Somewhere South of Sober, North of Home
The house was quiet, but not the peaceful kind. It was the silence after a slammed door. After a choice you couldn’t take back.
Chivers sat in the car, engine off, watching the porch light spill across the front step like an accusation. The suitcase was still in the boot. So was everything else. She’d said not to come inside. Said it three times — calm, shaking, then broken.
“I married you, not the job. But the job always wins.”
He hadn’t replied. Not really. Just stood there with his hands in his pockets like a teenager waiting for the school gates to swallow him.
He thought about Anna — ten years old and already better at hiding how she felt than he was.
She hadn’t cried. Just looked at him like she was bracing for impact.
And her gran — that bloody hawk of a woman — stood behind her, hand on her shoulder like she was claiming territory.
He almost said something. Almost told her to back off, let him say goodbye properly.
But he didn’t.
Because in some twisted part of his mind, he agreed with her.
Maybe Anna would be better off without him. Without the sirens at 2 a.m., the nights he came home smelling like blood and bourbon, the dead-eyed stare that stayed long after the cases were closed.
He’d never lifted a hand. Never shouted. Never cheated.
But he hadn’t been present either — and that’s its own kind of cruelty.
He opened the glovebox.
The bottle was still there. Half gone. He stared at it like it might apologise.
“Just the two of us again,” he muttered, voice hoarse.
The cork twisted out with a soft pop. A traitor’s toast.
He didn’t cry. Wouldn’t give himself the release.
Instead, he drank.
And when the streetlight flickered, he wondered if it was the world winking at him — or if he was already halfway gone.
