What Hayley Knows

POV: Imogen

Cooper's car smelled of pine and coffee. The twins had colonized the back seat without discussion or negotiation, the way they did everything. Declan had a window. Hayley always chose the seat where she could watch them both.

"Seat belts," Cooper said.

Declan groaned with his entire body. "They're already on."

Cooper checked the rearview mirror. "Humour me."

Declan tugged the buckle twice, hard enough that Imogen was briefly concerned for the buckle. "Satisfied?"

"Immensely."

Imogen looked out the passenger window before either of them could see her smile.

The drive to Silvercrest Academy took twelve minutes on a clear morning. The ocean flashed between houses in quick silver glimpses before vanishing again. Imogen watched the streets and kept her breathing even and did not think about Melbourne.

She was very practiced at that.

In the back, Declan had moved on from seat belts to volcanoes.

"When the pressure gets too big," he said seriously, "it has to come out."

"Or it explodes," Hayley said.

"That's what I said."

"You said it has to come out. That's different."

Declan frowned. "Mrs. Davies said they all explode eventually."

Hayley looked out her window. "She's talking about mountains."

"Volcanoes are mountains."

"Not all mountains are volcanoes."

A pause. "What's the difference?"

Hayley was quiet for a moment. "Sometimes people are volcanoes too," she said, almost to herself. "They look like mountains until they don't."

Imogen kept her eyes on the road ahead and said nothing.

Cooper drove with one hand on the wheel. Every so often he glanced at Imogen. She felt each one but noticed, somewhere around the third minute of the drive, that Hayley had gone quiet. Not the comfortable quiet of a child watching the world pass by. The careful quiet of a child holding an idea she hadn't decided what to do with yet.

Imogen had learned to tell the difference.

"You're quiet today," Cooper said, low enough to stay under any little ears still listening.

"I'm thinking."

"About?"

His jaw had that particular set it got when he was paying closer attention than he appeared to. "The usual," she said.

The usual changed week to week but always circled the same fear. Someone noticing Declan's strength. A teacher making an innocent comment that lingered too long. Another parent asking questions that started casually and didn't end that way. Fear had become less like panic and more like housekeeping. Constant. Ordinary. Always another problem waiting to be dealt with.

She refused to follow that thought any further.

Her phone had been sitting on the kitchen counter when she checked the news that morning before the twins woke. Third item on the feed. A brief business piece, barely two paragraphs, about the Nightshade Pack's latest Melbourne property acquisition.

The article hadn't even been important. A commercial development. Another hotel. Another acquisition. Just business, the kind of thing that crossed her screen and meant nothing.

Except his photograph had sat beside the headline. Older than she remembered. Sharper. The same grey eyes that looked back at her every morning from two small faces.

She hadn't opened the article. She hadn't needed to.

She had scrolled past it with her face perfectly blank. Then she had made the twins' lunches and convinced herself she hadn't thought about Lachlan once all morning.

Which was why she had now thought about him three times.

The academy appeared ahead, and Cooper pulled into the car park. Declan unclipped his belt before the car fully stopped. Imogen reached for her bag.

Hayley's hand closed around her fingers.

She turned.

Her daughter wasn't looking at the school or the other children streaming past the windows. She was looking only at Imogen. She rubbed her thumb slowly across the back of Imogen's hand. Once. Twice. She always did that when she was trying to find the right words, not because she didn't know them, but because she already knew exactly how much they would hurt.

"Mummy," barely a whisper. "I had the dream again."

The car park noise pulled away. Cooper went still in the front seat. He didn't ask questions. He never did when Hayley used that voice. He had learned long ago that some things in this family were better believed first and explained later.

"Which dream?" Imogen asked.

Hayley's fingers tightened once.

"The big dark wolf," she said. "He's coming."

The cold hit so fast it stole her breath.

The first dream had come three months ago. Hayley had described the same wolf, same eyes, and same quiet certainty that he was on his way. Imogen had told herself it was imagination, the kind of vivid dreaming that empathic children were prone to.

She hadn't slept properly since.

Five years of distance. Five years of silence and careful daily effort and mornings exactly like this one, small and ordinary and safe.

Hayley's dreams were never wrong.

Cooper was watching her now, reading her face. She couldn't get her expression back fast enough.

Hayley just waited, holding her hand, the way she always did when she had delivered words that couldn't be taken back.

And at the edge of Imogen's thoughts, a dark SUV moved slowly along her street.