Fragile Lives by Jane A. Adams

tentatively.
    â€˜I’ve heard anything about Karen? No, sorry, George.’
    â€˜Well, I guess that’s a good thing in a way.’
    Mac drank his tea. ‘Homework?’
    â€˜Unfortunately. I’m
waaay
behind with everything. I’ll never catch up.’
    â€˜You know what might be the best thing to do,’ Mac suggested.
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜Make sure you don’t get any further behind. I mean, do the stuff that the rest of your class is doing now, then catch up the rest just a little bit at a time. You’ll probably find that trying to get to grips with the current stuff will point out which other parts you really don’t know. Start by catching up with those. If you try to do the whole lot in one go, you’ll just feel like you’re drowning and get nowhere fast.’
    George nodded slowly. That did make a kind of sense. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Is that what you do?’
    â€˜It is. You know, before I came here I’d had six months off work. Off sick. I’m still figuring out how things work round here, but I found if I focused on the job in hand and then filled in the gaps that showed up … well, it helped.’
    â€˜Why were you off sick?’ Ursula asked, surprising them both.
    Mac hesitated. These were just kids, he thought. Then he reminded himself that George was a kid who’d already coped with more than most adults twice or three times his age and there was something about Ursula that told him she was in pretty much the same boat. Besides, all they had to do was Google his name to find out and Mac figured that was exactly the kind of thing that Ursula would think of.
    â€˜I was working on a kidnap case,’ he said. ‘The little girl was six years old. Her abductor killed her and I was there but I could do nothing to stop him – and then I made a bad call. I went to her instead of chasing him. Back-up arrived only minutes later but he was gone and he’s still out there. I failed.’ Cold facts, pared down. No less painful for the lack of elaboration.
    â€˜So you fell apart?’ Ursula said.
    â€˜I did, yes.’
    She turned her face away, staring out of the window at the chill, grey ocean.
    The house was an ordinary one. Expensive, yes, but not unusual; one of the new ‘executive builds’ on what were meant to be exclusive developments but which Stan thought of as glorified estates.
    At least they had laid off the mock Tudor.
    It was set well back at the end of an elongated cul-de-sac. A large garden backed on to open fields and beyond the field lay a side road. They had pulled their vehicles into the field, drawing up behind the hedge and closing the gate. There was little risk of them being seen. It was a through road, leading only to another road and used only by the locals wanting to take a short cut. No one in their right senses would want to take a short cut along its winding length at the dead of night. Not when the straight and well-lit main road only added an extra couple of miles to anyone’s journey.
    Coran spoke softly, aware of how far sound could travel at night and tonight was almost windless, the howling gale of the past days finally having dropped and the rain ceased. Stan looked up at the stars and wished himself elsewhere. To cut and run now would mean he didn’t get paid for the past two months’ work – quite aside from any other consequences that might come about – but he’d got by with nothing before and he could do so again. Only Coran’s assertion that he should just give it another week or two and let matters play out according to some design only Coran seemed privy to made him hesitate.
    He trusted Coran – pretty much. In the ten years of knowing him, Coran had never once broken his word, though that didn’t mean he was immune to the odd misjudgement.
    â€˜You all know what to do,’ Coran was saying. ‘We go in quiet, come out