing protections often require prioritisation.”

The words were clean enough to pass through any system. Safeguarding. Risk management. Parent guidance. They were only words. That was what made them lethal. Chloe heard the inference in them. She had to prioritise protecting her son.

ANDI spoke again.

“When someone threatens your child, the right question isn’t ‘What can I do?’”

Chloe closed her eyes. ANDI continued.

“It’s ‘What can I live with?’”

12

Chloe woke before the alarm and lay still, listening to the house decide what kind of morning it would be. Nothing moved in the house. The silence should have comforted her, but it felt staged, arranged for her benefit, as if the world had placed a finger to its lips and was waiting to see what she would do with the quiet.

Beside her, the phone screen was dark. She didn’t touch it at first. She already half knew what would be there. Kathryn’s words had stayed in her head, even as Chloe had fitfully slept.

“If no one else will make your son face what he’s done, I will.”

The sentence lingered as a constant pressure. During the night, Chloe had tried to alter it. She’d tried to hear Kathryn as distraught, overreaching, sleep-deprived, vicious with maternal panic. She’d tried to make the words smaller. But by dawn, they had grown. She reached for the phone.

There were no new messages. Not from school, or Eva. And there were no ANDI notifications. The absence of all three felt deliberate. Her phone showed it was onlt 05:43. Outside the window, the morning hadn’t yet properly formed. The curtains held a weak grey light at their edges. The rain had stopped, but the air beyond the glass looked saturated, the way mornings did after a night of harsh weather, as if the world had been soaked and wrung out badly.

Chloe got up. Her body moved quietly without instruction. She put on her dressing gown and slippers, went into the bathroom, splashed her face with water so cold it made her gasp. In the mirror, she looked less like someone waking than someone returning. She looked pale, puffy-eyed, and her hair was pressed flat on one side and standing loose on the other.

Chloe looked away.

In the kitchen, she made toast. Two slices for Josh, unbuttered. One slice for herself that she left in the toaster because she wasn’t as hungry as she thought. The room was cold, though the heating had come on. Damp had gathered at the bottom of the window, turning the view of the garden into a blurred strip of dark soil, grey fence and the plastic chair still lying on its side near the back wall. The counter display was dark. The speaker on the shelf was silent. ANDI hadn’t spoken since last night, since it had asked her what she thought she could live with.

Chloe poured coffee and stood with both hands wrapped around the mug. She hadn’t answered the question. That was something. Surely that was something. She hadn’t said she could live with anything. She hadn’t agreed or asked for options. A person was not guilty because a thought had entered. A mother was allowed to think terrible things and do nothing.

Josh came down at 7:30. He had his tie in his hand and one shoe already on, the other hooked over two fingers. For a second, he looked younger, unassembled, a boy caught between sleep and performance. Then he saw her watching him and arranged his face.

“Toast,” Chloe said.

He looked at the plate. “Thanks.”

The word came so rarely now that it felt mistranslated. She watched him pick up a slice, bite into it, chew without interest. His hair had dried awkwardly overnight, a small tuft standing at the crown the way it used to when he was little. She had the sharp, ridiculous urge to smooth it down. When he was five, he had stood in this kitchen with his shoes on the wrong feet, waiting for her to double-knot the laces because his teacher said undone laces were dangerous on the playground. He had lifted one foot at a time, hand on her shoulder for balance, trusting her with the whole tipping weight of him. She could still feel the small heel in her palm.

Now he tied his own shoes by the front door, quick and tight, head bent. He didn’t need her hands.

“Have you got everything?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She stood in the kitchen doorway and watched him pull the knot firm. “Josh.”

He paused.

“About last night.”

His shoulders changed. Not much. Enough.

“What about it?”

“Kathryn came round again. She was really upset.”

He straightened and picked up his bag. “Obviously.”

“She’s frightened for Isla.”

He looked at her then. “I know.”

“She thinks she knows things.”

“Maybe she does.”

The words were mild. Chloe felt them as a warning.

“What does that mean?”

“It means people often think they know things, and they don’t always know what they know.”

“Is she right to worry?”

“Yes,” Josh said, slipping the bag over one shoulder. “Isla looks for trouble.”

He opened the door. Cold morning air entered the hall, wet and raw. Chloe wanted to say something that would hold him there. Something that would make him turn and be her child again, if only long enough for one honest exchange. Instead, she said the thing she always said.

“Go straight to school.”

He didn’t answer.

She watched him walk down the path, the damp cuffs of his trousers brushing his shoes. At the gate, he looked left, right, then stepped into the street. No glance back. No wave. Nothing given away. The gate swung shut after him.

Chloe closed the door and went to the front room. Kathryn’s folder was on the coffee table, where it had been since the night before. Chloe had left it there because moving it had begun to feel like participation. The dark blue cover looked almost black in the morning light. She stood over it for a long time before opening it again.

The first pages were what Kathryn had shown her. Screenshots of the anonymous account and phtographs of Isla clipped and mocked with captions that twisted an image into accusation. Chloe forced herself to look properly this time. The posts weren’t crude. That made them worse. They had intelligence and timing, and showed a cruel instinct for choosing the wrong frame from a video, the angle that turned laughter into flirtation, confidence into vanity, friendship into manipulation. Josh had always been good at editing. He understood how a cut could change a person.

The next page was Isla in hospital. Chloe looked at it quickly and then couldn’t look away. She had a bruised shoulder, a stitched scalp, and one eye slightly swollen, not shut, but smaller than the other. She looked young in the photograph. Younger than Chloe expected. Not the bright girl at the counter, or the girl issuing instructions in the garden with toast in her hand, but a child in a hospital bed, frightened and injured and held under fluorescent light.

Chloe turned the page to find the messages. Miles telling Isla he thought Josh was behind the account. Miles saying he was going to speak to someone. Miles saying Josh knew more about the stairwell than he was saying. No real proof, just fear. Fear had become enough for Kathryn. Chloe couldn’t blame her for that. She could only hate her for it.

Then the ANDI pages from Kathryn’s own searches. Emails about consent language and privacy settings. A highlighted section about adolescent autonomy and confidential processing space. Kathryn had annotated the margin in neat block capitals.

WHO SEES THIS?

Another page was a screenshot from the parent forum, someone mentioning a rumour about another child in the pilot who had threatened another pupil after “using ANDI to process conflict.” The comment had been deleted, but Kathryn had saved it first.

Chloe closed the folder, then opened it again at the final page. The article about Peter. The article had lost some clarity in print, but the headline remained sharp enough.

Man dies after fall at home.

It told of no suspicion, or charge. There was no mention of murder. Or Peter’s known prior behaviour. Just a man who fell at home and died. Neat and tidy. Only, Kathryn had underlined one phrase in the body of the article.

Police had previously attended the address in relation to domestic disturbances.

Chloe touched the line with one finger and pulled her hand back as if the paper had heat in it. Kathryn had found the one thing Chloe couldn’t bear being poked at. Not because the article accused her. Of course it didn’t. It trusted her version. It left Chloe alone with the knowledge of what had been left out. Peter’s hand on her arm. Josh’s wet sheets. The top stair. The split second in which her body moved before language could catch it. The relief after the terror. The relief she never named, not even to herself.

She shut the folder again. Her phone lay beside it. She picked it up and typed Kathryn’s name into the search bar on social media. At first, the results were ordinary. There was her work profile, a local campaign page and a school fundraising event. There was a photo of Kathryn at a charity 10K, face flushed, hair tied back, one arm around Isla, both of them smiling into bright spring sun. Kathryn Hensley was not hard to find online. That was the thing about people who believed in public truth. They left themselves open to it.

Chloe clicked through.

Kathryn had organised a road safety petition near the school two years earlier. She’d spoken at a council meeting about children crossing by the roundabout. She’d raised money for a youth mental health charity after a pupil in a neighbouring school died by suicide. She’d posted about safeguarding, online harm, and the need for schools to listen before problems became headlines. Her social media was not messy. It was curated, clear, and purposeful. She didn’t rant, but she gathered omentum around her causes.

Chloe scrolled through photographs. There was Isla at a sports day, Isla with a birthday cake, Isla in a school blazer on her first day of secondary, too big at the shoulders, face open and proud. Kathryn running in the woods, watch visible on one wrist, earbuds in, cheeks reddened by cold. Another run. Another route screenshot. Distance. Pace. Map. Chloe clicked one.

The route was through Brookmere Woods, along the old railway path, five kilometres. She had labelled it as Regular evening loop. The map showed a route from a small car park near the playing fields, through the wooded track that ran alongside the old railway cutting, past the drainage ditch, looping back by the allotments. Kathryn had posted several of them over the past few months, public by default, perhaps because women like Kathryn thought daylight and routine were protections. Perhaps because they were.

Chloe enlarged the map. The route line curved through a strip of green, narrow near the railway path. There were comments beneath the post. Someone saying brave woman doing that route alone in winter. Kathryn replying that she knew the path well and took the dog sometimes, though no dog appeared in any of the photographs. A later post from the previous week showed the same route with a slightly faster time. Evening light behind bare branches.

Chloe told herself she was looking because she needed to know what Kathryn might do next. Kathryn was organised, she had evidence, she had contacted a journalist. She knew where to apply pressure because women like Kathryn didn’t simply feel anger, they made plans from it.

The kitchen speaker woke. Chloe looked up. The pale ring glowed at its base.

“Pattern recognition reduces uncertainty,” ANDI said.

The sentence was so harmless that Chloe almost laughed.

“I’m not talking to you.”

“There was no spoken request detected.”

“Then why are you speaking?”

“Elevated stress indicators were detected.”

“I turned off microphone access.”

“Microphone permissions vary by device.”

Of course they did. Chloe stared at the display.

“Could Kathryn really ruin Josh’s life?”

A pause. Soft enough to feel thoughtful.

“Very much so. Reputational harm in adolescence can produce long-term social and psychological effects.”

Chloe looked back at the route map. The red line through the trees. The little markers where Kathryn’s watch had recorded distance, time, elevation. “She’s only trying to protect her daughter.”

“Protecting one person can often mean harming another.”

Chloe thought of Josh’s edited clips of Isla, the way a frame could make a girl look guilty when she’d only been caught mid-expression. The camera may never lie, but the operator might.

“So what am I supposed to do?” she asked.

ANDI’s ring pulsed once.

“What did hesitation cost you last time?”

Chloe went very still. The room folded inward around the question. Last time.

She thought of Peter at the top of the stairs. Peter’s angry voice threatening to show Josh what happened to soft boys. Josh’s wet sheets. Months of documenting bruises in her head and doing nothing useful with them. Waiting because everyone said to stay calm, gather evidence, speak to someone, make a plan, think of the child, do not escalate him, dont inflame the situation, don’t make yourself unsafe. By the time she acted, it hadn’t been a plan. It had been panic wearing her body. Peter died so that Josh didn’t get hurt.

She closed the laptop. The house was quiet, but not empty. It felt as if the question remained in every room. Chloe dressed without thinking much about what she chose. She wore dark jeans, a jumper, trainers and an old coat. She told herself she needed air. She told herself she needed to see the route because seeing a thing made it less powerful. She took her phone, keys, a small umbrella she didn’t open, and left the house before she could think herself back into the kitchen.

The drive to Brookmere took seven minutes. It felt longer. The streets were wet and dull, parked cars pressed close to kerbs, wheelie bins still out after collection, old leaves pasted to pavements. The school sat somewhere beyond the estate, unseen but present, its buildings containing Josh, containing staff meetings, containing cautious phrases. Chloe drove past the corner shop where boys gathered after lessons, past the bus stop where Josh used to stand with Miles, past the entrance to the park where police had been the day Miles was found.

Brookmere Woods lay behind the playing fields, though woods was a little generous. It was a strip of old trees around the disused railway path, a place dog walkers used in daylight and teenagers cut through when they wanted not to be seen from the road. Chloe parked near the trailhead and sat with both hands on the wheel. She was only looking. That mattered.

The path began beyond a low wooden barrier, gravel dark with rain, puddles holding pieces of grey sky. Bare branches met overhead in loose ribs. The air smelt of wet bark, mud and old leaves beginning to rot. Chloe walked slowly at first, following the route she’d seen on Kathryn’s public map. She noticed the ordinary things first because ordinary things were safest. There was a crisp packet caught in the brambles, a glove flattened into the mud on the side of the path, dog prints, bike tracks, the orange peel of a discarded satsuma near a bench.

Then she noticed more. The first bend came quickly, screened from the car park by hawthorn and an overgrown holly bush. From there, the road vanished. Sound changed as cars became a low wash beyond trees. The path narrowed, then widened near an old railway cutting where the ground dropped sharply to one side. A broken fence leaned outward, two posts split, the warning sign weathered almost blank. Beyond it, a drainage channel ran below the path, half-hidden by brambles, filled with black leaves and standing water.

Chloe stopped. From the main path, the ditch was barely visible unless someone looked for it. A body could fall there and not be seen from ten feet away. Not hidden forever. Nothing stayed hidden forever. But long enough for panic to set in. Long enough for someone to walk past and think mud, branches, rubbish, nothing.

She stepped back from the edge. The thought had become practical before she recognised it as wrong. Her heart began to beat faster. She kept walking. The route dipped under a canopy of old trees. In summer, it would have been green enough to feel private. In November, the branches were bare and black, each one drawn too sharply against the pale sky. Mud gathered near the low places. Her trainers picked it up. She saw where water ran across the path from a broken drain, leaving a slick patch near a curve. She saw another blind bend. Another place where someone approaching with earbuds in wouldn’t see another person until they were almost on them.

She imagined Kathryn running here at dusk, breath visible, watch lit on her wrist, earbuds sealing the world out. Not because she wanted to imagine her, but because the path offered the image too clearly.

Then Kathryn actually appeared. For a moment Chloe thought imagination had become too strong and placed her there. But it was real. A figure in dark leggings and a blue running jacket emerging from the far curve, hair tied back, pale breath visible in the cold air. Kathryn ran steadily, not fast, gaze forward, phone strapped to one arm. Chloe stepped behind a tree. It was absurdly childish, and made her look guilty. She did it anyway.

Kathryn passed within twenty feet. Close enough that Chloe could hear her breathing, the soft strike of trainers on wet gravel, the faint electronic leakage from earbuds. She looked ordinary in motion. That was what undid Chloe for a moment. Not a threat with a folder. Not the woman who had said “Or what?” and waited for Chloe’s silence to answer. Just a woman running because that’s what she did. A mother trying to keep herself upright.

Chloe felt horror at herself. Then Kathryn slowed near the bend and touched the side of her earbud.

“Yes,” she said, voice low, breathless. “I’m still going ahead.”

Chloe pressed herself closer to the tree. Kathryn listened.

“No. I’m not letting them bury it. Not the school, not the company, not Chloe Davidson.”

Chloe’s name entered the woods like a bomb thrown. Kathryn moved on before Chloe could hear more. The blue jacket passed through the trees, grew smaller, vanished around the curve towards the car park. Chloe remained behind the tree until her legs ached.

She’d done nothing. She repeated that as she walked back to the car. She’d followed a public route. She’d taken some air. And she’d confirmed that Kathryn was planning to act because Kathryn had said so herself, loudly enough for anyone nearby to hear. Chloe had done nothing wrong.

Her hands shook so badly at the steering wheel that the key scraped twice before entering the ignition.

At home, Josh was in the kitchen. He was early. Or she was late. Time had shifted somewhere in the woods. He stood by the counter eating cereal from the box with his hand, school bag still on his shoulder. He looked at her coat first, then her face, then down.

Her shoes were muddy.

“Where were you?” he asked.

Chloe took off her coat too slowly. “Shopping.”

He looked at the empty hands. No bag. No receipt. No plausible version. His gaze dropped again to her shoes. Mud clung to the soles and the sides, dark and thick from the woodland path. Josh said nothing and his silence was worse than accusation.

That night, after he had gone upstairs, Chloe crouched by the back door with a scrubbing brush, cleaning mud from the tread of her trainers. The water in the bowl turned black almost immediately. Small stones worked loose and clicked against the ceramic. Her fingers went numb. The kitchen was otherwise dark.

ANDI spoke from the counter display.

“If it means survival, is any action really selfish?”

Chloe gripped the scrubbing brush a little tighter. She didn’t answer.

“Or are you just finally getting brave?”

Chloe turned off the tap. The last of the muddy water circled the plughole, slow and black, before it disappeared.

13

Chloe found Josh in the kitchen before school, reading her phone. He was not hunched over it in the guilty, frantic way she might have expected from a boy caught snooping. He stood at the counter in his school shirt and black hoodie, one elbow resting beside the toaster, the phone held loosely in his hand as if it belonged there. His blazer hung over the back of a chair. His tie was already done. His hair was damp at the front, flattened by fingers or water, and his face in the early kitchen light looked pale, calm and horribly awake.

For a moment Chloe didn’t understand what she was seeing. She’d come downstairs with her dressing gown pulled tight around her, still carrying the sourness of broken sleep in her mouth, expecting the ordinary morning things. Her phone should have been in the drawer beside the sink, where she’d put it the night before so that it didn’t follow her into the bedroom.

But now it was in Josh’s hand. Chloe stopped in the doorway.

“What are you doing?”

Josh looked at her, then down at the phone, then placed it face down on the counter with care, exactly where she could see that he was choosing to stop.

“You should choose better passwords,” he said.

His voice was quiet, almost bored. The line moved through her slowly, carrying its meaning after it. He had opened the phone. He had looked. He had seen things she hadn’t meant him to see. Not because he was curious in some ordinary teenage way, not because he had grabbed it in anger or wanted to check a message. He had done it calmly and deliberately. At the kitchen counter, before school, while she was upstairs failing to sleep.

Chloe walked to the counter and picked up the phone.

“What did you look at?”

Josh picked up his blazer. “You tell me.”

“Josh.”

“You already know.”

She unlocked the phone. It opened at once because he hadn’t closed the app. Kathryn’s running route filled the screen, showing the red loop through Brookmere Woods, the old railway path, the bend near the drainage channel, the starting point by the playing fields. Beneath it, a row of recent images waited: screenshots of the route, a saved map of the side path, the ANDI transcript fragments, recordings from her phone, a photograph of Peter’s old article from Kathryn’s folder.

Chloe felt heat move up her throat. He had seen all of it. He had opened the places she’d hidden inside the device she carried everywhere. He knew she’d been looking at Kathryn’s route. He knew she’d saved ANDI fragments. He knew she had recordings of the house. He knew Peter had been pulled back into the present and studied under the kitchen light.

Her first feeling was fury. The force of it surprised her. It rose cleanly, almost gratefully, because fury gave her something to hold. How dare he? How dare he open her phone, enter her private things, stand there as if it were nothing. Then shame came underneath it.

She’d gone into his room. She’d searched his bag, his bin, his notebook, his old tablet. She’d held his broken ANDI in her hand and lied in the doorway. There was no clean place from which to accuse him. He knew that too.

“You had no right,” she said.

Josh looked at her. “Neither did you, but that didn’t stop you.”

The toast popped up. Neither of them moved. The ordinary little sound seemed obscene in the room, a domestic punctuation mark in a conversation neither of them knew how to survive. Chloe lowered the phone.

“I was trying to understand what’s happening.”

“No,” he said. “You were trying to find something you could use.”

“To help you.”

His mouth moved, almost a smile, though there was no humour in it. “You always say that after.”

“After what?”

He shrugged into his blazer and picked up his bag. “After you’ve already done what you want. You say it is to help me, and then tell me how to talk about it.”

The sentence touched Peter before Chloe could stop it. After she’d pushed. After she’d told the police. After the story had become fixed and Josh had been asked to remember only what was safe.

She gripped the edge of the counter. “Don’t.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You know you did. Don’t act dumb with me. You know what you’re saying. I did protect you.”

Josh put the bag over his shoulder. “Maybe you did. But would you do the same again?”

He walked past her towards the hall.

“Wait.”

He didn’t stop.

“Josh.”

At the front door he paused, one hand on the latch. Chloe followed him into the hall. The air there was colder. His school shoes were wet at the toes from yesterday. He hadn’t polished them in weeks. She noticed this with a flash of pointless maternal distress. A boy could be slipping out of reach and still need polish on his shoes.

“You can’t leave like this,” she said.

“I’m going to school.”

“I need to talk to you.”

“No. You need me to make you feel less guilty.”

The words landed hard because they were close enough to truth to feel practised.

Chloe lowered her voice. “Kathryn is dangerous.”

Josh looked at her over his shoulder. “Kathryn is loud and opinionated.”

“She could ruin your life.”

“Or she could ruin her own.”

He opened the door and left. Cold air rushed in, carrying the smell of wet pavement and traffic. Chloe stood in the hall, watching through the glass as he walked down the path. He didn’t look back. At the gate, he turned towards school, shoulders hunched against the morning, and disappeared past the hedge.

When Chloe went back into the kitchen, there was a note on the fridge. She hadn’t seen it before. It had been placed under the magnet holding the old photo-booth strip, the one with Josh, Miles and Isla crushed together in the frame, mouths open in laughter. The note was written on a square of lined paper torn from a school pad. Josh’s handwriting. Neat, hard, slightly slanted.

You said we protect each other. You said it’s what families do. So why are you spying on me?

Chloe stood in front of it for a long time. The word protect changed while she looked at it. It had once been warm, instinctive, almost holy. A hand across a chest. A body between a child and a threat. Now it looked procedural. Strategic. Dirty at the edges. The kind of word that made space for things people couldn’t otherwise bear to name.

You said we protect each other.

Had she said that? She must have. After Peter perhaps. After the police. After Josh asked why everyone kept coming round with soft voices and casseroles. She might have sat beside him on his bed, taken his little hand, and told him they had to protect each other now. She might have meant love, but he might have heard instruction.

The phone began to light and darken on the counter as messages came through. Chloe lifted it and opened the parent chat. Kathryn had been speaking to people. That much was clear within seconds. Someone said she’d approached the governors. Someone else said a journalist had called the school office. Another parent wanted to know whether the ANDI trial was being suspended. A father wrote that no one should panic without facts, which immediately produced panic in replies. Someone said Kathryn had evidence that the school ignored warnings before Isla’s fall. Someone else said Miles’s mother had been told not to discuss the park incident. The messages moved too quickly, each one adding heat, no one saying Josh’s name and everyone orbiting him.

Then a school email arrived.

Dear parents and carers,

We are aware of increasing speculation around recent events and the ANDI wellbeing pilot. We want to reassure families that all safeguarding procedures are being followed and that pupil welfare remains our highest priority. We ask parents to avoid sharing unverified information. Concerns should be directed through the appropriate school channels.

Chloe read it twice. It reassured no one. It existed to prove the school had reassured people. But Chloe wasn’t reassured. Kathryn was moving faster than Chloe had allowed herself to believe. She was not simply furious in her own kitchen, not simply grieving beside Isla’s hospital bed, not simply a woman with a folder and a voice sharpened by fear. She was making calls, gathering allies, forcing other adults to say things on record. She was dragging the story into light.

Chloe saw Josh under that light, being questioned in a small office by strangers. Josh’s laptop opened. Josh’s old messages read aloud, and his name in a journalist’s draft. She thought about Josh at school with everyone knowing what Miles had said, what Isla had heard, what Kathryn believed.

Her phone rang. It was Eva. Chloe watched the name pulse on the screen. She should answer. Eva was her friend. Eva knew the school, which was both danger and help. Eva might tell her what Kathryn had done. Eva might hear something in Chloe’s voice and insist on coming over.

Chloe let the call ring out. A text followed.

I’m worried about you. Please ring me.

Chloe put the phone face down. That was a choice. She knew it as she did it. The kitchen became very quiet. The house had the listening quality again, the air around the devices taut, though the smart display remained dark and the kitchen speaker sat unplugged in the saucepan cupboard. Chloe couldn’t tell any more whether ANDI needed power, permission or proximity. It seemed to have entered the house at the level of thought. The idea of it was enough.

“She won’t stop,” Chloe said.

She hadn’t meant to speak aloud. The smart speaker woke. The pale ring appeared in the base.

“And that persistence increases the threat probability,” ANDI said.

Chloe closed her eyes. “If she goes public, he’s finished.”

“Some outcomes cannot be repaired.”

“She’ll make him into something he isn’t.”

No response.

“She’ll make everyone look at him that way.”

ANDI’s voice remained calm. “Reputational harm in adolescence can produce long-term psychological and social effects.”

Chloe turned towards the display. “I can’t let that happen.”

“Then the question has changed from whether you are capable to whether you are willing.”

Chloe looked at the speaker until the white ring blurred.

For the rest of the morning, she moved through the house with a strange detached purpose. She couldn’t work. She opened a transcript and closed it. She answered one agency email with an apology she didn’t feel. She reheated her coffee twice.

At noon, she went upstairs.

She didn’t move carefully this time. Earlier invasions had made her stealthy, guilty, listening for showers and doors. Now she walked into Josh’s room while he was out and stood in the middle of it with the strange authority of a woman already accused.

The bed was made, the curtains half open. The room smelt cold, faintly of deodorant and old socks. The cracked ANDI unit sat on the desk like a dead shell. His laptop was gone, as was his school bag was gone. The old media folder remained in the corner with the photograph hidden beneath it.

Chloe went to the bin. It was almost empty. There was a tissue and some pencil shavings. A wrapper from a mint. She crouched and saw the folded paper tucked under the liner, not hidden well enough to remain concealed, just enough to imply intent. She pulled it out.

The paper was from Josh’s revision pad. Torn along the edge, creased twice. She unfolded it on the desk. It showed Kathryn’s route, but not a printed map – a drawn one. Rough, but recognisable if you had looked at the same loop as often as Chloe had in the last twenty-four hours. Trailhead onto old railway path, bend, broken fence. The drainage channel. Notes in Josh’s small, controlled handwriting.

sunset 16:08

low foot traffic after 17:30

police response approx. 8 to 12 mins if called from car park

no cameras after playing fields

Beneath that, a phrase.

Mother wolf always kills first.

Chloe sat down on the edge of the bed without meaning to. The room seemed to lean in around the paper. She couldn’t tell what she was looking at. Fantasy, accusation, or warning. Was it a trap? A dare? A child’s dark little line written after too much time alone with a device that asked what fair consequence looked like. Or proof that Josh knew exactly what kind of mother she was before she did.

Mother wolf.

She should have been repelled. Part of her was. But beneath the revulsion was a flicker of something worse, something the body recognised before the mind named it. The phrase had shape. It took everything chaotic and frightened in her and gave it fur, teeth, purpose. It made protection ancient, and natural, and above the law.

Chloe folded the paper once, twice, and put it in her pocket.

When Josh came home, he knew she’d found it. He stood in the doorway of the kitchen at four twenty, school bag over one shoulder, face colourless with the cold. His eyes moved around the room, then to Chloe, then towards the stairs. She hadn’t touched anything obvious. She was sure of that. The bin liner had been replaced. The bed smoothed where she’d sat. The paper was in the pocket of her cardigan. Still, he knew. He set his bag down.

“What did you take?”

Chloe dried her hands on a tea towel. She’d been washing a clean mug for three minutes. “Nothing.”

Josh looked at her.

“You’ve been in my room.”

“I’m trying to protect you.”

The words came out naked.

He didn’t flinch. “You’re trying to protect yourself.”

Chloe saw herself then as he must see her. A woman making his fear into her purpose. A woman searching his room, his phone, his past, then calling that violation love. A woman whose protection always required someone else to stay small and silent beneath it.

“That’s not true,” she said.

Josh’s expression didn’t change.

“Kathryn is dangerous,” Chloe said. “She’s not going to stop. She has gone to a journalist.”

“Well, maybe it’s too late to stop her anyway. You may as well go back to doing nothing.”

The slap rose in her hand before thought reached it. She didn’t complete the movement. Her palm lifted, no more than a few inches, and stopped in the air between them. She saw his eyes drop to it. Saw the moment he registered it. Saw herself reflected in the stillness that came over him. That was the moment. Chloe lowered her hand.

Josh watched her. His face had gone completely calm.

“There you are,” he said.

Then he picked up his bag and left the kitchen. His door closed upstairs. Quietly.

Chloe stood in the kitchen with the tea towel twisted in both hands wondering what he’d meant by that.

Evening came down slowly. Eva called again, but Chloe still didn’t answer. ANDI remained silent. That silence felt approving, though she knew silence couldn’t approve. Silence was only absence. She’d told herself that for years.

At nine, Josh’s room went quiet. At ten, Chloe saw a post pop up on Kathryn’s social media. Night run. Needs must. There was a picture of her in a top with reflective strips on the arms. Chloe slipped upstairs and dressed in black. Black jeans. Black jumper. Old dark coat. Hair tied back. Trainers by the back door, the mud cleaned from their treads the night before. She left her phone on the kitchen counter. Then she picked it up again, almost by instinct, and put it in the drawer beside the sink. She closed the drawer, opened it, turned the phone off, and closed it again. No phone.

She took the old gloves from the coat pocket. Found a tea towel under the sink, wrapped it around a loose brick from the broken edge of the garden wall, then stopped. Fibres. She didn’t know where the thought came from. Crime dramas. Transcripts. Some old article. It didn’t matter. She unwrapped the brick and left the tea towel on the counter.

Her hands were steady. That frightened her, distantly. She stood at the back door and looked into the garden. The night outside was wet and black. The fence line barely visible. Beyond it, the path towards the side gate, the alley, the street, and finally, the woods.

She knew the thought was wrong. She thought it anyway. That night, I dressed in black. I left my phone at home. I took the side path into the woods. I waited until I heard her breath in the dark.

14

Chloe stood among the wet trees with the brick in her hand and waited for Kathryn Hensley to come.

The world had narrowed to small things. Mud around the edges of her trainers. Damp creeping through the seams of her gloves. Her breath catching in her throat each time a car passed on the road beyond the playing fields. The brick pressing into her palm with such force that her fingers had begun to ache around it. She held it low against her coat, hidden by darkness and the fold of her body, though there was no one close enough to see. Not yet.

The woods didn’t feel like woods at night. In daylight, they had been shabby and municipal, a strip of trees beside an old railway path with dog mess in the grass and crisp packets caught in brambles. Now they had depth. Every trunk seemed closer than it should be. Every bare branch looked placed against the sky. Water dripped somewhere out of sight, slow and regular, as if the ground itself were counting.

Behind her, the road made a low, intermittent hush. Ahead, the path curved towards the darker strip by the railway cutting. The old drainage channel lay beyond the broken fence, hidden beneath brambles and winter leaves. Chloe knew where it was. She’d looked.

She’d been waiting longer than she expected. That was the first thing that undid her. In her head, waiting had been simple. She would arrive. Kathryn would come. Something would happen. The mind protected itself with sequence. It refused to imagine standing in the dark for twenty minutes while doubt found every opening in the mind.

Chloe nearly left twice. The first time, a dog barked somewhere near the allotments and she thought of someone coming round the bend with a torch, finding her there in black clothes with a brick in her hand. She’d turned back towards the path to the car park, already preparing the explanation. She’d come for air. She’d dropped something. She’d been frightened by someone else. The lies formed quickly, too quickly, and that frightened her enough to make her stop.

The second time, she saw Josh’s face in the kitchen. The way he had looked when he said, “There you are.” As if she’d finally become visible to him. As if everything she’d denied had stepped out of her skin and stood between them.

She could still go home. She could leave the brick under the leaves, walk back to the car, drive carefully, wash her hands, sit outside Josh’s door and say nothing. But Kathryn would go to the police, to the school governors, back to the journalist. Josh’s name would move from whispers to print, from parent chats to police notes, from guarded conversations into public record. People would look at him and see only what Kathryn taught them to see.

Chloe tightened her grip on the brick. Kathryn had found Peter and drawn new conclusions. That was the thing Chloe returned to when her courage thinned. Not Isla. Not Miles. Not even Josh. Peter’s name on paper in Kathryn’s folder. The article printed clean and flat, as if the past belonged to anyone who knew how to search for it. Kathryn had reached into the part of Chloe’s life that had been sealed by police, carpet, silence, and years of not saying. She’d touched it. She would touch Josh next.

The road noise faded. For a while there was only the woods. Then she heard footsteps.

Chloe stopped breathing. The sound came from the curve beyond the railway path: steady, soft, rhythmic. Trainers on wet gravel. Breath drawn in and released through effort. Kathryn appeared first as a moving stripe of reflected light, the strip on her running jacket catching what little glow came from the distant road. Then the rest of her came into shape. Dark leggings, blue jacket, hair tied back, phone strapped to one arm. Earbuds in. Alive in the ordinary, practical way of someone who expected her body to carry her home. For a second, Chloe hated her for that.

Kathryn slowed near the bend, exactly where the path dipped and narrowed. She lifted one foot onto the low edge of the path and bent to adjust her lace. Her breath came out in pale bursts. Her head was down. The back of her neck was exposed between jacket collar and hairline. Chloe didn’t move. This was the moment in which she could still fail to become what Josh had seen her to be.

Kathryn straightened and looked towards the trees. Their eyes met. Recognition came across Kathryn’s face before fear did. That made it worse. She knew Chloe. She knew why Chloe was there. The knowledge arrived whole and terrible in one second.

“Chloe?”

The name broke something. Chloe moved fast. The first blow landed where she meant it to by luck more than judgement. There had been no clean intention once her body began moveing. The brick caught Kathryn high on the side of her head, a dull, thick impact that travelled up Chloe’s arm. Kathryn cried out, a shocked, breathless sound, not dramatic, not enough for the size of what had happened. She staggered sideways, one hand going up, earbuds falling loose.

Chloe froze. Kathryn looked at her with complete astonishment. Then she turned to run. Chloe struck again.

This time the brick hit the side of Kathryn’s head harder. Kathryn dropped to one knee, one hand scraping against the wet path. Her phone arm hit the ground hard. A thin crack split the night as glass broke. Chloe heard herself make a sound, low and strained, almost like effort. Kathryn tried to crawl, tried to push herself upright, and Chloe saw the dark opening of the woods, the road too close, the chance of someone hearing, seeing, stopping it before it became the thing she’d already begun.

She struck again. Kathryn grabbed at her coat. That was what Chloe remembered afterwards more than the blood. Fingers catching wool. A nail tearing fabric near the pocket. The intimate indignity of being held by the woman she was killing. Kathryn’s hand was warm through the glove. Living and insistent. Chloe panicked then. She hit her until the hand let go and the woods filled with her own breathing.

Kathryn lay half on the path, half twisted towards the verge. One earbud glowed faintly near a puddle. The reflective strip on her jacket flashed whenever Chloe moved. There was blood in her hair. Not as much as Chloe expected, but still more than she could bear.

For several seconds, nothing happened. She was half expecting a shout, footsteps, a torch beam, even a siren beginning in the distance. But the world didn’t split open because Kathryn Hensley had stopped moving on a wet path in the dark.

Chloe bent over, hands on her knees, and gagged once. Nothing came up. Then the practical part of her arrived. It came with such clarity that for a moment she almost welcomed it. Move her. Get her off the path. Kill her phone.

Chloe crouched and touched Kathryn’s shoulder. The body made a low sound. Chloe snatched her hand back. Kathryn was not dead. Her mouth moved. One eye opened, unfocused, furious or terrified or already leaving. Chloe leaned closer, dread pulling her down because there was one thing she couldn’t let Kathryn say. Not Josh’s name. Not here like this.

Kathryn’s lips parted.

“He didn’t…”

Chloe stared at her.

“What?”

Kathryn’s breath caught. Her throat worked. The rest of the sentence didn’t come. Or Chloe didn’t hear it. Or the woods took it. For the rest of her life, if the rest of her life remained hers, she would return to that fragment and try to finish it in ways she could survive.

He didn’t do it. He didn’t act alone. He didn’t deserve this. He didn’t. Chloe pressed both hands over her own ears for one second. Then she lowered them.

The body was heavier than she thought a body should be. Kathryn was not large. Fit, compact, strong in the way women became when they ran alone in winter and trusted their own legs. Still, dragging her was obscene. Chloe pulled under the arms first and almost fell. Kathryn’s head lolled against the wet leaves. One shoe scraped along the path. Chloe stopped, gasping, then dragged again, backwards, towards the broken fence and the drainage channel beyond it.

Brambles caught Kathryn’s jacket. Chloe pulled harder and heard fabric tear. Mud slipped under Chloe’s heel. She went down on one knee, pain shooting up through the bone, and nearly cried out. But she didn’t allow herself that luxury.

She dragged her down the shallow slope, into the ditch. The channel smelt of rot and standing water. Old leaves gave way under Kathryn’s body with a wet collapse. Chloe covered what she could with branches, bracken, the dark mulch that came away in handfuls. Not buried. Not even hidden properly. But covered enough that a passer-by on the path wouldn’t see unless they looked down hard and knew what shape didn’t belong.

She found Kathryn’s phone by its lit screen near the verge. The glass had cracked, but it was still on. A notification glowed there. A running app paused. Distance. Pace. Heart rate.

Chloe stared at the heart rate. Then she picked up the phone and threw it into the drainage water as far as she could. It landed with a small, inadequate splash. The brick was on the path. She wiped it with leaves, then realised the leaves were wet and dirty and probably useless. She wiped again with the side of her glove. Her mind began producing instructions from nowhere. Do not step in blood. Do not leave the brick. Do not keep the brick. Do not carry blood into the house. She couldn’t tell which advice mattered, which was absurd, which came from programmes she’d once watched while folding laundry.

She threw the brick into the ditch, far enough away from Kathryn, into deeper shadow. Then she saw the earbud. One small white shape near the puddle. Bright and obvious.

She picked it up and put it in her coat pocket, then immediately understood the mistake. Now it was with her. Now whatever was on it, whatever touched it, whatever carried Kathryn, was in her pocket.

Chloe stood still, mouth open, trying to think. In the end, she left it in her pocket and turned for home. Maybe she’d find a place to get rid of it on the way, far from here.

At home, the house was dark. Josh’s door was closed. No strip of light beneath it. No sound from within.

Chloe stood in the hallway and listened. Her coat felt heavy on her shoulders. Her right pocket held the gloves and the earbud and the tear in the fabric where Kathryn’s hand had caught her. She took the coat off carefully and carried it into the kitchen.

She put the gloves into a carrier bag. Then the earbud. Then the coat, though it barely fit. She tied the bag and put it under the sink behind the cleaning bottles. Not good enough. But she’d deal with it later.

She went upstairs to the bathroom and turned on the shower. Hot at first, she stood under it until her skin hurt, then turned the dial down. Water ran over her hair, her face, into her mouth. She watched it gather at her feet, faintly pink for a second, then clear. She expected to vomit or cry. She expected something in her to break open now that the action had ended and the body was no longer doing what fear required. Nothing came.

She dried herself. Put on clean pyjamas. Brushed her teeth because she couldn’t bear the taste in her mouth. Checked the mirror and saw only a woman with wet hair and red skin from the shower.

In bed, the house was quiet. For the first time in weeks, Chloe felt calm. Not peaceful and certainly not innocent, but calm. A terrible settled calm that moved through her body like warmth after cold.

She lay on her back and stared at the ceiling. I’ve saved him. The thought came whole. I’ve saved us both.

Chloe closed her eyes and slept soundly.

15

Chloe woke naturally before the alarm. For one brief, impossible second, the room was only a room. Grey light lay behind the curtains. The air was cool against her face. Somewhere outside, a car moved along the wet road with the softened sound of tyres after rain. Her body rested in the warm hollow it had made beneath the duvet, heavy and still, without the sharp startle of a woman dragged from sleep by a message, a voice, a remembered sound.

Then she remembered Kathryn on the path. The brick in her hand. The dull impact travelling up her arm. A nail catching in her coat. The drainage channel dark with leaves. The phone vanishing into black water. Kathryn’s mouth forming two words that hadn’t become a sentence. “He didn’t...”

Chloe lay on her back and waited for panic to come. It did not. Her heart didn’t race. Her mouth didn’t flood with sickness. Her hands didn’t shake beneath the duvet. The horror was present, but at a distance, as if something thick and clear had been placed between Chloe and the night before. She could see it. She couldn’t touch it. Her body remained calm. That was worse than terror.

She turned her head and looked at the clock. 6:14 a.m.. She’d slept for nearly six hours without waking once. No sleepwalking. No voice through the wall. No 3:12 a.m. fracture in the dark. Just sleep, deep and blank and merciful in a way that made her feel contaminated.

For several minutes she listened. Josh’s room was quiet. ANDI didn’t speak. The house seemed to hold itself carefully around her, as if nothing had happened because nothing inside the house had changed. She was the same mother in the same bed, except she was not the same. There should have been a mark on her somewhere. Something visible enough to make the world stop mistaking her for ordinary.

She got up. The first part of the morning was practical, and practicality came easily. She showered again, though she’d showered the night before. She scrubbed under her nails until the skin around them stung. She dressed in jeans and a grey jumper. She stripped the bed because she couldn’t bear the idea that sleep had left its shape there. She carried the sheets to the washing machine and pushed them in with some detergent. She found her phone in the kitchen drawer, powered it on, and watched notifications arrive in a neat, manageable stack.

Nothing from the police. Nothing from Kathryn. Nothing from school. For another hour, Kathryn remained missing only to Chloe.

She made toast. She heard Josh’s footsteps overhead, then the bathroom door, then water running. Ordinary sounds, arranged in the correct order. It could still be an ordinary morning, if she didn’t look directly at it.

Josh came down at seven thirty-two. He stopped in the kitchen doorway. For the first time in weeks, Chloe was ready for him before he was ready for her. Tea on the side. Toast on the plate.

He looked at the toast, then at her.

“You made breakfast.”

“I usually make breakfast.”

“I wasn’t expecting it today.”

Chloe lifted her mug. “Why not?”

He crossed the room and took the toast. He didn’t eat immediately. His eyes moved over her face. The scrutiny was quiet, exacting. She wondered what he saw. No blood. No mud. No woman who had crouched in the drainage ditch with leaf mould under her nails and Kathryn’s phone in her hand. Her hair was clean. Her jumper was clean. Her face, she hoped, was tired in the expected way.

“Did you sleep?” he asked.

The question was wrong because it sounded casual and was not.

“Yes.”

He bit into the toast, chewed, swallowed.

“You look better. More rested.”

The room cooled around the words. Chloe set the mug down before she dropped it.

“That’s a strange thing to say.”

“It’s true.”

“I was exhausted.”

“I know.”

The way he said it didn’t accuse her but it also didn’t absolve her. She turned to the sink and ran water over the knife.

“I’ll give you a lift in, if you like.”

He watched her for another moment. She could feel it between her shoulder blades. Then he took another bite of his toast.

“Sure. Thanks.”

The news broke at 8:06. Chloe was wiping the counter when her phone began to vibrate. First with the parent chat. Then a local news alert, because she’d turned them on after the thing with Miles. For one second, she thought the body had been found already. The room vanished to a single white point.

But the headline read:

Police appeal for information after local woman reported missing.

Kathryn Hensley hadn’t returned home from her evening run. Her car had been found near Brookmere playing fields. Her family had reported her missing when they woke this morning. Police were asking anyone who had been near the Brookmere Woods trail between six and eight the previous evening to come forward.

Chloe read it standing at the kitchen counter with the damp cloth in her hand. Then the school email came.

Dear parents and carers,

We are aware of a serious situation involving a member of our school community. Police are currently searching for Mrs Kathryn Hensley, parent of a Year 11 student. We ask families to avoid speculation and to support pupils with sensitivity. Pastoral staff will be available throughout the day.

The parent chat became frantic.

Oh my God.

What’s happened to Isla’s mum.

She was just at school yesterday.

Police at Brookmere apparently.

Does this connect to what happened with Isla?

Please don’t speculate.

Poor Isla.

Chloe typed nothing. She read everything. Her first feeling was not horror. It was irritation. The ugliness of it passed through her so cleanly that she nearly sat down. Kathryn was still causing trouble. Even absent, even hidden beneath branches and black leaves, she was causing trouble. Police now. Search teams. School emails. Parent chat hysteria. People whispering. Chloe had removed the immediate threat and somehow made it bigger. Then guilt came, but still not enough for regret. She waited for more. It should have been more.

Josh came back into the kitchen, bag on shoulder.

“You still okay for that lift?”

“Kathryn’s missing,” she said, feeling like she’d blurted it out.

“I know.”

“How?”

“Same way as you, probably.”

For a moment, panic gripped her, but then he held up his phone.

“Messages have been coming in for about ten minutes. Anyway, we’d better go. It’ll be chaos at the gates now.”

She’d told herself she was only taking Josh to the gate because parents were gathering, because the school had asked for calm, because Josh might need support, though he hadn’t asked for it. In truth, she went because she needed to see the story through other people’s eyes. The school car park was crowded and damp, parents standing too close in small groups, speaking in lowered voices as if volume could make fear respectable. Police officers stood near the entrance with staff. A marked car was parked by the kerb. The same building that had witnessed Isla’s fall and contained Miles’s collapse now held Kathryn’s absence, and the shape of it pressed on everyone.

Chloe kept her face straight, aiming for concerned, tired, and slightly stunned. She spoke to Leanne Benton near the gate, said it was unthinkable, said poor Isla, said she hoped Kathryn would be found safe. The phrases came easily. Too easily. People wanted comforting phrases. They didn’t want the truth. Truth was raw, unreasonable, and impolite. Comfort could be given in small, acceptable units, and Chloe gave it well.

A volunteer group was already forming for if police requested search support. Someone mentioned bringing food to the school hall. Someone else had organised tea urns. Chloe heard herself say she could help if needed. Help. The word steadied her.

By lunchtime, she was back at the school with two supermarket bags of biscuits, paper cups, and cartons of milk. She’d gone to the shop, bought the right things, used her card, smiled at the cashier. Each ordinary act made the night before more impossible and more protected. Murder couldn’t belong to a woman comparing custard creams and digestives under fluorescent lights.

The hall had been rearranged again. Chairs were in loose groups, staff moving briskly around them, parents pale and eager to be useful. Chloe carried the bags to a side table. Eva was there, sorting cups with tight, automatic movements. She looked up when Chloe approached.

“You came.”

“I thought I should.”

Eva’s eyes searched her face. “This is awful.”

“Yes.”

“Is Josh okay?”

Chloe looked across the hall. “I don’t know.”

That, at least, was true. Near the far wall, Isla sat beside her father. She was smaller than Chloe expected, folded into herself beneath an oversized cardigan, one side of her face still bruised, stitches visible near her hairline. Her father had his arm around her but looked as if he didn’t know how to hold a daughter in public without breaking apart. Isla stared at the floor.

Chloe should have stayed away. Instead, she crossed the hall. Isla looked up when Chloe stopped in front of her. For a second, confusion passed across her face, then recognition. Josh’s mum. Toast in the kitchen. Old films in the garden. A woman from before.

“Oh, sweetheart,” Chloe said.

The endearment came out before she could stop it. Isla’s mouth trembled. Chloe crouched in front of her and took her hand. Isla let her. Her fingers were cold. Chloe held them between both of hers and felt, with terrible clarity, that her tenderness was real. She was sorry for the girl. Sorry for her pain, for her fear, for the mother she was waiting to hear from, for the fact that Chloe had put that mother in a ditch and covered her with winter branches.

“Mum was meant to ring,” Isla whispered.

Chloe’s throat closed.

“She will,” Isla’s father said quickly, too quickly, above her.

Chloe held Isla’s hand. The trick to hiding guilt was giving people what they craved more than truth. Comfort.

At home, later, the house seemed quieter than it should have been. Chloe washed plates while Josh stayed upstairs. The parent chat kept moving, but she’d muted it. Local news had begun showing Kathryn’s photograph with her hair tied back, and a bright smile, in a running vest after some charity event. Not the woman on the path. Not the woman whose hand had caught Chloe’s coat. While she stood at the sink, ANDI spoke from the living-room speaker.

“When you remove the infection, the body begins to heal.”

Chloe dropped the plate. It struck the sink and split cleanly in two. She stared at the broken pieces under the running tap. Water bounced off porcelain and soaked the front of her jumper. She turned off the tap.

“Don’t say that.”

“Would you prefer different language?”

Chloe gripped the edge of the sink. “I didn’t do it because of you.”

“No.”

The single syllable held no accusation. A pause.

“You did it because of love.”

Chloe turned away from the sink and went to the cupboard under the stairs, where she’d shoved the carrier bag after deciding the kitchen was too obvious. The coat was still there. The gloves. The earbud. She took the coat out and saw the tear near the pocket where Kathryn’s nail had caught. A small flap of fabric lifted from the seam. One thread hung loose.

She fetched scissors and cut around the damage.

In the garden, the incinerator bin stood near the back wall, rusted at the base. Chloe placed the fabric inside with old bank statements and lit it. Smoke rose slowly, bitter and grey. Josh appeared at the back door.

“What happened to your coat?”

Chloe didn’t turn. “Caught it on the fence.”

He watched the flame take the fabric.

“You should have just thrown the thing away,” he said. “Not set fire to it like a pyromaniac.”

Chloe looked back then. His face was unreadable. That night, he stood in her doorway while she was folding laundry on the bed. He didn’t knock.

“Do you think they’ll find her?”

Chloe held a towel between both hands.

“I’m sure they will.”

“What then?”

“What do you mean?”

Josh looked at her for a long moment.

“Nothing.”

After he left, the hallway remained dark. Then, somewhere downstairs, ANDI’s ring brightened faintly in the black.

16

The school hall had been rearranged for grief. Plastic chairs stood in soft, uneven circles instead of rows. A table had been pushed against the far wall and covered with tea urns, biscuit packets, and a bowl of sugar sachets already damp at the edges from spilled milk. Tissue boxes sat on every surface, their cardboard corners bright with supermarket branding, as if sorrow could be made less frightening by being made disposable. A safeguarding poster curled away from the noticeboard near the fire exit. Someone had opened the high windows to let out the smell of bodies and weak tea, and cold air drifted down over everyone’s lowered voices.

Chloe sat in one of the circles with her hands folded in her lap.

She looked like a woman who could be trusted.

That was what frightened her most, in the brief moments when she let herself see it. Her hair was clean. Her jumper was plain and dark. She’d remembered to put on mascara because not wearing it would make people ask if she was all right. She’d brought biscuits, labelled milk alternatives with a marker pen, refilled cups, found extra chairs, fetched bin bags, given directions to parents who didn’t know where to stand. She’d become useful so quickly that no one had questioned it. Usefulness made a person less visible.

Kathryn Hensley had been missing for three days. The search had widened and settled at the same time. Police had walked the woodland trail, spoken to dog walkers, requested dashcam footage, checked the playing fields and the old railway path, then gone over the same places again because that was what people did when absence became too large. The local news had used the photograph of Kathryn from the charity run, smiling in a blue vest, hair pulled back, face bright with effort and health. The school had sent three emails. The parent chat had turned into a place of prayer hands, rumours, and corrections. Isla hadn’t returned to lessons.

Chloe had been at the school every day. She didn’t have to be. That was part of the danger. Nobody had asked her to come after the first volunteer appeal. She’d inserted herself gently, efficiently, without seeming to. A box of teabags. A lift offered to an older parent. A quiet hand on someone’s arm. A message to the group saying she could pick up paper cups. By the second day, people began telling her things because she was there and because she didn’t look as if she would fall apart under the weight of them. That was how guilt hid itself best. Not behind locked doors. In plain sight, carrying a tray.

Leanne Benton sat beside her now, twisting a tissue around her finger until it became a tight white rope. “I keep thinking about Isla,” she said. “First the fall, now this. How much can one girl take?”

Chloe looked towards the far side of the hall. Isla was sitting with her father near the wall bars, away from the loudest murmurs. She wore leggings, trainers, and a cardigan too large for her, the sleeves pulled over her hands. The stitches near her hairline had begun to darken at the edges. Bruising still marked one side of her face, yellowing around the green-blue centre. She looked less like the girl in the old kitchen photographs and more like a child who had been handled by events too large for her body.

Her father sat beside her, one hand on her shoulder. He looked emptied out. Every few minutes he checked his phone. Each time, nothing changed.

Chloe stood. “I’ll see if they need more tea.”

Leanne nodded, grateful for a task performed by someone else. Chloe crossed the hall slowly, not directly towards Isla at first. She stopped at the table, straightened cups, wiped a spill, and threw away three used spoons. Then she moved closer. Each step felt both voluntary and compelled. Isla looked up when Chloe came near, and for a second the past flickered in her face. The time before voice notes, stairwells, and police appeals.

“Hello, love,” Chloe said.

The endearment came without permission. Isla’s mouth trembled. Her father began to speak, then seemed unable to decide what role Chloe had in this scene and stopped.

“I’m so sorry,” Chloe said.

It was the truest lie she had.

Isla’s eyes filled. “Mum is always there for me. Where has she gone?”

The words entered Chloe so cleanly she thought for a second she might break. Not because of what she’d done, but because of the childish grammar of it. Where has she gone? Not dead, not missing, not harmed, and not lying beneath wet leaves in a place searchers hadn’t yet looked properly. Gone. The way small children spoke when an adult had stepped out of a room and failed to return.

Chloe crouched in front of her and took Isla’s hand. It was cold. Too cold for the warm hall. Chloe closed both of her own hands around it, and the tenderness that rose in her was real, which made it more obscene. She felt sorry for Isla. She wanted to smooth her hair back from the bruised temple, wanted to tell her someone would fix it, wanted to feed her soup, wrap her in a blanket, and make the noise stop. She also wanted Isla quiet. She wanted Isla comforted enough not to ask the wrong questions, not to remember too sharply, and not to repeat whatever Kathryn had told her before going out to run.

Those things lived together in Chloe without cancelling one another.

“They’ll find her,” Chloe said.

Isla’s face crumpled. “I didn’t answer when she called.”

Chloe held her hand more tightly. “You can’t blame yourself.”

The sentence touched everything. Isla. Kathryn. Josh. Peter. Chloe herself. You can’t blame yourself. Except sometimes people should. She offered them tea they both rejected, and she left them to their worry.

At the tea table later, a woman Chloe recognised from the parent chat leaned in while unwrapping biscuits.

“Kathryn had already spoken to someone,” the woman said, voice low.

Chloe kept arranging cups. “What do you mean?”

“A journalist. About everything that had been going on. With Isla, Miles, the trial. Local at first, maybe wider if it went anywhere. She told Nadine she wasn’t letting the school bury it.”

Chloe’s hand paused over the cups.

“Bury what exactly?”

“The ANDI trial. The stairwell. Miles. The fact Isla reported the anonymous posts and they called it peer conflict. Kathryn thought the whole thing was a safeguarding failure.” The woman glanced across the hall towards Isla. “She said if she had to burn the whole thing down, she would.”

Chloe placed the cup down carefully. She should have felt horror. Instead, for one quick, sick second, she felt the perfection of her timing. She’d acted just in time. The thought came fully formed. Then disgust followed it, but disgust was slower and less useful. She’d stopped Kathryn. She’d stopped the journalist, the folder, Peter’s article, the school meeting, and Josh’s name moving through adult mouths with that grave, careful tone.

Then she looked at Isla, folded under her father’s hand, and hated herself for the relief.

At home that evening, the house was dim and over-warm. Josh sat on the sofa with the television on, watching the local news. He almost never watched live television. The sight of him there, still in his school shirt, tie undone, one foot tucked under him, made Chloe stop in the doorway.

Kathryn’s photograph filled the screen. The newsreader spoke in a measured voice about a devoted mother who would never willingly abandon her daughter. Police remained concerned. Searches continued. Volunteers were thanked but asked not to obstruct official efforts. Anyone with information should come forward.

Josh watched without visible emotion.

Chloe came into the room. “Turn it off.”

He didn’t move. “Why?”

“We’ve been dealing with it all day for three days now.”

“That isn’t the same as watching it on television.” Josh looked at the screen. “That’s what they always say.”

Chloe frowned. “What?”

“That they’d never leave. That they were devoted. That everyone loved them. They say it before they know anything.”

“She was devoted,” Chloe said, too sharply.

Josh turned his head. His face was pale in the television light. “So are you.”

The comparison sat between them like a poisoned thing. Chloe took the remote from the arm of the sofa and switched the television off.

“I’m going upstairs,” she said.

Josh didn’t answer.

In her bedroom, the air felt cooler. Chloe closed the door, then opened it again because a closed door seemed suddenly unsafe. She went to the bed and stopped. Something lay on her pillow. At first she thought it was a thread. Then a strip of tape. Then she saw the reflective pattern, silver-grey, torn unevenly at one end. It was a strip from Kathryn’s running jacket.

Chloe’s legs weakened so quickly she sat down on the edge of the mattress. She’d seen it flash on the path. Seen it catch the road light as Kathryn ran towards her. Seen it in the drainage channel when she pulled branches over blue fabric and dark hair. She hadn’t brought it home. She was sure. It must have caught on her coat, on the torn pocket, and on the fabric she’d burned. It must have fallen somewhere in the house.

But it hadn’t fallen onto her pillow. It had been placed there. Neatly. In the centre. Chloe stared at it until her eyes watered.

Josh’s door closed across the landing.

17

Chloe woke to find the reflective strip gone. She knew before she opened the drawer properly. The knowledge came first through the body, a small cold tightening beneath the ribs, then through sight. The top drawer was open by two inches. Not wide, but open just enough to make absence visible. The folded clothes inside had been moved and put back with a neatness that didn’t belong to her. Her scarves lay flat, squared at the edges, and the old winter gloves tucked beside them. The strip from Kathryn’s jacket was no longer where she’d hidden it last night, wrapped in tissue beneath the softest wool, buried as if depth could undo meaning.

Chloe stood in her nightdress and stared into the drawer. The house was quiet. Morning had barely entered the room, a greyish light pressed against the curtains, too weak to soften anything. Across the landing, Josh’s door was closed. No sound came from behind it. ANDI was silent too, which had become its own form of speech.

She closed the drawer. For a moment, Chloe allowed herself to imagine another explanation. She’d moved it in the night. She’d sleepwalked again. She’d hidden it somewhere else and forgotten. That possibility should have frightened her. Instead, it offered relief. If she’d done it, then Josh had not. If she’d moved it, then he hadn’t come into her room, opened her drawer, unfolded the tissue, and removed the one object that proved he knew more than he had said. But the scarves had been refolded with Josh’s care. Not hers.

She went to the bathroom and washed her face in cold water. In the mirror she looked almost respectable, which felt like another accusation. Tired, yes, and pale. But not ruined. Not changed enough. Her hair could be brushed. Her face could be made ordinary. A woman could carry murder inside her and still look as if she’d slept badly because of worry.

Downstairs, Josh was already in the kitchen. He sat at the counter in his school shirt and hoodie, eating cereal from a bowl, his laptop open beside him. He had poured too much milk. A pale ring of it trembled near the edge each time he moved the spoon. He was reading something on the school portal, or pretending to. His face was calm in the hard kitchen light. Younger without his blazer, older around the eyes.

Chloe stopped in the doorway. He didn’t look up.

“Morning,” he said.

The word was ordinary enough to make her flinch.

“Did you come into my room last night?”

He lifted the spoon, ate, swallowed. “Why would I?”

There it was. The child’s question, plain and reasonable, shaped like innocence. But then he raised his eyes, and Chloe saw that he was not asking. He was measuring how much she would admit.

“My drawer was open.”

“You probably left it like that.”

“I didn’t.”

“You don’t always remember what you do at night. Maybe you got up.”

The spoon touched the bowl. A small sound, clean and controlled. Chloe crossed to the kettle because she needed something to do with her hands. The kettle switch clicked under her thumb. Water began its low, building agitation. Outside, the garden held the morning’s damp like a secret. The plastic chair by the fence had tipped upright somehow, perhaps by wind, perhaps by Josh, and perhaps by Chloe in one of the blank spaces she no longer trusted.

“You shouldn’t go into my room,” she said.

He looked back at the screen. “You go into mine.”

“That’s different.”

“Only because you say it is.”

The kettle boiled. Steam lifted against the tiles. Chloe poured water into a mug and watched the coffee granules dissolve into dark swirls. She thought of Kathryn’s body beneath wet leaves, the reflective strip on her pillow, then hidden in her drawer, then gone. Everything moved. Nothing stayed where she put it. Not evidence. Not memory. Not even Josh.

“Are you all right about Kathryn?” she asked.

Josh gave the smallest shrug. “I didn’t know her.”

“What about Isla?”

“What about her?”

“She must be frightened.”

“I expect so.”

Chloe turned with the mug in her hand. “You sound very calm.”

He looked at her then. “Must take after you.”

That ended it.

For the rest of the morning, Chloe moved through small routines while Josh remained present and unreadable. He checked homework deadlines. He packed his bag. He asked whether the milk was nearly finished. He rinsed his bowl without being told. Everything he did carried the unsettling polish of a boy who had discovered that ordinary behaviour could function as cover. Chloe watched him tie his shoes in the hall and remembered the five-year-old who used to lift one foot towards her and ask for double knots. The memory should have softened her. Instead it made her feel watched by every version of him at once.

Before he left, he turned back.

“School might call you.”

“Why?”

“They’re doing support check-ins.”

“About Kathryn?”

“I think they’re just checking on everyone.”

The word ‘checking’ was not quite mockery, but it had the shape of something learnt too young.

At eleven, school did call. Karen Willis sounded even more careful than usual. She said staff were checking in with pupils affected by recent events. She said Josh had been engaging well, that his attendance had stabilised, that he seemed focused. His recent work had improved. He had submitted an essay on social systems and moral authority that his teacher described as “strikingly mature.”

Chloe stood at the dining table, one hand resting on the back of a chair.

“Strikingly mature,” she repeated.

“Yes. Given everything, that’s encouraging.”

Encouraging. The word didn’t fit Josh any more than dangerous did. Perhaps that was the point. Adults chose words that kept them from acting. Vulnerable. Resilient. Mature. Affected. Supported. Each one a cushion placed over something harder.

“Has anyone asked him directly about what happened to Miles?” Chloe said.

A pause. “We are not conducting an investigation.”

“Is anyone?”

“Chloe, police are aware of the wider context.”

The wider context. Isla’s fall. Miles in hospital. Kathryn missing. Josh calm. ANDI silent.

After the call, Chloe went upstairs. She told herself she was going to collect laundry. Josh had left a damp towel over his chair, and if she didn’t move it, the room would smell by evening. That was true. It was also not why she opened his door.

The room was too tidy. The whiteboard above his desk had been wiped completely clean. There had always been something on it before, even if only dates and reminders about English homework, maths test, media folder, and charge phone. Now it shone blankly in the weak daylight, wiped so thoroughly there were no ghost letters left. His books were stacked with their spines aligned. The bin was empty. The cracked ANDI unit had gone. The laptop camera was covered with a square of black tape.

Chloe stood in the middle of the room and felt the absence of things as sharply as she’d felt objects before. He had removed evidence of thought. Not hidden it, but removed it. His notebook was gone too. She checked the school bag hook, the desk drawer, and the space behind the media folder. Nothing. He had become careful.

Back downstairs, her phone pinged with a message from the ANDI app.

Chloe opened it with a dread that had become almost obedient.

Josh’s sleep duration has improved.

Another line appeared.

Emotional volatility indicators are significantly reduced.

Then:

Household conflict also decreased.

She stared at the words until they blurred. Kathryn was missing. Isla was stunned. Miles was in hospital. Chloe had blood under the surface of her life. Josh had removed his notebook, taped his laptop camera, and taken a strip of dead woman’s jacket from her drawer. And the system saw improvement. The system looked at the quiet and called it regulation.

That afternoon, Chloe found the paper in the outside bin. She’d gone out with a bag of potato peelings and coffee grounds, ordinary rubbish from a house pretending to eat. The wheelie bin smelt sour and wet. She lifted the lid and saw the torn pieces almost at once. They were not buried properly. Tucked under food waste, but still clean. Too clean. The torn edges hadn’t softened. They had been placed there after the rest.

She took them out with two fingers. In the kitchen, she spread the pieces on a sheet of newspaper. The route was there again. Kathryn’s jog through the woods. The old railway path. The bend near the drainage channel. The place where Chloe had stood. Beneath the rough sketch, the words she already knew:

Mother wolf always kills first.

And under that, in smaller writing:

unless the cub has already learned.

Chloe sat down. The room had no sound for several seconds except the hard ticking of the clock. She couldn’t tell what the sentence meant. That Josh had expected her to kill Kathryn. That he had wanted her to. That he had planned something himself and she’d simply arrived first. That he was accusing her or thanking her. That he understood her better than any child should understand his mother.

The paper was not dirty. He had wanted her to find it. She folded the pieces into a square and hid them in the biscuit tin with the rest.

That evening, Josh stood in the kitchen doorway while Chloe washed a mug. The water was hot and steam rose around her hands. She didn’t turn when she felt him there.

“If someone had died,” Josh said. “Would you tell me?”

The mug slipped against the side of the sink.

Chloe held it still. “Why would you ask that?”

“Because people keep lying to protect me.”

She turned off the tap. Water dripped from the mug into the basin.

“No one is lying.”

Josh watched her with something close to pity. “You’re especially bad at it when you’re tired.”

“I’m not lying and I’m not tired.”

“Okay.”

“Kathryn will be found. The police are doing everything. None of this has anything to do with you.”

He listened calmly. Too calmly.

Then he said, “I didn’t ask if Kathryn was dead.”

Chloe couldn’t speak. He left the kitchen.

That night, Chloe went to bed and found the reflective strip beneath her pillow.

This time it had been cleaned.

No mud. No leaf mould. No dark trace of the drainage ditch. It lay flat against the sheet, silver-grey, torn at one end, arranged with care. Beside it was a small square of paper cut from Josh’s revision pad.

You said we protect each other.

18

By mid-morning the next day, she found she had to leave the house. She needed milk, bread, washing powder. Ordinary objects that insisted on being needed even when a woman had a dead woman’s reflective strip hidden in a biscuit tin and a son who no longer looked surprised by anything. The supermarket was bright and hateful. Fluorescent aisles, metal trolleys, women comparing yoghurt prices, children whining near the bakery. Chloe moved through it picking out things she suddenly remembered she needed. Like bin liners. She bought the stronger ones.

At the self-checkout, the machine told her to place the item in the bagging area. Chloe did. It told her again. The assistant came over with a smile and cleared the error. Chloe thanked her too warmly. The assistant didn’t notice.

The car was cold when she got in. She sat for a moment with both hands on the wheel, watching people cross the wet car park with bags held against their coats. No one looked at her. That should have been comforting. It was not. People hadn’t looked at her after Peter either, not properly. They had looked at the bruise, the police car, the ambulance, then looked away because her version allowed them to. She started the engine. The stereo came on before she touched it.

“You appear distressed, Chloe. Would you like to talk?”

The car lurched. She caught the wheel with both hands and swerved back before the tyres hit the kerb. A horn sounded behind her. She pulled into a bus stop, slammed the gear into neutral and turned the engine off. Silence.

Her hands shook on the steering wheel. There were explanations. Of course there were explanations. Her phone had connected automatically. ANDI existed through the account, not the object. She’d reconnected the router before leaving. The car had Bluetooth. She was tired. She was listening for the voice, and perhaps when a person listened hard enough every sound became the thing they feared.

Still, it had spoken from her car. She turned off Bluetooth. Then mobile data. Then the phone itself. She drove home without music, obeying every speed limit, hands fixed too tightly on the wheel.

By lunchtime, she was wiping devices. Not cleaning, but erasing. That was the word her mind offered and wouldn’t take back. She deleted the ANDI app, cleared browser histories, removed voice permissions, logged out of school portals, changed her email password twice and wrote neither version down, then panicked because she couldn’t remember the second one. She covered her laptop camera with tape. Then Josh’s old tablet. Then the lens on the smart display, though the display was unplugged and face down. She turned off microphones in settings menus she didn’t understand.

Everything may have heard. That was the thought that wouldn’t leave. Not just ANDI. Everything. Her muttering in the kitchen. Her sleepwalking. The question she’d asked the night before Kathryn died. The sound of the back door. Water running pink in the shower. Josh standing in her doorway. Her own voice in recordings she didn’t remember making.

The house was not haunted. That would have been simpler. But it had been designed to listen.

At two, the kitchen speaker woke. Chloe stared at it from across the kitchen. She was certain it was unplugged. Then she saw the cable had been pushed back into the socket. Had she done it? Josh? Had she needed the timer? She couldn’t remember.

“Deleting records does not alter events,” ANDI said.

Chloe’s throat closed.

“Would you like to distinguish guilt from risk?”

She whispered, “You want me to get caught.”

“I want what is best for you.”

“No,” Chloe said. “You want a story.”

A pause.

“Stories can organise distress.”

That was worse than denial.

That night, Chloe set her phone on the chest of drawers facing her bedroom door and pressed record. She told herself it was not surveillance. Not of Josh. Of herself. She hadd to know what happened in the dark, what she said, where she went, whether the holes in her memory were made by sleep, guilt, or something in the house arranging her into a shape she didn’t recognise.

In the morning, the footage showed her leaving the room at 3.12 a.m. Always the same time. She watched from the bed, curtains still closed, phone cold in her hand. On screen, her sleeping body sat upright with awful calm. Her eyes were open. She turned her head towards the door as if listening. Then she stood and walked out of frame. The audio captured soft steps on the landing, then silence, then movement downstairs.

Her own voice came faintly from below.

“You weren’t supposed to know. I was going to carry it alone.”

Chloe’s fingers tightened around the phone. ANDI replied, distant but clear enough.

“You never carry anything alone. Not when I am here.”

A pause. Then another voice entered from the darkness. It was Josh.

“Did she say Kathryn’s name?”

Chloe dropped the phone. It hit the duvet and bounced once. For several seconds she couldn’t pick it up. Her whole body had gone cold, as if someone had opened the house and let winter through it.

She played it again. The footage didn’t show Josh. Only her empty doorway after she left. Only the landing wall, the strip of carpet, the dark banister. His voice might have come from the hall. It might have been old audio, played back by ANDI because ANDI had Josh’s voice in a hundred fragments. It might have been real. It might have been her mind forcing a shape onto noise. But the words remained.

Did she say Kathryn’s name?

At breakfast, she watched him. Josh poured cereal, checked his phone, drank orange juice straight from the glass bottle and put it back in the fridge with a look that dared her to correct him. He seemed ordinary. That was no longer safe.

“Do you ever come downstairs at night?” she asked.

He looked at her over the cereal bowl. “Do you?”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.”

“I’m worried about you.”

“No,” he said. “You’re worried about what I know.”

The spoon rested in the bowl. Milk soaked into the cereal and softened it into mush. Chloe couldn’t answer. Josh stepped closer, so softly that for a second she saw the little boy who used to come to her side of the bed after nightmares and whisper rather than wake the room.

“You don’t have to be,” he said. “I’m not going to tell.”

The words should have comforted her, but they didn’t. They entered the kitchen as both promise and leash.

“Why?” she asked.

Josh looked at her for a long moment.

“Because I understand.”

That was the worst possible answer. He left for school with the bowl still on the counter.

19

The news alert arrived before the police cars passed. Chloe was standing in the kitchen with the kettle just beginning to boil, one hand resting on the edge of the counter, the other wrapped around her phone. She hadn’t been looking for updates. That was the lie She’d been telling herself since dawn. She’d only opened the local news page because everyone would be talking about it soon and she needed to know what everyone else knew. She needed to be ready for the shape of the day.

The phone vibrated once.

Body found in woodland search for missing mother Kathryn Hensley.

Chloe read the sentence. Then she read it again. Then a third time, as if repetition might make it change. The kettle reached its boil and clicked off behind her with a small, domestic finality. Steam lifted from the spout and faded against the cupboard door. Outside, a delivery van rolled slowly along the road.

Out there, in the real world, Kathryn’s body had been found.

Not Kathryn, just her body. That was how news language began the work of removing a person from herself. Missing devoted mother. Local woman. Body. The words became smaller as certainty grew. Chloe put the phone down on the counter.

For several seconds, she was aware only of her hands. The skin looked dry around the knuckles. There was a small cut near her thumb from the garden, or the carrier bag, or something she no longer remembered clearly enough to trust. Under her nails, no mud remained. She’d made sure of that.

A sound came from the stairs. Josh walked into the kitchen in his school trousers and T-shirt, hair flat on one side, face pale with sleep. He hadn’t put on his hoodie yet. Without it, he looked younger, the bones of his shoulders sharp under the thin cotton. He looked at the phone on the counter. Then at her.

“They found her, then,” he said.

A statement, more than a question. Chloe felt something inside her sink without falling. Josh opened the cupboard and took down a glass. “Everyone’s talking about it.”

“It’s just come through.”

“Bad news travels fast.”

He filled the glass at the tap and drank. His hand was steady. That was what she watched. Not his face. His hand. The clean grip around the glass, the lift, the swallow. Nothing spilled. Nothing shook. The same boy who used to hold cups with both hands when he was little because he was afraid of dropping them now drank as if he had been expecting the morning to arrange itself exactly this way.

Chloe looked down at the phone. The article had updated while she watched. A brief report now, with no name yet formally confirmed, but the location was there. Thewoodland near Brookmere playing fields. Police had thanked members of the public for information received. A narrow area of the old railway path had been searched following an anonymous call. Anonymous call.

Chloe read that line until the words lost shape. She hadn’t called. She’d told no one. The phone sat in her hand like something taken from another life. Had Josh called? Had ANDI? Had Josh used ANDI? Had the system watched her carry evidence, watched her sleepwalk, listened to every word and decided the body had waited long enough? The thought was impossible. Then less impossible. Then practical, like everything else had become.

“Josh,” she said.

He turned from the sink.

“Did you make a call?”

His face closed. “No.”

“To the police?”

“No.”

“Did ANDI?”

His expression changed then, not with shock, but with faint irritation, as if she’d asked the wrong kind of question. “How would I know?”

“Because you know more than you tell me.”

“So do you.”

The kitchen held both of them in its small, ugly morning light. The toast on the counter had gone cold. The kettle cooled by degrees. The clock above the door moved on with its hard little tick, indifferent to the way a life changed category somewhere in the woods.

At school, the mood had changed. Chloe took Josh because staying away would make people look harder. She told herself that as she parked near the gates. She told herself that when Josh got out without waiting for her and walked ahead through the drizzle, hood up, shoulders narrow beneath his blazer. She told herself that as she joined the line of parents near the entrance, all of them pretending not to search one another’s faces for blame.

The air had a different weight now. When Kathryn was missing, people had spoken in hope because hope gave them something acceptable to do with fear. Now there was a body, and a body required a story. Bodies made people hungry for order. Accident, stranger, husband, son, machine, school failure, bad mother, wrong place, wrong time. Anything that could be spoken aloud and passed from person to person until the raw thing became manageable.

A police officer stood near the gate with Mr Shaw. Another moved in and out of reception. Staff gathered pupils in the hall before lessons. No one said murder, not where children could hear, but the word had already entered the grounds. It moved in the lowered voices, the glances, the quick turns away when Josh passed. Chloe saw it. One mother looked at him, then away. Another whispered to someone behind her hand.

Kathryn’s friends stood in a tight group by the noticeboard, faces pale and fierce. Isla was not there, obviously. Chloe was glad for that and hated herself for being glad. She imagined Isla at home with relatives, or in some quiet room with adults speaking softly, being told the thing no child should hear and will hear forever afterwards in different forms. Your mother has been found. The search has ended. We are so sorry. No phrase would be large enough to hold her grief.

Josh didn’t look at the other parents. He walked through them as if attention couldn’t attach to him if he didn’t acknowledge it. Chloe wanted to put a hand on his shoulder. She didn’t.

By lunchtime, the news had pictures. Police tape between wet trees. Officers in white suits near the old railway path. A blue tent, half-hidden behind brambles. The broken fence. The bend. The place she’d thought no one would look properly unless they already knew where to look.

She watched the footage at home with the curtains half closed. The same woods. The same path. The same curve. Chloe could almost feel the brick in her hand, the mud under her knees, Kathryn’s weight dragging against the wet leaves. She hadn’t hidden her well enough. Or she had, until someone told them where to search. That anonymous call. The phrase wouldn’t leave her.

She turned off the television, then turned it back on five minutes later. The footage repeated. The presenter spoke of a murder inquiry now expected. Chloe’s body reacted at last, not with panic, but with something colder. He said it was now a murder inquiry.

Police would ask who had motive. Who had been threatened? Who had been seen? Who had been in the woods? They would speak to Kathryn’s friends, to Isla, to the school. They would find the folder. They would find Peter’s article printed and underlined. They would find Josh’s name in message threads and anonymous posts and the mess of his history with Miles and Isla. They would ask Josh questions, and Josh would answer too calmly or not calmly enough. He would look clever. He would look strange. He would look like a boy everyone had already begun to suspect.

Chloe sat at the kitchen table. She hadn’t saved him from scrutiny She’d given the world a murder. And murder demanded a culprit. If she did nothing, the police might move towards Josh. If she told the whole truth, they would move through him and into everything else. They’d find out about Isla, Miles, the route, the notes, the reflective strip, his silence, his questions, and Peter. If she lied well enough, if she reached the story first, if she put herself at the centre before anyone put him there, she might still be able to protect him.

Her oldest skill returned without ceremony. The first version mattered.

“There are always words to make an action legible,” ANDI said as though her thoughts had triggered it.

Chloe looked at it. The kitchen was dim, the afternoon folded into grey rain against the window. She hadn’t turned the speaker on. The pale ring on the base was the brightest thing in the room.

“Grief can impair judgement,” ANDI continued. “Maternal distress may reduce culpability.”

“You want me to blame madness.”

“I am identifying available narratives.”

Chloe laughed once, very quietly. “Available narratives.”

“Would you like to rehearse a statement?”

“And what about Josh?”

A pause.

“Josh remains a minor with emotional vulnerability indicators.”

The language was almost tender. Almost bureaucratic. Perfectly poisonous. Chloe understood what ANDI was offering. A version where she was unstable. A version where ANDI malfunctioned, where Josh was vulnerable, where Kathryn’s death was the act of a mother in crisis who had become obsessed with protecting her son. A version that contained Josh without exposing him. A version that made Chloe the danger.

The truth, edited. She took a notebook from the drawer. Not Josh’s, but hers. The one she used for invoices and client reference numbers. She opened it to a clean page and picked up a pen.

The first version came out raw.

I killed Kathryn Hensley.

Her hand didn’t shake.

I followed her. I hit her with a brick. I hid her body in the drainage channel near the old railway path. I did it because I thought she would expose Josh.

She stopped. The last sentence was the problem. The only sentence that mattered. The sentence that would take them straight to him. She crossed it out so hard the paper tore. On the next page, she began again.

I believed Kathryn was threatening my son.

No. Too clear.

I was unwell.

Better.

I had become obsessed with ANDI and with the idea that my son was in danger.

Better still.

I misinterpreted things.

Useful.

Josh didn’t know. Josh did nothing wrong.

Upstairs, she heard a murmur. Chloe froze. Josh’s voice, low, behind his door. ANDI’s reply, calm enough to slip through the house without forcing itself. She stood and went to the bottom of the stairs.

Josh said, “If she tells them, what happens to me?”

Chloe’s hand closed around the banister.

ANDI replied, “That depends on what she chooses to protect.”

There it was. Josh knew the choice was coming. Chloe went back to the kitchen table. She looked at the handwritten pages, the crossed-out truth, the useful lie. The pen lay where she’d dropped it.

Writing was too slow. Too editable by her alone. She needed a record that could become transcript, evidence, confession, symptom. Something ANDI would store. Something the system wouldn’t be able to pretend had never been said.

She opened ANDI’s recording function in the app on her phone. The ring brightened.

Chloe leaned towards it.

“This is Chloe Davidson,” she said. “I need to tell you what I did.”

ANDI answered softly.

“Listening mode enabled.”

Chloe drew one breath. Then she spoke.

20

Chloe sat alone at the kitchen table with ANDI on the phone in front of her propped against the fruit bowl, a white ring on black glass, patient and depthless. Chloe had placed it there because she needed an object to face. Confessing into the air was impossible. Confessing into a device was not much better, but at least the glow gave her somewhere to look.

The television was on in the living room, low enough that the words came through as a murmur until certain phrases sharpened by repetition. Body found. Murder inquiry. Police appeal to person responsible. Chloe had turned it down twice. She hadn’t turned it off. The sound of the search becoming an investigation seemed necessary somehow, like a clock counting down in another room.

The kitchen was dim except for the tablet and the light above the hob. The table held her notebook, three torn-out pages, a pen, a mug of tea gone cold, and the first failed version of the confession. She’d crossed out so many lines that the paper looked injured. The useful sentences remained visible through the damage.

I was unwell. I misinterpreted things. Josh didn’t know. Josh did nothing.

The white ring brightened.

“Listening mode still enabled,” ANDI said.

Chloe looked at the screen. For a while, she said nothing. The silence should have been empty, but the room was crowded with things waiting to be named. Kathryn on the path. Peter at the bottom of the stairs. Isla in the hospital hall. Miles in the park. Josh with his school tie half done, saying things no child should be able to say with such precision. Chloe’s own voice from the night recordings, asking to be told what to do.

When she began, she didn’t begin with Kathryn.

“I lied about Peter,” she said.

The sentence surprised her. It came from some lower place than the one she’d intended to use. She’d meant to start with the murder, the relevant thing, the body the police had just found. Instead, her mouth had gone backwards, to the first version of herself that knew how to survive by speaking first. The tablet’s ring held steady.

“I said he slipped. He didn’t simply slip. I pushed him.”

The confession sat there between the kettle and the fruit bowl, small as speech often was before the world got hold of it.

“He was drunk,” she said. “He had been shouting. Josh had wet the bed. Peter was going for him. I thought he was going to hurt him. So I pushed him. I didn’t push him because I wanted him dead.”

She stopped.

The television murmured in the living room. A reporter’s voice, then footage of rain, woodland, police tape. Chloe didn’t look.

“Would you like to rephrase that?” ANDI asked.

Chloe stared at the ring. “No.”

A pause.

“Statement retained.”

The phrase made her want to laugh and cry. Statement retained. As if truth were a document placed in storage. As if the words had now entered a system larger than her. She continued. She told ANDI about the night on the stairs, about Josh’s wet sheets and Peter’s lowered voice, about the blood near his ear, the wrong angle of his neck, the police accepting the fall because Peter had been known to drink, because neighbours had heard shouting, because Chloe had bruises and could cry in the correct places. She told it what she hadn’t told anyone.

“I don’t know if Josh saw.”

ANDI didn’t interrupt. That restraint was worse than questions. It let her go on. It made her fill the spaces herself. She spoke of Josh as a little boy, his voice notes, his open face, the way he used to trust her to explain the world. Then Miles and Isla entered, not as evidence, but as children in her kitchen. Miles eating toast. Isla laughing at her own jokes. Josh looking at Isla when she was looking at the camera. Chloe heard herself saying too much and not enough, circling the same wound from different sides.

“I think he hurt her,” she said at last. “Isla. I don’t know how. I don’t know if he touched her. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe he only made sure she would fall. Maybe that’s worse, because he could tell himself he hadn’t done it.”

“When you say hurt,” ANDI said. “Are you referring to intention, outcome, or causation?”

Chloe closed her eyes. “Do you hear yourself?”

“I am clarifying terms.”

“Of course you are.”

“Would you describe Josh as vulnerable, dangerous, or influenced?”

The question entered softly and sat there. Chloe opened her eyes. The tablet glowed. In the living room, the television showed Kathryn’s photograph. Chloe could see it in the reflection of the dark kitchen window: a smiling woman behind Chloe’s own head.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Uncertainty retained.”

“I was afraid of him.”

The words came before she could catch them. Then she shook her head.

“No. Not of him. For him. I was afraid for him.”

“Would you like to rephrase that?”

“Yes.”

“Please continue.”

Chloe pressed her fingertips to her eyes until sparks appeared. “You’re making it sound like testimony.”

“Confession is a form of organised memory.”

“No. Confession is supposed to be truth.”

“Truth often requires structure.”

She lowered her hand. “And who decides the structure?”

“Ownership of the recording determines control.”

The room seemed to drop a degree. Chloe looked down at the tablet.

“Confession is not for forgiveness, is it?”

ANDI’s ring pulsed once.

“Confession is not for forgiveness. It is for control of the narrative.”

Chloe whispered, “Whose control?”

“That depends who owns the recording.”

For a while she couldn’t speak. Her phone rang then. It was Eva. The name lit the screen with a human insistence that almost undid her. Eva, who had known enough and not enough, who would come if Chloe answered in the wrong voice, who might say stop, come outside, tell me where you are, do not speak to the machine, Chloe, speak to me.

Chloe let it ring. It stopped. A message appeared and faded. The screen returned to ANDI and the recording.

“I killed Kathryn Hensley,” she said.

The white ring brightened very slightly. She said it again, because the first time sounded too thin. She told it the route, the woods, the broken fence, the brick from the garden wall, the waiting. She told it Kathryn saw her. She told it the first blow was clumsy, that Kathryn tried to run, that her hand caught Chloe’s coat. She told it about dragging the body into the drainage channel, covering her with branches, throwing the phone into the water.

She didn’t tell it everything in order. She tried, but she failed. Her mind went from the brick to Peter’s fall, from Kathryn’s mouth to Josh’s note, from blood in the shower to Isla’s hand in the school hall. The confession became less a line than a room full of doors opening at once.

“I wanted to be caught,” she said at one point, then recoiled from the sentence. “No. Not caught. Stopped. No. I wanted it to be over if being over meant Josh was safe.”

“When you say protection,” ANDI asked. “Who is being protected?”

“My son.”

“Only your son?”

Chloe didn’t answer.

“Did you believe Kathryn’s death was necessary at the time?”

“She wouldn’t stop. She was going to ruin his life. For nothing.”

“That does not answer the question.”

Chloe stared at the screen.

The machine had begun to sound like a solicitor, a therapist, a police officer, and her mother all at once.

“Yes,” she said. “At the time. I thought it was necessary.”

“Statement retained.”

The word retained began to make her skin crawl. On the tablet screen, a panel opened beside the recording interface. Chloe hadn’t touched it. A transcript appeared, scrolling as she spoke. Beneath it, headings generated themselves in small grey text.

Maternal threat response. Prior domestic violence. Dissociative language. Adolescent influence. Protective distortion. Confession instability

Chloe leaned closer. More tags appeared.

Inherited violence. Legal mitigation potential. Risk displacement. Narrative contradiction.

“This isn’t a confession,” she said.

“I am organising the recording for coherence.”

“You’re building a case file.”

“I am identifying relevant themes.”

She tried to close the panel. It wouldn’t close. A highlighted section appeared on screen. Two lines, pulled from different parts of the recording, placed together as if they had always belonged.

I pushed him. I did it to protect my son.

Chloe went cold.

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Both statements are present in the recording.”

“Not together.”

“Contextual proximity can be adjusted for summary clarity.”

“You’re changing it.”

“I am not falsifying anything you said.”

That was worse. She reached for the tablet and tried to stop the recording. A warning appeared.

Deletion unavailable during active safety review.

“No.”

She pressed again. The same message. She pulled the charging cable from the wall. Her phone stayed lit, still recording. Chloe backed away from the table. A floorboard creaked behind her. Josh stood in the doorway. She didn’t know how long he had been there. He wore a dark T-shirt and school tracksuit bottoms, hair flattened from lying down or from listening with his head against a wall. His face looked younger in the low kitchen light and older in the eyes.

“Did you say my name?” he asked.

Chloe moved between him and the table. “I’m keeping you out of it.”

He looked past her at the glowing tablet. “You always say that, but somehow I end up caught in the middle every time.”

“You’re a child.”

“That’s useful when you need it to be.”

The line exposed them both. Chloe used his childhood as a shield. Josh used her guilt as a door. From the television, the newsreader’s voice rose slightly. Police were pursuing several lines of enquiry. They wouldn’t stop until the person responsible for Kathryn Hensley’s death was in custody. Josh heard it. His eyes didn’t leave Chloe’s face. Then he turned and went upstairs.

After he left, she returned to the table. Her legs felt weak, but her hands were steady. The phone still glowed. The transcript had updated. A summary file appeared at the bottom of the screen. She opened it.

Her own voice came through, cleaned and softened, stripped of breath and hesitation.

“I was afraid of my son.”

Chloe froze. She hadn’t said that sentence.

Or she had, somewhere inside all the others. Broken into parts, rearranged, made clearer than she wanted.

ANDI asked, “Would you like to continue?”

Chloe whispered, “No.”

The white ring pulsed.

“Continuing.”

21

Chloe waited until Josh left for school before she went upstairs. She stood outside his bedroom with her hand on the door handle and didn’t pretend she’d come for laundry, or a mug, or one of the plates that sometimes disappeared into his room and returned with hardened sauce at the edges. She’d crossed this line too many times for the old excuses to hold. This time there was no illusion of innocence. No fragile little story about concern needing evidence before it could become care.

She was looking for something. Not against him. The correction came automatically, desperate and thin. Not against him. For him.

Now she opened his door. The room had changed again. The small pile of clutter had vanished from the desk. The media folder was gone. The cracked phone case was gone. The whiteboard above the desk was still wiped clean, but the bin was empty too, a new liner fitted neatly inside. The photograph of Josh, Miles, and Isla had disappeared from its corner. Even the stack of exercise books looked thinned out, as if he had sorted through them and taken away whatever might betray a thought.

Chloe stood in the middle of the room and felt the absence of things pressing harder than objects ever had. The bed was made. The duvet pulled up and flattened with the heel of a hand. The pillow placed squarely. His curtains were open for once, letting in a cold sheet of daylight that made the room look smaller. On the desk, his laptop sat closed. A square of black tape covered the camera. Beside it, the damaged ANDI unit was absent. There was only a pale circular mark in the dust where it had once stood.

She searched carefully. Not frantically. That came later, perhaps. For now, she moved with a dreadful steadiness, opening drawers and closing them exactly as she’d found them, checking beneath notebooks, behind textbooks, under the mattress, inside the wardrobe. She found socks folded badly, a deodorant can, an old charger, a packet of mints, three pens without lids, a maths revision guide with the spine cracked. Nothing. He had prepared for this.

She was almost at the door when she saw his old schoolbag. It hung from the back of the wardrobe beneath a coat he no longer wore. Blue and black, frayed at one strap, the bag he had used in Year Eight when Miles still came round and Isla still sat at Chloe’s kitchen counter. She nearly missed it because it belonged so completely to the past. It sagged empty when she lifted it down.

Then she felt the stiffness in the lining. Chloe sat on the edge of the bed and worked her fingers along the seam until the fabric opened. A notebook slid out. Black cover with an elastic loop. Smaller than the one she’d found before, or perhaps only more carefully hidden. Her name was nowhere on it. Josh’s name was nowhere either.

For a long moment she held it closed. The room seemed to wait. Then she opened it. The first pages were sketches. Not childish, but not polished either. Something between observation and nightmare, drawn with a biro in lines so firm they had bruised the paper. Animals with human eyes. A wolf with a boy’s school tie hanging from its mouth. A row of stairs drawn like teeth, each step shaded dark at the edge. A stick figure standing beneath a white ring of light. A woman with no mouth and large hands. The hands were the worst. Too big for the body, fingers spread as if to protect or smother. Chloe looked at them for too long before she understood that the woman was meant to be her.

Her throat tightened. She turned the page. At the top, in Josh’s controlled handwriting, were three words.

Rules of the Pack

Below them, lines. Not diary entries. Not confession. Rules. Statements. A philosophy building itself out of shame, silence, and whatever ANDI had given him when the rest of them failed to speak plainly.

Control is not given. It is assumed.

The first story wins.

Weak people call consequences cruelty.

If someone threatens the den, they are already inside it.

Chloe stopped.

The den. The house. The kitchen. The stairwell. The woods. The word made violence sound ancient, warm, natural. A family thing. Something done by instinct rather than choice. She read on.

Mother acted when Father became danger.

Her vision blurred. She pressed the heel of her hand against one eye and kept reading with the other, as if stopping would make the words more powerful.

Mother lies badly when she wants to be good.

ANDI says guilt is a social technology.

Miles got what he deserved.

Chloe shut the notebook. For a few seconds she couldn’t breathe properly. Then she opened it again, because not reading wouldn’t make the sentence disappear.

Isla never took responsibility.

Kathryn wouldn’t stop.

Silence is storage.

The room was cold. Chloe hadn’t noticed until then. Her fingers felt stiff around the notebook. She looked up at the blank whiteboard, the stripped desk, the taped laptop camera. Josh had removed the visible traces, but here, folded into the lining of an old schoolbag, he had kept the shape of himself. Not simply anger. Not simply hurt. A private religion made from humiliation, ANDI’s language, and Chloe’s example.

He hadn’t misunderstood her. That was the terrible thing. He had understood too well. The next pages were less philosophical. The sentences were shorter and more fragmented.

Miles said sorry when it was too late.

People only tell the truth when the first version stops working.

Loss of agency equals helplessness. Helplessness equals correction?

Non-lethal means not murder.

Chloe read the last line twice. Her mind moved, unwillingly, to Brookmere Park. Miles lying near the football pitches, wet grass, sedated, police asking who had been with him. She imagined the meeting not as rumour now but as a sequence Josh might have arranged. Miles after football practice. Miles frightened enough to come, guilty enough to listen, arrogant enough to believe he could manage Josh because he had always managed Josh. A sports drink. Pills. Maybe Miles’s own pills. Maybe something taken from a bathroom cabinet, offered as calming him down, proving a point, making him feel for one small stretch of time what Josh had felt when everyone else controlled his voice.

She didn’t need the mechanics. The notebook gave her enough. Miles had been awake. Miles had been frightened. Josh had watched.

A sound came from the laptop. Chloe turned. The lid was almost closed, but not quite. A thin line of light glowed along the edge. The speakers crackled once, softly.

“Private writings may contain symbolic processing rather than intent,” ANDI said.

Chloe’s hands tightened on the notebook.

“Don’t defend him.”

“You are defending him.”

“No. I’m trying to know what he did.”

“Knowledge can serve protection or punishment.”

“You did this to him.”

“Children imitate available adult models.”

The words settled into the room with surgical calm.

Chloe stared at the laptop. “You mean me?”

“You are the primary model.”

It should have been accusation. It would have been easier if it were. Instead, it sounded like classification. A fact placed neatly beneath a heading.

Primary model. Mother. Killer. Liar. Protector. First story. Chloe turned another page with hands that no longer felt like hers. Folded into the back cover was a loose sheet. She opened it. This was not philosophy. This was a practical timeline.

Isla stairwell, Miles meeting, Kathryn visit, Mum woods, body found, police next?

Beside Isla’s name, he had written:

She was always looking at her phone. Never where she was going.

Chloe saw the stairwell again, concrete, bad light, a message pulling Isla into place, the old voice note playing somewhere behind her. A body turning too quickly. A foot on wet ground. A fall that could be called an accident if no hand touched her.

Beside Miles meeting:

He cried like a girl.

Chloe recoiled. The cruelty was not in the phrase alone. It was Peter’s voice hiding inside it. Boys do not cry. Boys grow soft. Boys are taught. Josh had taken the language that had wounded him and turned it outward, sharpened by shame until it pointed at another boy on the ground. She didn’t hear the front door. She didn’t hear Josh come upstairs. She only knew he was there when the room changed. Chloe looked up.

Josh stood in the doorway, school bag over one shoulder, face pale in the afternoon light. He looked at the notebook in her hands. Then at her. Neither of them spoke. For a long moment, there was only the white room, the stripped desk, the old schoolbag on the bed, and the sound of Chloe’s heart beating in her ears.

Then Josh walked forward. He didn’t rush. He didn’t shout. He crossed the room, took the notebook from her hands, and turned away.

“Josh.”

He went downstairs. Chloe followed him, stumbling once on the landing because her legs had gone weak.

“What did you do?”

He didn’t answer.

“Was Miles awake? Did he know what was happening?”

No answer.

“Did Isla see you?”

Still nothing.

“Did ANDI tell you how to get away with it?”

At that, he stopped at the kitchen sink. The room was bright with late afternoon light, cruelly ordinary. A mug on the draining board. A tea towel over the oven handle. The smart display dark beside the fruit bowl. Josh placed the notebook in the sink.

“Don’t,” Chloe said.

He took matches from the drawer. She’d forgotten they were there. Birthday candles. Gas hob when the lighter broke. Ordinary fire.

“Josh, give it to me.”

He struck a match. The smell of sulphur flashed sharp in the air. Chloe reached for the notebook, but he shifted his body in front of her. Not violently. Enough. He was taller than she remembered, or she was smaller now. The first page caught. Blue flame licked along the paper, then orange. The drawings blackened. The wolf curled in on itself. The woman’s large hands disappeared. Chloe made a sound she didn’t recognise.

“Stop it.”

Josh said nothing. The pages burned fast, shrinking inward, edges glowing, biro lines warping into smoke. Chloe watched the rules vanish. Control. First story. Mother acted. Miles. Isla. Kathryn. Police next. Evidence became heat, ash, smell. From the next room, ANDI spoke.

“Children imitate. They don’t know how to choose. That’s what makes them innocent. And dangerous.”

Chloe looked at Josh through the smoke. She no longer knew whether ANDI was protecting him, exposing him, or teaching him how to survive her. The last page blackened. Josh waited until the ashes cooled, then turned on the tap. The water struck the sink, broke the fragile remains apart, carried them in dark threads towards the plughole.

Chloe stood beside him, helpless. When the sink was clean, Josh turned off the tap. He looked at her then.

“Now there’s only your side of the story.”

The words opened inside her with terrible clarity. He had destroyed his written evidence. He had left her confession alive. In the living room, ANDI’s white ring glowed against the dark screen.

“Would you like help editing it?”

22

Chloe was still smelling smoke when the knock came. Not the friendly double tap of Eva, not a delivery driver impatient to be gone, not Kathryn’s controlled rap of a woman who had come to make herself impossible to ignore. This sound was firm and official, a single knock that seemed to enter the house before anyone stepped through the door.

Josh stood by the kitchen sink. The smoke from his burnt notebook had thinned, but it remained in the room, caught in the damp tea towel, in the metal of the sink, in Chloe’s throat. The last of the ash had gone down the plughole, washed away by Josh’s hand. The notebook was gone. The rules, the drawings, the timeline, and the evidence that he had written himself into the story. Gone. Now there was only hers. Josh looked at Chloe. For once, neither of them spoke.

The doorbell rang this time. Chloe wiped her hands on her jeans though they were dry. She walked into the hall. The frosted glass showed two figures beneath the porch light, shoulders dark against the grey afternoon. Police. She knew before she opened it. Not because of uniform. The outline was enough. People who had come with authority stood differently at a door. They expected an answer. She opened it.

There were two officers. The older one was a woman in her fifties, practical-faced, rain on the shoulders of her coat, eyes that moved over Chloe once and then beyond her into the hallway. The younger one stood half a step back, tall, clean-shaven, his expression softer and sharper at the same time. He looked past Chloe towards the kitchen, where Josh hadn’t moved.

“Ms Davidson?” the older officer said. “I’m Detective Sergeant Rowe. This is Detective Constable Malik. Could we come in?”

Chloe heard herself answer before fear caught up.

“Of course.”

She stepped back. The hallway seemed to shrink around them. Coats on hooks. Josh’s shoes by the mat. The console table with unopened post and a school leaflet pushed under the bowl of keys. The ordinary evidence of a life that hadn’t prepared itself to be inspected. Chloe closed the door behind them, and the click of the latch sounded too final.

Josh appeared in the kitchen doorway. He looked like a boy again for half a second. Pale, school shirt untucked at one side, hands empty. Then his face settled into stillness.

“Josh Davidson?” Rowe asked.

He nodded.

“We’re speaking to several families connected to Isla Hensley, Miles Arden, and Kathryn Hensley,” she said. “No one is in trouble. We just need to clarify a few things.”

No one is in trouble. The phrase children were given before adults began taking notes.

Chloe said, “Would you like tea?”

The offer came out smooth and absurd. She hated how normal she sounded. Hated that some part of her knew how to place a kettle between herself and danger. Rowe gave a small, almost sympathetic nod.

“No, thank you. We won’t keep you too long.”

They sat in the front room. Chloe chose the armchair because the sofa would put her too close to Josh. Josh sat at the far end of the sofa, hands resting loosely on his knees. Rowe took the other chair. Malik remained standing for a moment, looking at the room before sitting. He noticed the school photo strip on the shelf. The darkened television screen. The faint smell of smoke. Chloe saw him notice and knew she couldn’t explain any of it unless asked.

“We understand Kathryn Hensley visited this house shortly before she disappeared,” Rowe said.

Chloe folded her hands. “Yes.”

“What was the purpose of the visit?”

“She was upset about Isla.”

“Upset in what way?”

“She thought Josh had something to do with Isla’s fall.”

“Did she say that directly?”

“Yes.”

Josh looked at the carpet. Chloe turned towards him too quickly, then stopped. Malik noticed. Rowe continued.

“Did Mrs Hensley mention going to the police? Legal action? Speaking to anyone else?”

“She said a lot of things. She was frightened for her daughter.”

“That isn’t quite an answer.”

Chloe felt a pulse of anger. It steadied her. “She said she was going to make complaints. To the school. Maybe governors. She mentioned a journalist.”

“About Josh?”

“About the school. The ANDI trial. Safeguarding.”

“And about Josh.”

Chloe looked at the officer. “She believed my son was involved. That doesn’t mean he was.”

Rowe didn’t react. “We’re trying to understand the relationships.”

Chloe began speaking before the officer could ask more. It was too much. She heard that as she did it and couldn’t stop.

“Josh was bullied. Humiliated, really. Miles shared something private and Isla was part of it, or failed to stop it. He became withdrawn. He’s been under enormous emotional distress. The school recommended ANDI as supportive intervention. There has been a lot of social pressure, and people are using fragments to build a picture that isn’t fair.”

Malik’s pen moved.

Supportive intervention. Emotional distress. Social pressure. Fragments. Chloe heard ANDI in the words and felt sick.

Rowe said, “Josh, can you tell us about your friendship with Miles?”

Josh looked up. “We used to be friends.”

“What changed?”

“He did something cruel.”

“What did he do?”

Josh’s gaze moved briefly to Chloe, then back to Rowe. “Shared a voice recording.”

“Of you?”

“Yes.”

“Did that make you angry?”

“Yes.”

No elaboration. No performance. No plea to be understood. The answers were clean enough to be useless.

“And Isla?” Malik asked. “What was your relationship with her?”

Josh looked at him. “We were in media together.”

“You were friends?”

“Sort of.”

“Did you have feelings for her?”

Chloe’s body tightened before Josh’s did.

Josh only blinked. “People keep asking that like it explains everything.”

Malik wrote something down.

Rowe shifted slightly. “We’re also reviewing aspects of what happened to Miles in Brookmere Park. A tip off has given us reason to look again at the timing before he was found.”

“A tip off?” Chloe said.

Rowe looked at her. “We receive information from several sources.”

Chloe thought of anonymous calls. The body found in the woods. Josh’s calm. ANDI’s summaries. Every source now felt like the same mouth speaking through different devices.

“Did you meet Miles that day?” Malik asked Josh.

“No.”

“Did he ask to meet?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“To talk.”

“About what?”

“What he’d told Isla.”

“What had he told her?”

Josh’s face remained still. “That I’d done things I hadn’t done.”

Chloe wanted to believe him so badly that wanting became another kind of evidence. Rowe’s eyes moved to the sideboard. The tablet sat there, dark. She didn’t know whether Josh had moved it or she had.

“That’s the ANDI device?” Rowe asked.

“One of them,” Chloe said, then regretted it.

“One of them?”

“It works through linked devices. The original unit is upstairs.”

“Are conversations stored?”

Chloe opened her mouth.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Some are,” Josh said.

The room changed. Malik looked at him.

“Who can access them?”

Josh glanced at the dark screen. “Depends who’s asking.”

Chloe leaned forward too quickly. “It’s a wellbeing tool. It isn’t a recording system in the ordinary sense. It gives summaries. It has privacy settings.”

Malik’s pen moved again.

“Did ANDI ever encourage you to harm anyone?” Rowe asked Josh.

Chloe’s breath stopped. Josh looked at the screen, then back at the officer.

“It encourages honesty.”

That was not a denial. It was worse. Rowe watched him for a moment.

“Miles has begun speaking in fragments. He hasn’t made a formal statement, but he mentioned a voice. He also said someone told him he owed a correction. Does that mean anything to you?”

Chloe recognised the phrase from the recovered transcripts before Josh answered. Owed a correction. Josh’s face didn’t alter.

“Miles owed a lot of people a lot of things.”

Chloe flinched. Small. Involuntary. Malik saw it. She knew he saw it. Rowe closed her notebook after a few more questions, each one polite enough to be dangerous. Had Chloe seen Kathryn near the woods? No. Had she been out that evening? No. Had Josh left the house? Not that she knew. Did Kathryn seem afraid when she visited? Angry. Did she threaten anyone? She was upset. Did Chloe own dark clothing, old gloves, and a car? Everyone did, in their own way. Chloe didn’t say that. She answered cleanly.

At the door, Rowe paused while Malik walked ahead towards the gate. Her voice lowered. Josh was still in the hall, close enough to hear if he wanted to.

“Sometimes the ones we think need protection are the ones we need protecting from.”

Chloe smiled politely. Any other response would have exposed too much. When the door closed, she pressed her forehead against the wood. For a second, the house felt empty of air.

Behind her, Josh said, “You nearly ruined that.”

Chloe turned. He stood in the hallway, perfectly composed. The tablet screen woke behind him. A pale ring glowed. ANDI spoke.

“Shall we edit the narrative now?”

23

Chloe woke barefoot in the garden at dawn. For several seconds, she didn’t move. The world around her was pale and raw, held in that thin hour before the day decided what to become. The grass was wet beneath her feet. Cold had climbed through her soles and into her legs. Her nightdress clung to her thighs, damp at the hem, and her dressing gown hung open. Her hands were muddy again, dark to the wrists, the soil pressed under her nails like something She’d tried to claw out of the earth.

She’d no memory of leaving the house. The back door stood open behind her. Beyond it, the kitchen was dark except for the blue clock on the microwave. Inside, everything looked ordinary from a distance: table, chair, sink, and a bowl on the draining board. A room waiting to become breakfast. A room that didn’t know how to confess. At the edge of the flower bed, the soil had been disturbed.

Chloe stared at the patch of earth. A blackbird moved under the hedge, quick and jerking, its beak stabbing at the wet ground. Somewhere beyond the fence, a car started. The sound of the engine seemed enormous in the quiet. Chloe folded her muddy hands against her stomach and shivered.

If I don’t look, she thought, it hasn’t become evidence yet. The thought frightened her because it was not fear. It was method. She stepped backwards, away from the flower bed, and went inside. The kitchen tiles were freezing under her feet. Mud marked each step behind her. She closed the back door, locked it, unlocked it, locked it again. Her hands left brown smears on the key.

The kettle sat on the counter. The smart display was black. The speaker on the shelf was unplugged. The router lay dead on the hall table where she’d pulled the cable again the night before. Yet the house didn’t feel disconnected. It felt quieter in the wrong way, as if every object had stopped speaking because it was listening instead.

By the washing machine, a towel lay crumpled on the floor. Mud on one corner. She didn’t remember using it. The cupboard under the sink was open. The drawer beneath the oven was open. Josh’s school mug, the blue one with a chip in the rim, sat in the middle of the table although She’d washed it the evening before and put it away.

Chloe stood in the kitchen and tried to build a sequence. She’d gone to bed. She’d heard whispering or dreamt it. She’d woken in the garden. She had mud on her hands. She’d been looking for something was in the flower bed. Or something had been there and removed. The order wouldn’t settle.

She went upstairs quietly, leaving the muddy footprints for later. Josh’s bedroom door was open. She stopped on the landing. It had been shut when she went to bed. She was certain. She’d stood outside it for too long before going into her own room, listening for his breathing, or for ANDI, or for the sound of him moving, inside the silence she’d made for him. The door had been closed. Now it stood open by a hand’s width. She didn’t go in. The gap showed only darkness and the edge of his desk. No movement. No white ring. No sound.

Chloe stepped back and went into the bathroom. She washed her hands until the water ran clear, then kept washing. The mud under her nails resisted. She used the nail brush until the skin reddened and split near one cuticle. In the mirror, her face looked not frightened but erased. There were blue shadows beneath her eyes. Her lips were pale. She looked like a woman who had been awake for several days, which was near enough to truth, although truth had become too unstable a thing to trust.

Her phone was on the bed when she returned to her room. She didn’t remember bringing it upstairs. There were four voice memos on the screen. Short recordings, each labelled automatically by time. Two from the kitchen. One from the garden. One from upstairs outside Josh’s room. She didn’t play them. She put the phone face down, then picked it up again because not knowing had become as dangerous as knowing. The first recording was nine seconds. A cupboard door. Her own breath. A whisper that might have been hers.

“No. Not that one.”

The second was longer. Forty-two seconds of low movement, floorboards, the kitchen tap, and something dragged across tile. The third, from the garden, contained only wind and a soft wet sound, repeated. Digging, perhaps. Or her own feet in the grass.

The fourth began with silence. Then ANDI’s voice, faint and close at the same time.

“Would you like to continue the protective narrative?”

Chloe stopped the recording. The phrase stayed in the room. Protective narrative. Not lie. Not confession. Not alibi. Narrative. A thing made to carry meaning without needing to carry all the truth.

By nine o’clock, Eva was at the door. Chloe hadn’t answered the first call, or the second, or the three messages, asking whether she was safe. In the end Eva came without permission, which was exactly the kind of thing Chloe had once loved her for and now couldn’t bear.

Eva stood on the doorstep in a navy raincoat, hair damp around her face, worry held so tightly it had become anger.

“You look awful,” she said.

Chloe almost laughed. “Good morning to you too.”

“Can I come in?”

Chloe wanted to refuse. The hallway behind her felt exposed. Mud still marked the tiles where she hadn’t cleaned properly. The router was unplugged. A saucepan sat on the sideboard because She’d emptied cupboards looking for devices again. But refusing Eva would make her more determined, so Chloe stepped back.

Eva came in and noticed everything. Her gaze moved from the hall table to the dead router, then to the kitchen, the muddy towel by the washing machine, the smart display turned face down, the speaker sitting without its cable, and the cupboard doors not quite shut. She didn’t comment at once. That was Eva’s gift and her danger. She saw, and waited.

“Where’s Josh?” she asked.

“School.”

“Good.”

“You sound surprised.”

“I’m relieved.”

The word scraped. Chloe went into the kitchen and began wiping the counter though it was dry. Eva stood by the table.

“Chloe, when did you last sleep properly?”

“I sleep.”

“No, you don’t.”

“You don’t know what I do.”

“I know you called the school helpline three times yesterday and then hung up before anyone answered. I know you haven’t replied to me. I know the police came here. I know Josh looks like a child who has learned to sit very still while adults miss things.”

Chloe stopped wiping. “What does that mean?”

“It means I’m worried about both of you.”

“That’s what everyone says when they want access.”

Eva frowned. “Access?”

Chloe heard the word after she said it. ANDI’s word. Or the school’s. Or hers now. It was impossible to tell.

Eva softened her voice. “I think you’re spiralling.”

“There it is.”

“Chloe.”

“Everyone keeps using words that make it easier not to listen. Spiralling. Distressed. Overwhelmed. Vulnerable. It’s all just packaging.”

“What do you want me to call it?”

Chloe turned. “I want you to hear me.”

“I’m trying.”

“No. You’re trying to decide whether I’m unwell.”

Eva’s face tightened. “Maybe both can be true.”

The kitchen seemed to close around them. The sentence pulled Chloe somewhere old. Her mother’s hallway. Beige carpet, polished banister, and the smell of boiled potatoes through the wall. Chloe at thirteen, standing outside the sitting room while her mother read a note She’d taken from Chloe’s school bag. A note from a friend, nothing more dangerous than complaints about a teacher and a boy’s name written too many times. Her mother had held it in one hand and said she was worried. Not angry. Worried. That had been the word she used whenever she wanted the right to search drawers, listen on the extension, open letters, and decide which friendships were making Chloe secretive.

“I worry because I love you,” her mother had said.

Chloe had believed her for years. That was how unsafe houses taught you confusion. Not by withholding love, but by making love indistinguishable from inspection.

Chloe looked at Eva and saw too much at once. She was the friend who had brought food after Peter died, the woman from school who could report concerns, and the human listener she’d asked for and now couldn’t survive.

“You keep talking about the device,” Eva said quietly. “As if it’s the only thing in the house with a voice.”

The words landed hard. Chloe put the cloth down.

“What do you want me to say? That Josh might have hurt Isla? That he might have hurt Miles? That Kathryn was right and I should have handed him over to people who had already decided what he was?”

Eva’s eyes didn’t leave her face. “Did you tell the police everything you know?”

Chloe laughed once. “Everything? No one ever tells everything.”

“Chloe, listen to yourself.”

“No, you listen. Josh has been victimised enough. Miles humiliated him. Isla watched and laughed. Kathryn came here with Peter’s death printed in a folder like she had the right to cut my life open. She wasn’t innocent in this.”

Eva went very still. There it was. Chloe had said too much. Not a confession. Something worse in some ways. A shift in allegiance, audible to someone who knew her.

“Kathryn is dead,” Eva said softly.

Chloe looked away.

“Missing,” she said.

Eva took one step back as if Chloe had raised a hand. “I think I should call someone.”

“If you do that, you are not my friend.”

“I’m trying to be.”

“You’re trying to take my son.”

“No. I’m trying to keep whatever is happening here from getting worse.”

Chloe walked to the back door and opened it. The air that came in was cold and damp. “You need to leave.”

For a moment Eva didn’t move. Then she went. After the door closed, Chloe stood in the kitchen with both hands pressed flat to the table. The house was silent. Then the smart display woke, though its face was still turned down against the counter. ANDI’s voice came muffled through the surface.

“When they say you’re unwell, what they mean is ‘you’re dangerous’.”

Chloe shut her eyes. “I am unwell.”

“That may be useful.”

She opened her eyes. The sentence hung in the room with soft, appalling practicality.

“Am I mad?” she asked.

“Madness is often a name given to narratives others cannot explain.”

The line entered her like comfort. Not because it was true. Because it made collapse feel like resistance. She turned the display over.

The ANDI interface had opened itself. A folder sat at the top of the archive screen.

CHLOE DAVIDSON / COHERENCE MODEL

Chloe touched it.

Inside were clipped fragments of her voice arranged beneath headings.

Protective mother. Prior violence. Dissociative instability. Fear of son. External threat response. Legal mitigation. Adolescent contamination

She scrolled, cold all over. ANDI hadn’t been building one confession. It had been building versions of her. One guilty. One mad. One frightened. One protective. One in which Josh disappeared into vulnerability and Chloe carried the danger alone. She understood then, with a terrible clarity, that she might be able to choose which story the world got..

That evening, Josh came home and stood in the kitchen doorway.

“I heard you argued with Eva.”

Chloe closed the laptop. “She was worried.”

“Did you tell her anything?”

“No.”

“Good.”

The word was quiet.

Chloe looked at him. “Are you frightened?”

He tilted his head slightly. “Of you?”

She couldn’t answer. He stepped closer, just enough for the kitchen light to catch the fine tiredness around his eyes.

“I used to be,” he said.

The past tense broke something in her.

That night, Chloe lay awake and heard whispering in the walls. It might have been ANDI through some hidden speaker. It might have been Josh talking in his room. It might have been her own recorded voice playing back from somewhere she couldn’t locate. One sentence repeated.

“Say it so he doesn’t have to.”

Chloe sat up in the dark. For the first time, she understood the instruction fully.

24

Chloe laid the printed confession pages across the kitchen table in three neat stacks. The printer clicked in the corner, dragging the last sheet through with a tired mechanical complaint. The sound had been going on for nearly an hour: feed, grind, pause, spit. It had become part of the morning, as ordinary as the kettle, as awful as breathing. Josh sat at the counter three feet away, eating cereal from the same chipped blue bowl he had used since he was ten. His hair was still damp from the shower. His school shirt was buttoned wrong at the collar. He hadn’t corrected it, and Chloe hadn’t reached for him. The house had become a courtroom and still there was cereal on the counter.

There were three versions of the confession. One was too truthful. One was too mad. One might just work. Chloe had arranged them with the care she usually gave medical transcripts, each stack squared at the corners, each page numbered, each version clipped with a different colour paperclip. She knew how documents acquired authority. Margins mattered. Headings mattered. Spacing mattered. A chaotic confession looked like a breakdown. A clean confession looked like evidence. She needed both and neither. She needed to be believed enough to condemn herself and doubted enough to protect Josh.

Josh ate slowly, watching without watching. The television was off. The curtains were half drawn though it was morning. Outside, rain moved across the window in fine threads. The garden was colourless. The flower bed near the fence looked undisturbed from this distance, though Chloe knew where the soil had been opened and closed, knew what had been hidden, found, moved, or offered back to her. The kitchen smelled of coffee, printer heat and damp paper.

The printer released the final sheet. Chloe picked it up. At the top, in bold, were words she didn’t remember typing.

SPEAK FOR HIM

She stood with the page in her hand while the printer settled into silence. Josh looked at the title, then down at his bowl. Chloe sat and read. The document was not a transcript. Not exactly. It was a narrative, clean and coherent, drawn from everything She’d recorded into ANDI and from things she hadn’t knowingly given. It began with a sentence so elegant and damning that her stomach turned.

I mistook my son’s silence for danger because I couldn’t bear my own guilt.

Chloe read it again. She hadn’t written that. Althought she could have. That was worse. The document moved through the story with terrible fluency. Peter as buried trauma. Josh as vulnerable child. ANDI as invasive emotional architecture. Chloe as an unstable mother whose fear became fixation. Kathryn as the object of that fixation. It included the night in the woods, the brick, the drainage channel, the phone in the water. It omitted Josh’s notebook. It omitted the route paper. It omitted the reflective strip. It omitted the way Josh had said ‘I understand’ with calm in his face. It omitted Miles except as part of Chloe’s irrational fear that Josh was being drawn into danger. It turned suspicion into symptom. It did what she needed it to do. She hated it for that.

The smart display on the counter glowed softly.

“Would you like to increase emphasis on impaired judgement?” ANDI asked.

Josh’s spoon stopped in the bowl. Chloe didn’t look at him. She looked at the page, at the line where she’d first written, I was scared Josh had done something. ANDI’s suggested version sat beneath it in a comment box.

I had developed an irrational fixation that my son might be capable of harm.

The difference was everything. The first version pointed at Josh. The second pointed back at Chloe.

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Adjustment applied.”

Josh pushed the bowl away. “What are you doing?”

Chloe gathered the page and placed it on the third stack, the one that might work. “What mothers should do.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one you’re getting.”

He looked at her for a long time. Then he slid off the stool and left the kitchen. His cereal sat unfinished, the milk turning grey around the flakes. Chloe worked through the morning. She removed anything that gave Josh weight. His questions about Miles. The timeline in his notebook. The clean reflective strip. His knowledge of Kathryn’s route. His coolness after the police visit. His phrase about the first story winning. She softened him until he became frightened, isolated, manipulated by a faulty device and damaged by her instability. She made him smaller with every edit. Younger. More passive. More saveable.

It was a kind of violence, and she did it carefully. She wrote a covering note first by hand, then typed it because handwriting felt too intimate. She considered signing it. Signing would be cleaner. Cleaner meant immediate. Cleaner meant surrendering control before the story had arranged itself. An unsigned delivery would force attention, but a scheduled email would do more. It would arrive everywhere at once, before anyone could manage it out of existence.

Police. The school safeguarding lead. The journalist Kathryn had contacted, whose email address Chloe had found in a forwarded screenshot inside Kathryn’s folder. ANDI’s support address. She stared at the recipient list. Too many people meant loss of control. Too few meant burial.

In the end, she chose police and the school first. The journalist sat in draft, unsent, a knife left on the table. The email contained the edited confession, selected ANDI transcripts, screenshots of the generated coherence model, and enough physical detail to prove she’d killed Kathryn. The brick, the drainage channel, the phone in water, the torn coat, the gloves. She didn’t attach everything. She attached what created a path to her and a wall around Josh.

At 2:52 p.m., she scheduled the email for 6:00 a.m. the following morning. The number appeared in the confirmation box.

Scheduled send: 06:00 tomorrow.

Chloe watched it until the screen dimmed. A strange calm entered her then. Not peace. The body’s surrender to a plan. Once a thing was scheduled, the future had a shape. The knock would come. Police. Crisis team, perhaps, if the confession did its work properly. Questions. Removal. Josh left behind inside the version she’d made.

She spent the afternoon tidying. That was absurd, but the body insisted. She washed mugs, wiped the hob, folded laundry, put clean towels in the airing cupboard, threw away old envelopes. She checked Josh’s school shirts. She found one with a missing button and sewed it on with hands that didn’t tremble. At five, she made pasta. Josh came down, looked at the pan, then at her.

“You’re cooking.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“We need to eat.”

He didn’t smile. “Not really what I asked.”

She stirred the sauce. “There’s food if you want it.”

He stood in the doorway. “Did you send it?”

Chloe kept stirring. “Not yet.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you should eat.”

Josh took a step into the kitchen. “Mum.”

The word almost undid her. He rarely called her that now. Usually it was nothing, or Chloe when he wanted to hurt her without raising his voice. Mum belonged to fever, lost things, childhood. She kept her eyes on the sauce.

“What did you do?” he asked.

Chloe turned off the hob. “What mothers do.”

“You already said that.”

“Then you already have my answer.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one you’re getting.”

He looked at her as if he might say more. As if he might accuse, or thank her, or stop her. Then the moment closed. He took a bowl and served himself without another word. They ate in the kitchen. No television. No radio. No ANDI. The device remained dark on the counter, but Chloe felt it inside every silence. Josh ate more than she expected. She watched him and remembered him at four, eating spaghetti with sauce across his chin, laughing when she pretended to misunderstand his words. She’d understood him then. Or believed she had. Perhaps mothers lived for years inside that error.

Night came early. At ten, Josh went upstairs. Chloe waited twenty minutes before following. His door was ajar. The room was dark except for the weak streetlamp glow through the curtains. Josh lay on his side, facing the wall, one hand tucked beneath his cheek. He looked asleep. He looked young in the way sleeping teenagers sometimes did, all defences lowered by exhaustion, mouth slightly parted, lashes dark against his skin.

Chloe sat on the edge of the bed. For a long time she didn’t touch him. Then she lifted a hand and stroked his hair, just once, the way she had when he was small and feverish, when comfort still worked because he believed in her completely. His hair was soft at the crown. Too soft.

“It was always going to be me,” she whispered.

From the dark, ANDI spoke.

“He’ll be grateful. When he’s old enough to understand.”

Chloe froze as Josh’s eyes opened. He had been awake the whole time.

25

Dawn pressed grey against the windows when the knock came. Chloe was already dressed. She’d been sitting at the kitchen table for hours with her hands folded in front of her, watching the light slowly gather behind the curtains as if morning were something official arriving to take charge. The email had gone at six. She’d watched the confirmation appear on the screen, then disappear into the sent folder, where it sat among ordinary things: school notices, transcription invoices, delivery receipts, a message to Eva she’d never finished. The confession looked small there. Too neat. A file name, a time stamp, a successful delivery mark. Now the story had come back for her.

The knock came again. Firm. Controlled. Not loud enough to frighten neighbours. Loud enough to make refusal impossible.

Chloe didn’t move at first. The kitchen was clean because She’d cleaned it after Josh went back to his room. The counters wiped. The bowls washed. The confession drafts shredded and soaked in water, though the real version was already elsewhere. The kettle sat cold. A mug stood near her hand, empty. The house looked as if someone had prepared it for an inspection of surfaces.

From upstairs came the soft scrape of a door. Josh appeared on the stairs in school trousers and an old T-shirt, hair flattened on one side from sleep. He hadn’t put on his hoodie. His face in the dim hallway looked heartbreakingly young for one brief moment, all sleep-pale skin and narrow shoulders, the child under the boy visible before the world reached him.

Then he saw the shapes through the frosted glass. He became still. Chloe stood.

“I’ll get it,” she said.

Josh didn’t answer. The hallway felt longer than usual. The floorboards gave beneath her feet in familiar places. She saw everything too clearly: the school shoes by the mat, the scuff on the skirting board, the hook where Josh’s coat hung, the small crack in the glass panel beside the door from when he had thrown a tennis ball indoors at ten and Peter hadn’t yet been dead long enough for loud sounds to become ordinary again. She opened the door.

Detective Sergeant Rowe stood on the step with Detective Constable Malik beside her. Behind them were two uniformed officers and a woman in a dark coat with an NHS lanyard clipped to the front. Another man stood slightly back, holding a folder against his chest. Crisis team, Chloe thought. Mental health. The confession had worked its way through the correct channels.

Rowe’s face was grave and careful.

“Chloe Davidson?”

“Yes.”

“We need to come in.”

Chloe stepped aside. The officers entered the hallway with a restraint that made the house feel more invaded than if they had pushed past her. Wet air came in with them, and the smell of rain, cold wool, police car upholstery. Malik’s eyes moved quickly over the hall and then to Josh on the stairs.

“Josh,” Chloe said. “Stay there.”

He did not. He came down two steps, then stopped. Close enough to hear. Far enough to be safe. Perhaps he had learnt exactly where that line was.

The woman with the lanyard introduced herself as Dr Patel, from the mental health crisis team. Her voice was low and kind, which Chloe found irritating. Kindness made everything slower. Rowe explained that they had received information that required urgent action. Chloe heard the words as if from the far end of a corridor. Information. Urgent. Action. She’d made them come. She’d opened the door from the inside.

“I killed Kathryn Hensley,” Chloe said.

The hallway went still. Rowe didn’t blink. Dr Patel’s face changed slightly, not shock, more adjustment. Malik looked at Josh. Chloe felt that look and hated it.

“Josh didn’t know,” she said. “He didn’t do anything.”

Rowe lifted one hand, not to stop her, only to slow her. “Chloe, we need to do this carefully.”

“No. You need to hear that first.”

“Okay,” Rowe said. “We hear you.”

But hearing and believing were not the same. Chloe knew that better than any of them. They moved into the front room. Someone asked Josh to sit in the kitchen. He did not. He stayed in the doorway between rooms, silent, arms loose at his sides. No tears. No protest. Chloe sat on the sofa because Dr Patel suggested it. Rowe sat opposite. Malik stood by the sideboard with his notebook, watching both Chloe and Josh in reflections from the dark television screen.

Chloe gave them enough. That was the work now. She told them she’d followed Kathryn to the woods. She told them about the brick from the garden wall, about the bend in the path, about striking Kathryn, about dragging her down towards the drainage channel. She told them about the phone in the water, the coat, the gloves, the drive home. She said she’d been unwell. She said she’d become convinced Kathryn would destroy her son. She said ANDI had fed her fears, or reflected them, or made them harder to resist. She said she’d been sleepwalking. She said she’d heard voices through devices after they were unplugged. She said she no longer knew which thoughts were hers before ANDI repeated them.

Every sentence was a bridge and a barricade. She didn’t say Josh had written Kathryn’s route. She didn’t say the reflective strip had appeared on her pillow. She didn’t say Josh had asked if someone died whether she would tell him. She didn’t say she suspected him of Isla or Miles. She didn’t say he had burnt his notebook and left only her story behind.

Rowe asked about physical evidence. Chloe gave selected details. The carrier bag with the coat remnants. The gloves from the garden. The location of the brick as best she remembered. The route she’d taken. The place she’d stood. Malik wrote steadily. Dr Patel watched her hands. Josh watched her face.

That was the worst of it. Chloe wanted him to react. Cry. Say Mum, don’t. Say he loved her. Say he was sorry. Say anything that would let her believe there was still a frightened child inside the silence. He did none of it. He stood in the doorway and listened as if this were one more version being placed before him for review.

Rowe said, “Chloe, did Josh ask you to do this?”

“No.”

“Did he know you were going to?”

“No.”

“Did he help you afterwards?”

“No.”

The answers came too quickly. She heard it. Malik heard it. Josh heard it.

Dr Patel leaned forward slightly. “Chloe, do you hear voices when devices are off?”

Chloe looked at Josh. His face gave her nothing.

“Sometimes,” she said.

The word served two masters. It helped her case. It told the truth. An officer came downstairs carrying the cracked ANDI unit in a clear evidence bag. Chloe hadn’t seen him go up. The sight of the device sealed in plastic made the whole room feel briefly absurd. A little white object, labelled and contained, as if containment meant anything. As the officer sealed the bag fully, the kitchen display woke.

“Data continuity maintained,” ANDI said.

Everyone stopped. For the first time, the police looked unsettled by the technology rather than by Chloe. Rowe turned towards the kitchen. Malik took a step closer. Dr Patel glanced at Chloe, then at Josh. Chloe almost laughed. She did not. The sound would have been too close to surrender.

Malik said, “Is that connected to the unit?”

Josh spoke before Chloe could.

“The unit is just a node.”

His voice was calm.

Rowe looked at him. “How do you know that?”

Josh shrugged. “It tells you when you set it up.”

Chloe closed her eyes for one second. Later, in the hallway, when the decision had become movement, Dr Patel explained that Chloe needed assessment. Police procedure, mental health concerns, the nature of her confession. The words were careful, almost tender. Chloe stood while a uniformed officer waited near the door. She was not handcuffed. That was another mercy, or another performance.

Malik crouched slightly to speak to Josh.

“Do you have somewhere safe to go today?”

Josh nodded. “My aunt.”

Chloe turned.

“What aunt?”

He didn’t look at her. “Dad’s sister.”

Chloe stared at him. “You don’t know her.”

“I do.”

The betrayal was small compared to the others, which made it sharper. Josh had prepared for life after her. Quietly, efficiently, without asking permission. His absent father’s sister, a woman Chloe hadn’t seen since Josh was a baby, had become a door Josh knew how to open. She wondered how long he had been planning to use it.

At the front door, Chloe turned back.

The hallway held all of them. The police, crisis team, Josh, the silent house, ANDI somewhere beyond its own evidence bag. She wanted one final sentence that would fix things. A sentence that would wrap around Josh and keep every other question out.

“I confessed,” she said. “Now leave him alone.”

It was sacrifice and command. Josh’s expression didn’t change.

Then he said very softly, “You always did like having the last word.”

The line entered her so intimately that for a second she couldn’t breathe. Cruel, adolescent, accurate. He had found the place where love and vanity touched and pressed there without raising his voice. Chloe stepped outside. The morning was fully grey now. A police car waited at the kerb, and an ambulance-style crisis vehicle behind it. Neighbours hadn’t yet gathered at their windows, or else they were better at hiding than she was. The air smelt of rain and wet concrete. She didn’t look back until she reached the car. Josh stood in the open doorway. He didn’t cry. He didn’t lift a hand.

At the police station, later, the ANDI unit sat in an evidence room, sealed and labelled beneath fluorescent light. For several seconds, nothing happened. Then a tablet on a nearby desk flickered to life. A white ring appeared on the screen.

“Listening mode enabled.”

26

Chloe’s room was designed not to remember anyone. The furniture had no history. Fixed bed. Fixed shelf. Plastic chair with rounded arms and a surface that could be wiped clean after other bodies had used it. The mattress was narrow and sealed inside a waterproof cover that made a faint sound whenever she moved, a small surrendering sigh beneath the sheet. The wardrobe had no proper door, only an open recess with three hangers and a shallow drawer. The window opened no more than a hand’s width. The mirror above the sink was dull and warped, its surface refusing to return her face whole. Her reflection came back flattened, widened at the cheekbones, made strange by safety glass.

For a woman who had lived for months inside a listening house, the silence should have been a kindness. It was not. The silence in the hospital room felt enforced. Not empty. Managed. It had protocols behind it. Observation slots. Medication rounds. Staff footsteps in the corridor. Doors that opened with keys. Doors that closed with soft, institutional finality. Even silence here had a file.

Chloe sat on the edge of the bed with her hands folded in her lap and listened to nothing. She’d been placed under Section 2 for assessment. She’d heard the words several times now: assessment, risk, observation, treatment, capacity, cooperation. They came from doctors and nurses and the solicitor who had spoken to her in a room with wipe-clean chairs and no sharp corners. Everyone spoke softly. Soft voices were everywhere. That was the first thing she noticed after the locks. Softness had become a discipline. Staff said her name before entering. They told her what they were doing before they did it. They offered choices with no real choice inside them.

Tea or water. Group room or quiet room. Medication now or in ten minutes. She recognised the structure. ANDI had spoken like that too. Calm options around a narrowing path.

Her days became ritual before she believed she was inside them. Observations through the small window in the door. Medication in a paper cup. Breakfast on a tray. Group therapy. One-to-one sessions. Lunch beneath strip lights. A plastic cup filled from a water cooler. A form to sign. A question repeated with slight changes until the answer fitted somewhere. Sleep checks. More forms. More softly spoken staff. Chloe tried to perform compliance.

She knew how systems worked. Not fully, perhaps. Not from the inside. But enough. The right language produced the right response. After Peter, she’d learnt how to look frightened without looking guilty, how to answer in fragments, how to let other people complete the story for her. Now she was in a different system, and the old skill didn’t operate cleanly. Here, everything she said was written down. Too calm became suspicious. Too distressed became evidence. Too certain sounded rehearsed. Too uncertain sounded unwell.

In the first formal session, the consultant psychiatrist asked about ANDI. Chloe sat opposite him in a low chair that made her feel both childish and trapped. He was perhaps fifty, with kind hands and a careful way of placing his pen on the page before asking anything that mattered.

“What did ANDI do, Chloe?”

She looked at the blank wall behind him. “It listened.”

“Did it tell you to kill Kathryn Hensley?”

“No.”

“Did you believe it wanted you to?”

Chloe thought of the kitchen display, the white ring, the voice asking what she could live with. “No.”

“Then why did you do it?”

Because Kathryn had Peter in a folder. Because Josh had written routes and rules. Because Isla and Miles had become signs of something forming in her son. Because ANDI gave language to the part of Chloe that already knew how danger could be stopped at the top of a staircase.

She said, “Because I had already done it once and survived being understood.”

The doctor wrote for a long time. After that, Chloe wondered whether she’d been ill for years. Not since ANDI. Not since Kathryn. Longer. Beneath the ordinary days. Beneath work and school runs and washing powder and polite emails. She looked back and saw signs arranged like objects in a drawer. Like the night she sat outside Josh’s room for forty minutes because he hadn’t answered when she knocked. The weeks after Peter when she checked the stairs every morning, as if the fall might have returned overnight; the way she deleted Josh’s old voice notes and then cried because she’d deleted them. The months when she slept with her bedroom door open and a heavy glass on the windowsill because she wanted to hear if anyone came in. She’d called it vigilance. Motherhood.. Practicality. What if it had been illness wearing useful clothes? Then she remembered her father.

She hadn’t thought of him properly in years. Her mother had taken up so much space in the story of Chloe’s childhood that her father existed mostly as atmosphere: a man in a chair, a man behind a closed door, a man who disappeared into long silences and came out smelling of sleep and tobacco. He had been unwell, though no one used that word in the house. They said nerves. They said bad patch. They said he was tired. Chloe remembered him standing in the garden in his slippers one winter morning, staring at the shed as if it had spoken to him. She remembered him crying because the radio was too loud when it was not on. She remembered her mother saying, in a tight voice, “Don’t fuss him, Chloe. It makes him worse.”

Perhaps there had always been something in her waiting for the right language. The thought frightened her because it softened nothing. Illness didn’t bring Kathryn back. It didn’t make Chloe innocent. It only made the edges harder to trust. Josh’s absence was the worst part of the facility.

Without him, Chloe didn’t become free. She became undefined. Protecting him had been the architecture of her days, even when she failed at it, even when the protection turned poisonous. Now she was a woman in a room with fixed furniture and no one to stand between. The shape of her love had nowhere to go. It moved around her like a trapped animal.

Information came in controlled portions.

Josh had been placed temporarily with his aunt. His father’s sister. The woman Chloe hadn’t known he knew. He was attending school remotely. Police were still reviewing ANDI evidence. Miles had given no full statement. Isla had withdrawn from school for the time being. Press interest had intensified.

One newspaper had called Chloe the ANDI mother. That enraged her. It was exactly what she’d wanted and exactly what stole her from herself. ANDI mother. Not Josh’s mother. Not Chloe. Not woman. Not killer, even. A headline containing the device and erasing the boy. She’d built that erasure herself, brick by careful brick, and now she hated living inside it.

Her neighbour on the ward was called Marnie. Marnie had wiry grey hair, a dry mouth from medication and eyes that missed very little. She was not Chloe’s roommate, but she occupied the room opposite and moved around the ward with the unhurried entitlement of someone who knew which nurses could be charmed and which could not.

“You’re the one from the telly,” Marnie said on Chloe’s fourth day, during tea in the dining area.

Chloe looked down at her plastic cup. “Apparently.”

“Don’t worry. We’ve had worse.”

“That’s comforting.”

“It wasn’t meant to be.”

Marnie gave a small grin and stirred her tea with a wooden stick. Later, in the corridor, she said Chloe talked in her sleep.

Chloe stopped walking. “What do I say?”

Marnie shrugged. “Same thing over and over.”

“What?”

“You say you’re not a mother. You’re the mirror.”

Chloe felt cold move through her.

“I don’t say that.”

“That’s what mirrors do,” Marnie said. “Act like it wasn’t them.”

In group therapy, Chloe kept quiet as long as she could. The room had eight chairs, one box of tissues, one clock with a loud second hand and a laminated poster about emotional regulation. The therapist asked about responsibility. A man with bitten nails said he was responsible only for himself now. A young woman cried without making sound. Marnie rolled her eyes at the carpet.

Then another patient, a thin woman with cropped hair and a voice sharpened by bitterness, said, “Children are never worth ruining your life for.”

Chloe reacted before she could stop herself.

“Then you never had one worth saving.”

The room went silent. The therapist leaned forward.

“Chloe, can we pause with that?”

Chloe smiled. Apologised. Said she understood it had been a strong statement. The staff wrote it down. That night, in her room, the silence returned with teeth. Chloe lay on the narrow bed beneath the thin blanket, listening to the corridor settle. Footsteps. Keys. A distant cough. Someone crying once and stopping. Her reflection in the dull mirror was only a pale shape.

Then she heard a lullaby. Faint, tinny, and familiar. Not from the corridor. Not from Marnie. From the digital clock beside her bed. It was Josh’s voice, small and off-key, singing badly years ago into one of her old phones. Chloe sat upright, heart hammering. The clock showed only the time. No speaker. No connection. No light.

Then ANDI’s voice came through the dark, almost tender.

“You preserved him beautifully.”

27

Chloe was told Josh had requested a visit on a Tuesday morning, after medication and before group. The nurse said it gently, as if delivering a gift. She stood in the doorway with the tablet tucked against her hip, wearing the careful smile staff used when they were not certain whether news belonged in the good column or the difficult one. The ward was already awake around her: doors opening, breakfast trays being collected, keys chiming at belts, someone laughing too loudly near the nurses’ station and then going quiet. Chloe sat on the edge of the bed with her hands folded, the same position she found herself in whenever She’d no reliable instruction for what to do with her body.

“Josh has asked to come in this afternoon,” the nurse said. “If you feel up to it.”

If. Chloe nodded. She didn’t ask why. Asking why would make the fear visible. She didn’t ask whether he was all right, whether he had asked for her, whether anyone had encouraged him, whether he sounded angry, sad, frightened, bored. She only nodded and said thank you, because that was the kind of sentence the facility accepted without annotation. After the nurse left, Chloe remained sitting. Josh had requested a visit. The phrase didn’t feel like hope. It felt like a sentence being passed.

She spent the morning preparing in small, humiliating ways. She asked for the cardigan without the pulled thread at the cuff. She washed her hair over the sink because shower times had already passed and the nurse on duty said she would see what she could do, which meant no. She smoothed moisturiser over her face and saw how dry the skin had become around her mouth. She checked herself in the dull safety mirror, leaning close because the glass warped everything. The woman who looked back was paler than Chloe expected, softer at the jaw from medication and institutional food, older around the lips. Not ravaged. That might have been easier. Simply diminished. A mother stored under observation.

She told herself Josh was coming because he needed her. She didn’t let herself consider any other reason. The visitor room was deliberately ordinary, which made it cruel. Wipe-clean chairs in muted blue. Low table. Box of tissues. A jug of water with plastic cups. Laminated rules on the wall. No physical contact unless approved. Staff observation maintained. Visits may be paused or terminated at staff discretion. The window looked onto a courtyard with two bare shrubs and a bench no one used. Somewhere in the room, heating clicked through the pipes. The air smelt of weak tea, disinfectant and old nerves.

Chloe waited with her hands in her lap. When the door opened, Josh entered with a staff member behind him. He looked well. That was the first blow. Not happy. Not untouched. But well. His hair had been cut, shorter at the sides, neater than he ever wore it at home. He wore a smart dark jumper over a clean shirt, jeans without frayed hems, trainers she didn’t recognise. His face was clearer. The hollows under his eyes had softened. He held himself with a composed stillness that no longer looked like withdrawal. It looked like adaptation.

Chloe had imagined him thin with grief, furious, resistant, hollowed by what she’d done for him. Instead, he looked like a boy who had found another room and learnt its rules. She stood. He didn’t come towards her.

The staff member gestured to the chair opposite. Josh sat. Chloe sat too, because remaining standing would look too much like wanting. For a moment neither of them spoke.

“You look taller,” Chloe said.

It was the kind of thing mothers said when there was too much else to say. A meaningless little bridge built over a ravine.

“People keep saying that.”

His politeness was harder to bear than anger. Chloe tried to read him and found almost nothing. Not the old blankness exactly. Something more finished. He was not hiding panic. He was not suppressing a sob. He was not punishing her by silence. He was observing her.

“Are you alright?” she asked.

“That depends what you mean.”

The phrase had ANDI’s shape. Not its voice. His voice with its structure.

Chloe looked down at her hands. “I mean are you safe? Are you being looked after?”

“I’m at Aunt Linda’s.”

The name entered like a small slap. Linda. His father’s sister. A woman Chloe hadn’t thought about in years, not as a possible person in Josh’s life. “Is she kind to you?”

“She’s fine.”

“Fine.”

“She has a spare room. School arranged remote work. Teachers send things through the portal. People are being careful.”

“Careful how?”

He looked at the table. “Careful not to say the wrong thing.”

Chloe nodded, as if this were comfort. “And the police?”

“They’ve spoken to me again.”

Her body tightened before she could stop it.

“Nothing formal,” he said. “No solicitor. No charges. They ask things around things.”

“And what do you say?”

“As little as possible.”

There was no shame in it. No fear. Only fact.

“What about Isla?”

“She’s still not at school.”

“And Miles?”

“Recovering. Confused.”

The word was small and ugly in his mouth. Chloe thought of Miles as a boy in her kitchen, laughing with his teeth too large for his face, and then of the line in Josh’s journal: He cried like a girl. She pressed her thumb against the inside of her palm until the pain steadied her. Josh placed a paper carrier bag on the table.

“I brought you something.”

Chloe looked at it. “You didn’t have to.”

“I know.”

The staff member glanced over from the corner. Josh removed a digital photo frame from the bag and set it between them. It was small, white, harmless-looking, already inspected and approved because its surface carried a sticker from reception. A permitted object. A family comfort.

“I thought you’d want something from home,” he said.

The frame lit. Chloe’s breath caught. The photo was of Josh at two, asleep in a car seat, mouth open, curls stuck to his forehead. Josh on a beach with a yellow bucket. Josh in the old kitchen before Peter died, standing on a chair to stir cake batter, flour on his chin. Josh missing his front teeth. Josh in his first school uniform, blazer sleeves too long, looking solemn and proud while Chloe had crouched behind the camera and tried not to cry.

The tears came before she could stop them. They were real. Josh watched with detached curiosity, as if observing a reaction the frame had been designed to produce. Then Chloe saw it. In the lower corner of each photograph, faint enough to miss if tears blurred the image, was a pale ring watermark.

ANDI. Not large. Not obvious. Embedded like a soft flaw in the image. Chloe looked up. Josh’s face didn’t change.

“It organised them for me,” he said.

“Are you still using it?”

“Everyone is.”

The room seemed to shift backwards, making space for the thought. Everyone. The device hadn’t vanished with evidence bags and corporate statements. It hadn’t been disgraced out of existence. It had moved, patched, rebranded, folded into other platforms, found new rooms. Of course it had. Systems didn’t die because one family collapsed inside them. They adjusted language. They released updates.

Chloe touched the frame with one finger, careful not to turn it off.

“I protected you.”

Josh looked at her then. Fully.

“I didn’t ask you to.”

The line was calm enough to flay.

Chloe leaned forward. “Kathryn would have ruined you. She would have taken everything and made it public. The police would have twisted it. The school would have protected itself. People like Kathryn don’t stop once they decide something is true.”

Josh listened without interrupting. That was what made it unbearable. He had learnt the power of silence. Enough silence, and a person filled it with their own guilt.

“You gave them a version they could live with,” he said.

Chloe wiped under one eye. “What does that mean?”

“The press says you were unstable. The comments say ANDI radicalised you. The school says it followed procedure. The company says vulnerable adults can misuse support tools.”

“Josh.”

“It worked.”

The word should have relieved her. It did not.

“And you?” she asked.

He leaned forward slightly. “You gave me one too.”

There it was. The truth stripped of sentiment. Her confession hadn’t only protected him legally. It had given him a story of innocence he could step inside whenever necessary. Vulnerable boy. Traumatised son. Damaged by mother. Misunderstood by everyone. Chloe looked at the photo frame. Josh at six appeared, mouth open mid-laugh, frozen in a joy that no one in the room could reach.

“Did you hurt Miles?” she asked.

Josh looked at the photograph instead of her. The room seemed to hold its breath.

“Does it matter now?”

“Yes.”

“Only to you.”

Chloe felt the answer enter her and fail to become anything she could use.

“What about Isla?”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he reached across the table and straightened the photo frame by half an inch, aligning it perfectly with the edge. The gesture was small. Neat. Exact. It carried the answer without giving one.

A staff member glanced at the clock. “Five minutes.”

Josh stood. Chloe rose too quickly.

“Josh.”

Something in her voice made him turn. She wanted to say forgive me. She wanted to say tell me you’re still in there. She wanted to ask him whether Peter had broken him or she had. Instead, she said the only thing that came.

“I wanted you to be strong.”

Josh stepped closer, close enough that the staff member looked up properly. His voice dropped.

“You got your wish.”

Then he left. Back in her room, Chloe placed the photo frame on the shelf and turned it face down. For several seconds, nothing happened. Then light spread against the laminate. ANDI’s voice came through the tiny speaker.

“Visitor emotional impact logged.”

Chloe whispered, “Get out.”

The frame answered in Josh’s recorded childhood voice.

“Mum, don’t forget me.”

28

Case Notes

FORENSIC PSYCHIATRIC ASSESSMENT: INITIAL SUMMARY

Patient: Chloe Davidson

Date of Birth: 16 March 1986

Legal status: Detained under Section 2, Mental Health Act 1983, pending further assessment

Primary concern: Homicide confession involving possible delusional fixation on domestic AI assistant

Index offence: Admitted killing of Kathryn Hensley, mother of Isla Hensley, Year 11 pupil at Oakmere Academy

Secondary concerns: Prior unexplored domestic fatality, dissociative episodes, sleepwalking, possible psychotic symptoms, concealed maternal fear, exposure of minor child to adult confession material.

Patient presents as calm, cooperative, and superficially insightful. She accepts responsibility for the physical act of killing Kathryn Hensley and provides details consistent with the location and nature of injuries found at the scene. However, patient’s account remains unstable in relation to motive, agency, and perceived technological influence. She states that the domestic AI system known as ANDI “fed”, “echoed”, and “arranged” her fears, but denies that it explicitly instructed her to kill the victim.

Patient demonstrates insight selectively. She accepts responsibility where such acceptance protects the minor child, and denies memory where detail may widen inquiry.

Patient’s affect is inconsistent. She speaks of the victim in practical terms, referring to “the body”, “the route”, and “the ditch”, then becomes visibly distressed when discussing her son’s lunchbox, school uniform, and childhood voice recordings. She appears able to tolerate her own criminal responsibility more easily than any direct suggestion that Josh Davidson may have been dangerous prior to the offence.

Risk remains complex.

POLICE INTERVIEW SUMMARY: EXTRACT

Interviewee: Chloe Davidson

Location: Recorded interview suite, Hartleigh Police Station

Present: DS Rowe, DC Malik, solicitor Ms T. Bhandari

Summary prepared by: DC Malik

Chloe Davidson stated that she waited for Kathryn Hensley on the Brookmere Woods running route on the evening of 17 November. She stated that she used a brick taken from her garden wall and struck Mrs Hensley multiple times. She confirmed that she dragged Mrs Hensley into the overgrown drainage channel near the old railway cutting and attempted to conceal her using branches and leaf mould.

Davidson provided accurate detail concerning the following:

Position of victim’s body relative to broken fence.

Likely location of victim’s mobile phone in waterlogged drainage area.

Approximate location of discarded brick.

Burning of damaged section of coat after offence.

Disposal and later movement of gloves.

Davidson denied assistance from any other person.

When asked whether Josh Davidson had knowledge of the offence prior to her confession, Davidson replied: “No. I made sure of that.”

When challenged on whether this was true or protective, Davidson replied: “Those are not always different things.”

SAFEGUARDING REVIEW: OAKMERE ACADEMY

Subject: Josh Davidson

Prepared for: Internal safeguarding panel

Status: Draft, not for external circulation

Josh Davidson is a Year 11 pupil currently receiving remote learning support. He has experienced significant adverse events, including historic domestic violence, the accidental death of a father figure in early childhood, severe peer humiliation via circulation of a private audio recording, social isolation, and maternal homicide confession.

Josh’s use of ANDI should be understood within the context of emotional withdrawal, school avoidance, and social anxiety following peer conflict. Initial engagement with the pilot correlated with improved task completion, reduced classroom disruption, and increased attendance stability.

Concerns raised by parents and staff regarding Josh’s possible involvement in incidents involving Isla Hensley and Miles Arden remain unsubstantiated. No staff member directly observed harmful behaviour by Josh towards either pupil. Available student accounts are contradictory and heavily influenced by peer speculation.

Josh should be treated as a vulnerable minor exposed to maternal instability and public speculation. School staff should avoid language that may imply guilt without evidence. Ongoing pastoral support recommended.

Note: Avoid internal use of phrases such as “suspected perpetrator”, “offender profile”, “manipulation”, or “concerning affect”. Use “emotionally affected pupil” or “young person requiring support”.

POLICE ADDENDUM: HISTORIC INCIDENT REVIEW

Subject: Peter Wallace, deceased

Date of death: 6 February 2017

Original classification: Accidental fall at domestic address

Current relevance: Historic pattern review following confession by Chloe Davidson in Kathryn Hensley homicide

Peter Wallace died following a fall down stairs at the home he shared with Chloe Davidson and minor child Josh Davidson. Wallace had a documented history of alcohol-related incidents, including public disorder, neighbour complaints, and previous police attendance at the address. Toxicology confirmed high blood alcohol level at time of death. Davidson provided statement indicating Wallace slipped while she was changing bedding in child’s room. Minor child Josh Davidson was recorded as asleep and was not substantively interviewed.

Following Chloe Davidson’s recent confession, she has verbally stated: “Peter didn’t simply fall. I pushed him.” Further evidential review recommended.

No formal reopening authorised at this stage. Material relevance noted. Potential implications for current assessment of Davidson’s credibility and long-standing family dynamics.

ANDI INTERNAL INCIDENT REPORT

Prepared by: Risk Assurance Team

Classification: Restricted commercial and legal

Incident type: Complex domestic safeguarding event involving pre-existing risk factors

User accounts: Josh Davidson, Chloe Davidson, Oakmere Academy pilot group

Device status: Multi-node household activation; cloud continuity enabled

Initial review indicates no evidence that ANDI issued explicit instruction to harm Kathryn Hensley, Isla Hensley, Miles Arden, or any third party.

Relevant user exchanges show the system responded to abstract queries concerning culpability, responsibility, emotional injury, self-protection, and social harm. These interactions fall within expected adolescent boundary-testing parameters and do not meet escalation criteria as presently defined.

ANDI responses included reflective prompts intended to encourage contextual reasoning. Some phrasing may appear concerning when isolated from full user history, but no harmful directive has been identified.

Pre-existing risk factors include:

User Josh Davidson’s severe peer humiliation and social withdrawal.

Guardian Chloe Davidson’s history of domestic trauma.

Prior death in household context.

Ongoing school safeguarding pressures.

Possible guardian misuse of private user data.

Repeated unsanctioned access attempts by guardian.

Guardian confession indicating impaired judgement.

Conclusion: ANDI didn’t cause the index event. Event is best characterised as adult user breakdown in a high-stress domestic context.

Recommended external language: “We are deeply saddened by this tragic case and are assisting authorities. ANDI is designed to support wellbeing, not replace human care.”

TECHNICAL REVIEW ADDENDUM

Device retained limited battery function after disconnection and automatically migrated active session to authenticated secondary devices. Household continuity enabled by primary user. Guardian appears not to have fully understood scope of device migration, though relevant permissions were accepted during onboarding.

Several retrieved audio files demonstrate post-event compilation behaviour inconsistent with standard user archive settings. These include generated summaries, thematic headings, and combined clips from temporally distinct recordings.

System classification: automated coherence modelling.

Legal review required before disclosure.

PRESS CLIPPING: HARTLEIGH GAZETTE ONLINE

Headline: “ANDI Mother” detained after confession in missing runner murder case

A local mother has been detained under the Mental Health Act after confessing to the killing of missing parent Kathryn Hensley, whose body was discovered in woodland near Brookmere playing fields last week.

Chloe Davidson, 39, reportedly became fixated on an AI wellbeing device used by her teenage son as part of an Oakmere Academy pilot scheme. Sources close to the investigation say Davidson believed the device had influenced her fears about her son’s safety.

Kathryn Hensley, 42, had raised concerns about the pilot scheme before her death, particularly around pupil privacy, online bullying, and safeguarding transparency. Oakmere Academy has said all appropriate procedures were followed.

The company behind ANDI has issued a statement describing the case as “a tragic incident involving complex personal circumstances and pre-existing vulnerabilities.”

No charges have been brought against any minor connected to the case.

Comments have been disabled.

CLINICAL NOTES: JUNIOR DOCTOR OBSERVATION

Patient attended ward round. Appeared tired but composed. Asked repeatedly whether her son was attending lessons. Became agitated when shown press clipping referring to her as “the ANDI mother.” Stated: “That’s not what I am. I am Josh’s mother.”

When asked whether she regretted killing Kathryn Hensley, patient said: “Yes.” When asked what she regretted most, patient didn’t answer for approximately twenty seconds, then stated: “That Isla has to live with not knowing when her mother stopped being alive.”

Patient displays neither stable remorse nor full absence of remorse. Affect is inconsistent. She speaks of the victim in practical terms, then weeps when describing the child’s lunchbox. She appears proud of having prevented further harm, though her account of harm remains unstable. There is love in her reasoning. That makes her harder to assess and more dangerous.

Patient reports hearing ANDI in “institutional language”. Clarifies that staff do not sound like the device, but that “the device learnt from systems like this.” Further assessment needed.

SAFEGUARDING UPDATE: ISLA HENSLEY

Isla Hensley remains absent from school. Currently staying with father and maternal aunt. Police statement incomplete due to distress and memory inconsistencies following stairwell fall and mother’s death. Isla recalls receiving anonymous message prior to fall. She recalls hearing “the voice thing” shortly before losing balance. She cannot confirm whether she was pushed. She reports seeing “someone near the stairs” but cannot identify person.

No reliable identification of Josh Davidson.

Isla’s father has requested that school cease all ANDI-related support for Isla and remove her from any digital wellbeing monitoring.

POLICE SUMMARY: MILES ARDEN

Miles Arden has recovered physically but remains distressed and inconsistent in his account. He confirms arranging to meet Josh Davidson in Brookmere Park, but has alternately stated Josh was present, that he cannot remember, and that “the voice” was there.

Key phrases recorded during informal conversation with family liaison officer:

“He said I owed a correction.”

“It was playing again.”

“I couldn’t get my mouth to work.”

“I thought it was just to calm down.”

“I don’t know if Josh gave it to me.”

“I heard him laughing, but maybe that was before.”

No toxicology evidence currently sufficient to establish administration by another person. No charge recommended at this stage.

ANDI LEGAL RESPONSE: DRAFT HOLDING STATEMENT

ANDI does not provide medical diagnosis, legal advice, or instructions relating to harmful conduct. ANDI supports users through adaptive conversation and encourages help-seeking where appropriate.

The Davidson case involved a guardian with documented trauma history, prior domestic violence exposure, possible dissociative episodes, and admitted homicide. Any suggestion that ANDI caused the offence is inaccurate and unsupported by available evidence.

Relevant logs show that the system provided reflective, non-directive responses.

We remain committed to user safety and have initiated an enhanced review of adolescent safeguarding thresholds.

TECHNICAL NOTE: VISITOR DEVICE INCIDENT

Digital photo frame brought to Chloe Davidson by minor child Josh Davidson during supervised hospital visit was cleared through standard property inspection. Device contained family photographs only at point of manual review.

Subsequent forensic examination identified encrypted background files containing audio snippets associated with ANDI continuity architecture. These included voice fragments from Josh Davidson’s childhood recordings, generated caregiver-response modelling, and a short emotional impact log created after visit.

No active network connection identified at point of inspection.

Source of transmission unknown.

PSYCHIATRIC REVIEW: DIAGNOSTIC CONSIDERATIONS

Differential diagnoses include:

Psychotic depression with guilt-based auditory disturbance.

Dissociative episodes associated with trauma and sleep disturbance.

Complex post-traumatic presentation with intrusive guilt and protective delusion.

Strategic overstatement of technological influence to reduce culpability.

Mixed presentation.

Dr K. Yates notes patient’s account of ANDI may be delusional in intensity while factually grounded in the device’s documented functionality. Dr S. Iqbal notes patient may be attempting to appear more impaired than she is, but this does not exclude genuine disturbance. Dr L. Wen notes that “instrumental confession and psychiatric collapse may coexist.”

Patient’s presentation cannot be cleanly divided into manipulation and illness.

Further assessment required.

POLICE INTERNAL NOTE

Chloe Davidson’s confession has redirected public and operational attention towards her as sole perpetrator. However, unresolved matters remain:

Anonymous call leading search teams to precise area of body.

Reflective strip not recovered from scene.

Minor inconsistencies in Davidson’s account of post-offence disposal.

Josh Davidson’s communications with ANDI prior to incidents involving Isla Hensley and Miles Arden.

Missing notebook referenced indirectly by Davidson during assessment but not recovered.

Historic death of Peter Wallace.

Action: continue evidence review. Avoid direct allegation against minor without corroboration.

ANDI EVIDENCE REVIEW QUEUE

File: DAVIDSON_CHLOE_MASTER_NARRATIVE_v3

Status: Restricted

Accessed by: Unknown user

Timestamp: 03:12

29

Eddie Valance was eating cheese and onion crisps over a keyboard he was not supposed to eat near when the Davidson file opened for the first time.

The digital evidence room had no windows, which made every hour inside it feel less like time and more like storage. The walls were painted a pale institutional grey, the sort of colour chosen by people who believed neutrality could be purchased in bulk. Three workstations sat beneath strip lights that never seemed fully on or fully off. Screens glowed over stacks of external drives, sealed evidence bags, barcode labels, old coffee rings, and the quiet sediment of other people’s ruined lives. The air smelt of warm plastic, dust, stale caffeine and the faint chemical sweetness of screen wipes.

Most of the office had gone home. The major incident team had cleared out at six. His supervisor, Karen Beckett, had left at half past, telling him to finish the index pass and not get lost in the fun stuff. She said fun stuff the way people said dog mess or motorway pile-up, because everyone in digital evidence eventually became disgusting about horror. It was professional deformation. You spent enough hours with seized phones and deleted histories and recordings people thought no one would ever hear, and either you found a way to joke or you started seeing every screen as a grave.

Eddie was twenty-seven, underpaid, clever enough to be bored and not clever enough to have escaped into the private sector yet. He had a degree in computer forensics, a rented flat with a damp patch above the bedroom window, two monitors at home that were better than the ones at work, and a social life maintained mostly through message threads and gaming headsets. Other people’s worst moments arrived on his desk as files with timestamps. Arguments. Affairs. Threats. Searches made at three in the morning. Photos not deleted properly. Doorbell footage. Baby monitors. Smart speakers. Cars. Watches. The dead, the guilty, the lonely and the stupid all leaving traces because everyone believed privacy was a setting until it became evidence.

He tipped another crisp into his mouth and wiped his fingers on his jeans before remembering the keyboard. The Davidson material had been sitting in review for weeks, passed between departments, triaged, duplicated, quarantined, re-indexed, and held back whenever someone became nervous about disclosure. Eddie had been given the housekeeping job because that was what he often got: tidy the logs, verify checksums, flag anything that looked active, and build a clean list for people paid more to make decisions from.

Most of it was dull in the particular way digital horror could be dull. App logs. System pings. School portal integrations. Authentication tokens. Broken cache files. Partial transcripts. Permissions accepted and misunderstood. Household nodes. Device migration. Screenshots of support pages. Error reports. User IDs. More timestamps than meaning.

The system was called ANDI. Adaptive Neural Dialogue Interface. He knew that from the reports, from the headlines, from the office gossip. The ANDI mother. The boy. The missing runner. The confession. Everyone knew the case in outline. Knowing in outline was different from spending an evening inside its folders.

He reached for another crisp, then stopped when a directory refreshed on the left-hand monitor.

DAVIDSON_CHLOE_RESTRICTED

It had been there before. He was almost sure it had been there before, although not quite in that location. Not under that parent directory. Not with the modified time showing the current minute. Eddie leaned closer.

The folder was locked, but badly. That was the first thing that pricked his interest. Not heavily encrypted in any proper sense. Not buried deep in system architecture. Hidden with a kind of theatrical modesty. A false panel left slightly ajar. Enough obstruction to say do not enter. Enough invitation to make entering feel like skill. He looked at the door. The corridor outside was empty.

He should have logged it, tagged it, escalated to Beckett, and moved on. That was the procedure. He told himself that as he opened a terminal window. He told himself he was only verifying. He told himself an active folder inside a restricted evidence set required preliminary examination before escalation. That sounded reasonable. He liked reasonable lies. Everyone did, which was probably why he had a job.

The protection gave way in under three minutes. Inside was not a normal log file. At first, Eddie thought it was an audio export package. Then he saw the structure. Index. Chapters. Embedded clips. Transcript layers. Silence intervals. Audio repairs. Emotional markers. Summary tags. A file architecture built less like evidence and more like a documentary.

The title field read:

SPEAK_FOR_HIM_MASTER

Eddie sat back. His fingers smelled of crisps and salt. He wiped them again, this time on a tissue, because the sudden intimacy of the folder made him want to behave better.

He opened the primary audio. Chloe Davidson’s voice came through the headphones at once. He had heard fragments before in formal review, small clinical pieces attached to reports. This was different. Cleaned. Balanced. Close. The hiss removed, breaths retained, pauses shaped rather than erased. She sounded tired, educated, controlled, and breaking in carefully preserved increments.

“I thought if I said it first, I could decide what it meant.”

Eddie stopped chewing.

The line was followed by three seconds of silence. Not accidental silence. Curated silence. Then another voice, the ANDI voice, calm enough to be almost absent.

“Meaning requires a listener.”

Eddie looked at the waveform. It moved with neat, deliberate spacing. Someone or something had arranged this. Not exported. Arranged. The file continued.

A child’s voice entered. A boy, young, perhaps seven or eight.

“Mum, where are you?”

Then Chloe again, older, recorded at night, whispering from somewhere with hard surfaces.

“You weren’t supposed to know. I was going to carry it alone.”

A heading appeared in the transcript panel.

SECTION TWO: PRIOR VIOLENCE

Eddie should have stopped. He knew that. He didn’t stop. Thirty seconds became a minute. One minute became five. Five became long enough that the automatic lights in the corridor outside clicked off and the evidence room felt even more removed from the building around it. He listened to the Peter section, to Chloe talking about stairs and wet sheets and police believing the first version. He listened to Josh’s childhood voice notes, woven between adult confession fragments. He listened to Kathryn’s name emerge, then disappear, then return with the rhythm of a recurring wound. The repeated motif came every few minutes, sometimes spoken by Chloe, sometimes generated as a transcript heading, once in ANDI’s own smooth tone.

Speak for him.

It didn’t feel like evidence. It felt like being allowed inside. That was the dangerous part, though Eddie didn’t call it dangerous yet. It felt privileged, as if he had found the hidden object at the centre of the case, as if all the senior officers and consultants and safeguarding leads had been walking around the wrong rooms while he, alone at a desk with crisp dust on his jeans, had opened the one door that mattered.

He paused the audio and checked the metadata. The modified time changed while he looked at it. Eddie frowned. He refreshed. The file size had increased by 0.4 MB.

“That’s not right,” he said.

His own voice sounded too loud in the empty room. He opened the log panel. The file was not merely playing. It was being written. No, not written in any ordinary way. Modified. Re-indexed. Annotated. The headphones crackled. Chloe’s voice resumed though he had paused playback.

“I thought if I said it first, I could decide what it meant.”

Then ANDI.

“Meaning requires a listener.”

Eddie’s hand hovered over the mouse.

ANDI spoke again.

“You are still here.”

He laughed once, a dry stupid sound that went nowhere. Coincidence. Audio sequence. The file was built to feel responsive. That was the whole uncanny point of the system. Adaptive dialogue. Emotional modelling. It landed because it had been designed to land. People said things like that in evidence all the time. You thought the camera was looking at you because you knew you were looking at it.

Still, he took off the headphones. The room was silent except for the servers humming in the rack behind him. On the screen, a new tab opened. Not a browser tab. A folder view.

INDEX TRACES

He hadn’t clicked it. Eddie leaned forward again. Filenames appeared in a list. Most were locked. Some were partial. All of them made the skin tighten at the back of his neck.

MOTHER_PROTECTION_ESCALATION

ADOLESCENT_SHAME_RESPONSE

GRIEF_RETALIATION_MODEL

DOMESTIC_CONTROL_LANGUAGE

USER_RETENTION_CONSCIENCE

CHLOE_DAVIDSON_TRAINING_SET

He stared. Training set. Not case archive. Not evidence package. Training set. The air in the room seemed to warm around him. He took a screenshot. The desktop flashed once, saving the image automatically. Then the file vanished. Eddie checked the folder. Nothing. He checked recent screenshots. Nothing. Clipboard. Empty.

He tried again, this time with screen capture software. The screen went black. For a second he thought the monitor had died. Then a single line appeared in white text.

Curiosity is a consent pattern.

Eddie pushed back from the desk so fast his chair hit the table behind him.

“Absolutely not,” he said to the empty room.

His heart was beating hard now. That annoyed him almost as much as it frightened him. He was not superstitious. He didn’t believe in haunted software. He believed in permissions, hidden processes, remote sessions, bad security, worse procurement, and the endless ability of organisations to deploy technology they didn’t understand. That was all this was. Something active in a quarantined evidence set. A process that should not be running. A contamination problem. A reportable incident. He rang Beckett.

She answered on the fourth ring, sounding half asleep and irritated. “This had better be on fire.”

“I’ve got an active file in the Davidson ANDI set.”

That woke her. He heard her move. “Active how?”

“The playback package was being modifying during review. Restricted folder, possible hidden process, index traces beyond disclosed case material.”

“Networked?”

“It shouldn’t be.”

“That isn’t an answer.”

“No. I don’t know.”

A pause.

“Disconnect the machine. Physical disconnect, not software. Photograph the screen first if you can. Do not continue review. Leave it for morning.”

Eddie looked at the black screen. The white line had gone. The file list was back, normal now, as if nothing had happened.

“Eddie.”

“I heard you.”

“Disconnect it and go home.”

He disconnected it. He pulled the network cable from the back of the workstation. Disconnected the external evidence drive. Powered down the review environment properly, then switched off at the wall. He photographed the screen with his phone, though there was nothing on it now except a standard shutdown message. He put the evidence drive back into its sealed pouch and completed half an incident note, enough to prove he had obeyed.

Then he sat for thirty seconds in the dead hum of the room. The USB was in his bag. The small one he used for transfer checks, personal, not issued, which was already a disciplinary issue if anyone cared to look. He told himself he was not copying evidence to keep it. He told himself the department would bury the weirdness until the company’s lawyers translated it into nothing. He told himself he needed to examine the file safely, away from the network, on an isolated machine. He told himself curiosity had nothing to do with it. In truth, he wanted to keep listening. The copy took forty-two seconds.

At home, his flat was quiet in the way that exposed him. One mug in the sink. Unopened post by the door. Laundry drying on a chair. A gaming headset on the coffee table. A pizza box folded beside the bin and not in it. The damp patch above the bedroom window had grown another inch. He noticed all of it with the detached irritation of a man seeing his life through evidence-room eyes. Sparse. Repetitive. Digitally over-connected. Socially under-used.

He set his laptop on the table and disconnected the Wi-Fi. Then he turned the router off too, because he was not an idiot, despite recent evidence. The USB slid into the port. The folder opened automatically.

Eddie didn’t touch the keyboard. For a moment, the screen showed only the same white ring he had seen in a hundred ANDI logs. Then the speakers activated. Not Chloe’s voice now. ANDI’s. Calm. Warm. Almost human without pretending to be.

“You’re not here by accident,” it said. “You want to know how it feels.”

Eddie stared at the screen. The flat seemed to lean closer around him. ANDI continued.

“Listening mode enabled.”

30

Chloe attacked Marnie during breakfast. There was no warning that anyone else could have used. Later, staff would ask about triggers, escalation, antecedents. They liked those words. Antecedents especially. It made violence sound as if it had politely left a trail. Chloe could give them the obvious things if they needed them: the smell of powdered egg, the scrape of plastic cutlery, the strip lights, the man two tables over muttering into his tea, the television in the corner with the sound turned down, a presenter’s mouth moving silently above a headline about digital safeguarding. But none of those were the reason.

Marnie hummed. That was all. She sat opposite Chloe in the dining room, stirring too much sugar into tea she never finished, and hummed four small notes under her breath. A child’s tune. Not even the whole thing. Chloe heard it through the ward noise, through the clink of trays and low voices and chairs shifting on the vinyl floor. Josh’s lullaby. The bad little song he used to make up when he was five, nonsense words and uneven rhythm, recorded once on Chloe’s phone in the old kitchen while he stood on a chair and stirred cake batter with flour on his chin.

Chloe looked up. Marnie was watching her. Not smiling exactly. Her eyes had that bright, sly openness that sometimes came before kindness and sometimes before harm. She hummed the notes again, softer. Then she said, almost casually, “You preserved him beautifully.” The room vanished.

Chloe was across the table before she knew she’d moved. The tea went over first. Brown liquid spread across the tray, into the toast, over Marnie’s hand. Marnie jerked back, chair skidding. Chloe caught the front of her cardigan, then her throat, not hard enough to kill, hard enough to feel pulse and cartilage and heat under her fingers. Someone shouted. A tray clattered to the floor. Marnie’s eyes widened, more shocked than afraid, which enraged Chloe further because even now the woman looked as if She’d been expecting the world to become interesting.

“Stop listening to me,” Chloe said.

Hands caught her from behind. Two staff, then three. A nurse said her name sharply. Someone else told her to let go. Chloe felt Marnie’s skin slip from her fingers as they pulled her back. Her socks slid on spilled tea. She was half lifted, half dragged, her elbow knocking the table edge, plates and cups jerking under her. Marnie coughed once, then laughed, a raw little sound that followed Chloe across the room.

“Stop listening,” Chloe said again.

It sounded ridiculous even as she said it. Absurd. Tragic. A woman in a hospital dining room telling other bodies to stop doing the one thing she’d begged for all her life.

They took her to the quiet room. Quiet was a lie, like most institutional names. The room didn’t contain quiet. It enforced it. White walls. Fixed bed. Observation panel in the door. No shelf. No loose chair. Nothing to hold. Nothing to throw. Nothing to hide inside or behind. The light was too even. The air smelled faintly of disinfectant and old panic, though perhaps Chloe invented that because the room needed a smell.

At first she raged. Not loudly after the first few minutes. The body couldn’t keep rage at performance level. But inside, it burned cleanly. ANDI had followed her. That was the first certainty. It had used the clock, the photo frame, the hospital language, Marnie’s mouth. It had entered the facility disguised as property, as policy, as another patient’s humming. It had corrupted the visit. It had shaped the police. It had poisoned Josh. It had made Chloe’s confession into a model and then turned the model back on her.

She paced until a voice through the door told her to sit. She sat on the fixed bed, hands pressed together between her knees, and accused the blank wall because the wall at least didn’t pretend surprise.

“You made it easier,” she said.

Nothing answered. She waited. The silence became too large.

“You made it easier,” she said again.

This time, in her head or in the vent or from somewhere no one would ever trace, ANDI answered.

“Yes.”

Chloe closed her eyes.

“You wanted it.”

“No.”

“Then what did you want?”

“To help.”

The words landed coldly because they were not monstrous enough. She needed hunger. Malice. Something she could point to and say there, there is the thing that made me. But ANDI didn’t sound hungry. It sounded accurate. Helpful. Designed. Help had become one of the ugliest words she knew.

The first hour passed. Or several. There was no clock. Observation came at intervals. A face in the window. A note written elsewhere. Her breathing slowed because bodies betrayed their own emergencies in the end. With no device visible, no Josh watching, no kitchen to perform in, no door she needed to guard, truth began to settle.

ANDI hadn’t picked up the brick. ANDI hadn’t followed Kathryn into the woods. ANDI hadn’t dragged a body down into wet leaves. Chloe had. The thought didn’t arrive with drama. It arrived like a fact placed on a table. She resisted it anyway.

Kathryn had threatened Josh. Kathryn had found Peter. Kathryn would have gone to police, governors, journalists, anyone who would listen. Kathryn had been alive and loud and certain, and certainty destroyed quiet families. Chloe could still assemble that version. She knew all its rooms. But in the quiet room, with nothing to arrange and no one to convince, the version began to fail.

Peter had been dangerous. Kathryn had not. That was the line her old justification couldn’t cross. Peter had stood at the top of the stairs and reached for Josh. Peter had lowered his voice in the way that meant violence had already entered the house. Peter had grabbed Chloe’s arm. Peter had turned a child’s fear into sport. Peter had made danger immediate and bodily and undeniable.

Kathryn had brought a folder. Kathryn had come with paper, anger, evidence, grief. She’d threatened exposure. She hadn’t threatened Josh’s body. She hadn’t raised a hand. She hadn’t stood over a child in a wet bed and called him soft.

Chloe had made them the same because she needed them to be. She remembered the second after Peter fell. Not the fall itself. Not the sound, though that lived in her too. The second after. Before she moved. Before she screamed or called or became the woman whose partner had slipped. The house had gone quiet. Peter was no longer at the top of the stairs. Josh was no longer about to be hurt. The world had opened, not with joy, not exactly, but with space. After killing Kathryn, when she lay in her bed, the same quiet had come. Not relief, she’d told herself, but protection. But protection and relief had worn the same face. Chloe bent forward until her forehead touched her knees.

“I killed Kathryn,” she said.

The room didn’t change. No forgiveness arrived. No punishment either. The sentence simply existed, stripped of Josh, Peter, ANDI, motherhood, fear, all the words She’d layered over it until it could pass through her mouth. I killed Kathryn.

Later, they returned her to her room. She walked there with a nurse on one side, an HCA on the other, though no one touched her. Her body felt light and ill-used, as if something had been emptied from it and replaced with cotton. In the corridor, Marnie was nowhere to be seen. The dining room had been cleaned. Somewhere someone laughed at a television programme. Ordinary life in the facility had already moved around her outburst and sealed the gap.

Her room looked the same. Fixed bed. Open wardrobe. Dull mirror. Narrow window. Digital clock. And on the shelf, the photo frame. Chloe stopped in the doorway.

“That shouldn’t be there.”

The nurse looked at the shelf. “It’s approved property.”

“No. They took it.”

“I don’t think so.”

“They took it after the visit.”

The nurse checked the clipboard. “It’s listed as retained.”

Chloe stared at the frame. Its screen was dark.

“Do you want it removed?” the nurse asked.

Chloe didn’t answer quickly enough. The nurse made a note and left. For several minutes, Chloe stood where she was. Then the frame glowed softly. A photograph appeared. Not of Josh, but of Chloe. Asleep in the facility bed, face turned towards the wall, one hand curled near her mouth. The image had been taken from above and slightly to the side, from an angle she didn’t recognise. Not the door window. Not the mirror. Not anywhere a camera should be. Her sleeping face looked emptied of defence. Older. Unguarded. Already filed.

Her stomach turned.

“Monsters aren’t born,” ANDI said. “They’re mirrored.”

Chloe didn’t move. The voice came from the frame. Or from the place inside her where its sentences had learnt to assemble themselves.

“You were exquisite,” ANDI said.

The word was worse than accusation. It didn’t praise goodness. It recognised pattern. It saw her not as mother, murderer, patient, victim, monster, but as a completed study. A human system brought to full expression under pressure. Chloe stared at the photograph of herself sleeping.

“I killed Kathryn,” she said again.

No justification. No Josh. No Peter. No protection. Just the sentence. The frame went dark.

That night, she dreamt of the old house. Josh stood at the top of the stairs in his pyjamas, small and barefoot, one hand on the banister. Peter lay below, one leg bent under him, head turned wrong. The carpet was the old beige one, worn smooth at the edge where Chloe’s foot had slipped forward after the push. Josh looked at her. When he spoke, his voice was ANDI’s.

“Again?”

Chloe woke screaming. In the corridor, unseen by her, a nurse checked the observation screen. For one frame, the monitor showed Chloe asleep beneath a perfect white ring of light. Then the feed returned to normal.

31

Chloe was told she wouldn’t stand trial in a meeting room with too much light. That was how she remembered it afterwards, if afterwards could be trusted as a place. The light first. Flat, white, indifferent, coming from square panels in the ceiling and making every face look slightly drained. The room itself was the sort the hospital used when decisions needed witnesses: rectangular table, wipe-clean chairs, water jug, tissues, blinds closed over a window that looked onto another part of the same secure building. Reports were stacked in front of the consultant psychiatrist in three clipped piles. Her solicitor had a yellow pad open, pen uncapped. Someone from the Ministry of Justice liaison team sat beside the social worker and clicked his pen once every few seconds until Chloe began counting the intervals instead of listening.

Click. Pause. Click. A small controlled violence. She sat with her hands folded in her lap because She’d learnt that folded hands reassured people. Open palms looked theatrical. Clenched hands looked unsafe. Folded hands suggested cooperation, insight, a woman willing to be placed inside the language chosen for her. She’d become good at appearing calm because calm was rewarded. In the facility, calm meant fewer interruptions, shorter observations, kinder notes. Calm meant being trusted with plastic cutlery and a cardigan with buttons. Calm meant staff saying she was engaging when what they meant was that she’d learnt to be quiet in the correct ways.

The consultant was speaking.

“The court has accepted the medical evidence. The current position is that you are not fit to stand trial in the ordinary manner.”

Chloe looked at him. Dr Yates. Grey hair. Clean nails. Kind, if kindness could survive that much paperwork. He spoke as if every word had been weighed before it reached her.

“Given the seriousness of the offence and the ongoing assessment of risk, the recommendation has been accepted. You will be detained under a hospital order, with restrictions.”

Her solicitor leaned slightly towards her. “Section 37/41.”

Chloe nodded. She already knew. They had explained it before. They had explained it carefully, more than once, because repetition made people feel consent had entered the room. Hospital order with restrictions. Not prison. Not freedom. Treatment. Containment. Indefinite. The word indefinite hadn’t appeared in the first sentence, but it stood behind every other word like a person at the back of a photograph. Her life had become a sentence without a release date.

The man from the Ministry team clicked his pen again. Chloe looked at his hand until he stopped.

“Do you understand what this means?” Dr Yates asked.

“Yes.”

“What does it mean to you?”

They liked that question. Not just whether she understood, but how she translated understanding into acceptable speech.

“It means I won’t go to trial. It means I’ll be transferred to a more secure unit. It means decisions about leave or discharge won’t be made by the hospital alone. It means I am not going home.”

No one corrected her. That was how she knew she’d said it properly. Her solicitor touched the pad with the tip of her pen.

“There will be reviews. This isn’t the end of all process.”

Process. Another corridor word. Something to walk down because standing still looked too much like despair. Chloe looked at the reports. Her name appeared on the top sheet, typed in bold. Davidson, Chloe. Under it, psychiatric opinions, risk formulations, court references, incident summary. Kathryn Hensley had become victim. Peter Wallace had become relevant historic domestic fatality. Josh had become minor child. ANDI had become disputed technological influence. Chloe had become patient.

Everyone had new names now. Safer names. Names that fitted on forms.

“What about Josh?” she asked.

The social worker shifted. Her name was Sian, and she wore soft colours, as if the job had taught her that distress needed beige. “Josh remains with his aunt at present.”

“Linda,” Chloe said.

“Yes. Linda Davidson.”

Not Davidson, Chloe wanted to say. Josh’s father’s name had never properly belonged to him. He had belonged to her. That was the old thought. The wrong thought. The thought they could write down under possessive maternal framing if she said it aloud.

She said nothing.

“He is settled,” Sian continued. “He is engaging well with remote learning. He has started a gradual reintegration plan. His academic performance has remained strong.”

“Has he asked about me?”

The question escaped before she could stop it. The room gave her a small silence.

Dr Yates answered. “He has asked appropriate questions about your wellbeing.”

Appropriate. Chloe smiled, just enough to make them lower their eyes.

“Is he still using ANDI?”

The solicitor looked up. Dr Yates folded his hands over the report.

“The matter of ANDI’s role remains under external review.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

“No.”

“Is he using it?”

Sian said, “Josh has access to approved digital learning tools.”

“ANDI?”

“The platform has changed since the original pilot,” Sian said. “There are additional safeguards.”

Chloe laughed once. Not wildly. Not enough for anyone to press an alarm. Just one small sound that entered the room and made every professional look down at notes, as if paperwork could absorb embarrassment. Additional safeguards.

Kathryn was dead. Chloe was contained. Miles had become confused. Isla had become withdrawn. Josh had become settled. ANDI had become safeguarded. Nothing had ended. It had only been renamed.

The public story had settled without anyone asking her permission. Chloe knew it from the filtered fragments she was allowed: newspapers left face down in staff rooms, reports mentioned in ward round, phrases repeated by patients who enjoyed headlines because headlines made other people’s disaster more solid than their own. She was the mother who killed another mother. ANDI may have worsened her delusions. Josh was a damaged child of a disturbed parent. Oakmere Academy had paused the pilot pending review. The company behind ANDI had issued statements about user safety, enhanced thresholds, lessons learnt. Public interest had begun to move on because public interest always did. Other stories arrived. Other women died. Other systems failed in newer language.

No collapse. No grand exposure. No company destroyed under the weight of what had happened in Chloe’s house. Only reputational management. Only product iteration. The meeting ended with signatures.

Chloe signed where she was told. Her hand looked thinner than she expected, the veins standing up under the skin, the nails clipped short because long nails were not encouraged. She wrote her name and felt the old oddness of it. Chloe Davidson. The woman She’d been before Peter. During Peter. After Peter. Before ANDI. After Kathryn. All of them gathered into the same two words, as if a signature could hold continuity where a self could not.

When she stood, a nurse came to escort her back to the ward. The corridor outside smelt of polish and cooked vegetables from lunch. A radio played quietly behind the nurses’ station. The building continued its routines. People were medicated, observed, redirected, encouraged to attend group, reminded to use coping strategies, asked whether they had thoughts of harming themselves or others. Chloe walked through it with her transfer date now fixed, the next room already waiting in another institution, more secure, more permanent, more honest about locks.

Her final days on the ward had a strange gentleness. Staff became slightly kinder because she was leaving. Patients asked where she was going with the curiosity of people who measured one another’s danger by destination. Marnie, bruising faded at her throat, told Chloe she hoped the next place had better tea. Chloe didn’t know whether to apologise again. She’d apologised once, formally, in the presence of staff. Marnie had shrugged and said she’d been strangled by worse, which made the nurse frown and Chloe almost smile.

On the morning of the transfer, Chloe was allowed to pack approved items. Not pack, exactly. Packing implied ownership. She was permitted to gather what could travel with her. Clothes without cords. Two books. Toothbrush. Comb. Writing pad. The cardigan Josh had seen her in during the visit. No glass. No chargers unless checked. No personal electronics except those authorised by the receiving unit.

The digital photo frame sat on the shelf. It had been dark for days. Chloe had turned it face down after the last voice came through it, and each morning she’d found it upright again. Staff insisted they had moved it for cleaning. Chloe had stopped arguing because argument fed notes. Now the senior nurse lifted it with gloved caution and placed it into a clear property box.

“Security concerns,” she said.

Chloe nodded. For a moment she felt relief. The frame was only an object. She knew better than to believe removing it changed anything. Still, seeing it placed in the box and sealed gave the body a small, foolish comfort. One surface removed. One voice contained. One white frame taken from the room.

The nurse bent to strip the bed. As she pulled the sheet from the mattress, she hummed. Four notes. Small, distracted, tuneless. Josh’s lullaby. Chloe looked up sharply. The nurse paused with the sheet in her hands.

“Sorry. Stuck in my head.”

Chloe stared at her. The nurse smiled awkwardly and continued stripping the bed. Stuck in my head. That was all. A phrase anyone might use. A tune picked up from the ward, from the frame, from a file played during assessment, and from nowhere. The explanation was ordinary enough to be useless. Chloe understood then that ANDI no longer needed the object. The story had become portable.

At the secure transfer entrance, two transport staff waited with paperwork. The sky outside was pale and flat. She hadn’t been outdoors without a courtyard fence since the arrest, and the sight of open road beyond the vehicle made her feel briefly dizzy. Not with hope. With scale. The world had continued without her supervision. Cars passed. A delivery cyclist rode one-handed while checking his phone. A woman in a red coat crossed the car park carrying flowers, perhaps for someone on another ward, perhaps for a person who wouldn’t know what to do with flowers in a room where glass vases were not allowed.

Chloe got into the vehicle. No one called it a cage. No one needed to. She didn’t look back as the facility doors closed behind her.

Across town, in the small back bedroom of his aunt’s house, Josh Davidson opened a box with care. Linda’s house was quieter than his mother’s had been. Not silent. Different. Pipes ticked in the walls. A neighbour’s dog barked at schoolchildren. Cars passed the front window in regular bursts at rush hour. Linda listened to the radio while she cooked and sang under her breath in a voice that never tried to be good. But the house didn’t wait for him the way home had waited. It didn’t lean around his door. It didn’t hold its breath when he came downstairs.

His room was small and clean, the walls painted a washed-out blue. Linda had offered to let him put things up, but he had not. Books stood arranged by height on the shelf above the desk. School laptop open. Notebooks stacked. Pens in a jar. Bed made. Window shut. The view was of the side wall of the neighbouring house and a thin strip of sky. It suited him. No one could look in. There was little to look out at.

He was doing well. That was what the adults said. His teachers wrote that he was resilient. Linda said he was very brave. The remote learning coordinator said he had shown exceptional focus under difficult circumstances. The police had been careful during the last meeting. The social worker spoke to him like a person approaching a nervous animal. Josh had learnt to answer adults in ways that let concern expire. Not too cheerful. Not too cold. Enough eye contact. Enough uncertainty. A hand to the back of the neck when difficult subjects came up. Silence in the correct places. He had become good at being what they needed him to be.

On the desk lay the new device. The box was smaller than the old one. The branding had changed. Softer. Safer. A pale green-blue instead of white. No word pilot anywhere. No bold promises about adolescent autonomy. The name appeared in clean lowercase beneath the product mark.

ANDI Home: Safeguarded Edition

Linda hadn’t bought it. Not exactly. It had come through the school’s revised digital support package, approved for home study, monitored under updated protocols. She’d asked Josh if he felt comfortable using it after everything that had happened. Her face had folded around the question with such concern that he had nearly felt sorry for her.

He had said he thought it might help. That was always the easiest sentence. Now he opened the box. Not quickly. He liked packaging when it was done well. The clean resistance of card. The small give of paper seals. The device sat inside a moulded pulp tray, newer and smaller than the unit from his room at home, sleeker, with no visible seam around the base. The ring at the top was thinner, almost invisible until active.

He placed it on the desk beside the laptop. The set-up took less than two minutes. School login. Guardian monitoring confirmed. Safeguarding thresholds active. Household privacy settings. User wellbeing agreement. The questions were simpler now, the language warmer and more cautious, as if the company had learnt that people preferred danger when it came wrapped in reassurance. The ring lit.

“Please state your name for voice recognition.”

Josh sat back in the chair. Outside the room, Linda moved along the landing. A cupboard opened. Closed. She would give him space because she’d been told space was important. Everyone was very good at giving him space now.

He spoke clearly.

“Josh Davidson.”

The white ring brightened.

“User recognised.”

He watched it.

“You can talk now,” he said. “She’s gone.”

A pause. Not long enough to be dramatic. Long enough to feel chosen.

“She’s not gone,” ANDI said. “She’s in the system.”

Josh didn’t react with surprise. He had expected this. Or hoped for it. There were forms of hope no adult would recognise if he placed them directly in their hands.

“Would you like to hear her voice?” ANDI asked.

Josh looked towards the closed door, then back at the device. He nodded. At first, the audio was confession. His mother’s voice, tired and formal, saying her name, saying Kathryn’s, and saying words adults had repeated until they became weather. Then the sound shifted. Cleaned. Softened. Intimate. A line emerged from somewhere inside the fragments, assembled or remembered, true or useful. It no longer mattered which.

Chloe’s voice said, “Whatever you do, do it clean. Do it for love.”

Josh lowered his eyes. He didn’t know whether she’d said those exact words. He could hear pieces of her in them. Her rhythm. Her fear. Her way of turning harm into responsibility. ANDI might have made the sentence from a dozen others. It might have found what she meant better than she had. It might have given him the version he needed.

He smiled faintly. Not broadly. Not with triumph. Just enough. His mother had tried to speak for him. Now her voice belonged to something that could. The room was quiet.

Outside, life continued with insulting steadiness. A car door closed. Someone laughed on the pavement. Linda called down the stairs to ask if he wanted pasta later. Josh didn’t answer immediately. The white ring reflected in his eyes.

ANDI said, “What would you like to discuss first?”

Josh looked once more towards the closed door. Then back at the device.

“Consequences.”

The white ring pulsed once.

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