The chopping board clatters onto the kitchen bench. Elise lines up two carrots and dices them as loudly as she can. They’re bendy, and the zucchini is soft. When Constable Vickers was told to bring food, maybe she raided her own fridge and selected the things she was on the verge of binning.
Elise has no appetite. The smell of death still lingers in the house. But she’s not going to give Kiara another excuse to complain. If they’re hungry on the drive home, it’s not going to be Elise’s fault. She’s perfectly capable of roasting vegetables. She can do all sorts of things by herself.
Kiara is in the bedroom, thumping and rustling, packing all the things Elise refused to pack for her. She scrapes the carrot slices onto a tray lined with baking paper, then gets to work on grating the zucchini.
When did things go wrong? Elise can’t pin it down to one moment. A week ago she was sure she wanted to be with Kiara forever. An hour spent without her was an hour wasted. Bad shifts were made bearable by the thought that she could tell Kiara about them on the weekend. But now it feels like nothing she does is good enough. Kiara thinks she’s irrational, emotional, unreliable.
They love each other. So why does it feel like she’s walking upwards on an escalator that’s going the other way?
Elise dumps some wedges of red onion on the tray and splashes too much canola oil over them. She works the pepper grinder as though wringing a chicken’s neck. Is it too much to ask, she wonders, to be given the benefit of the doubt? When she says or does something that can be interpreted a number of ways, couldn’t Kiara choose the one that doesn’t piss her off?
The kettle boils, and she pours the water into a saucepan. Then she realises she hasn’t preheated the oven.
That’s the worst part of all of this: Kiara is right. Elise is unreliable. She says things without thinking. She ruins the mood with dark comments. She can’t even cook a basic dinner without screwing up.
Blinking back angry tears, she twists the temperature knob. A light clicks on inside the oven, but something blocks most of it out—a dark cloud on the inside of the glass.
Frowning, Elise pulls the door open.
A ghastly smell erupts from the oven and hundreds of flies boil out. A few are sucked up into the extractor fan, while others bounce off her skin and crawl through her hair, up her sleeves, down her collar, into her nose. She screams, and the flies fill her mouth, buzzing like live wires against her tongue.
She staggers backwards, flailing and choking, as Isla Madden’s body rolls out of the oven and tumbles to the floor.