The Recipient by Dean Mayes Page B

okay,” she stammered. “It’ll be better now that I’ve finished this job.”
    Her response was unconvincing. She saw his concern and she looked away. There was no doubting how well Peter knew his daughter.
    He reached into his pocket, fishing around until he clasped a pair of keys. He lay them down on the counter and slid them towards Casey.
    â€œTake these. Drive yourself up to Hambledown and hide out at the beach house for a couple of weeks. Go see your grandparents. Get some fresh air into your lungs again.”
    Casey regarded the keys in front of her and managed a weary smile at her father.
    She got up from the bench, rounded it and planted a tender kiss on her father’s forehead.
    â€œThanks, Dad. I am okay. I will be okay.”
    He nodded, even though there was a clear sense of doubt etched into his features.
    Casey turned to one of the kitchen drawers behind him, opened it and took out a familiar red box containing a deck of UNO cards.
    She tossed it to her father, who quickly caught it.
    â€œBest of ten?” she challenged, taking up her seat once more.
    Peter chuckled at the sight of the cards and he took the deck out as Casey sat down in front of him and rubbed her hands together eagerly.
    â€œBest of ten,” he echoed as he began shuffling. “But we’ll play for real this time around. Moneybags .”

CHAPTER 5.
    I n the depths of night, Casey ran at a steady pace on her treadmill. Her eyes were closed in concentration as she exercised her arms and legs, tuning her mind to her muscles while she balanced her body in full stride. She listened to her breathing, regulating her respirations in time with her strides so each intake of air filled her lungs and emptied out in a satisfying, effortless rhythm.
    The heart pumped in synergy with the rest of her body, receiving blood from her extremities, pushing it on to her lungs, where it was re-oxygenated before returning to the foreign cardiac tissue. The heart beat, ejecting her blood back out and into her body once more; the perpetual cycle that sustained Casey.
    She was in tune with her body. Yet, she felt incomplete. An unnerving darkness clung to her from within.
    She fought to ignore it. But, no matter how hard she tried, the beating of the heart pounded in her ears, carrying with it a taunt that demanded her attention. It was as though nothing could compete with the sound of the foreign organ beating inside her, and it angered her. Without realising it, Casey had dramatically increased the intensity of her exercise. She ran harder and faster. The machine responded to her effort. The longer she ran, the more intense her anger became.
    Already, Casey was regretting her decision to take a self-imposed vacation. It had only been a week and she hated not having anything to do, no work to keep her mind engaged. A restless mind like Casey’s was a dangerous thing.
    She’d looked for any activity she could find. She’d started out by moving all of her furniture and stripping the timber floors of her apartment, re-lacquering them and moving temporarily downstairs into the garage while she waited for them to dry. After moving everything back in, Casey turned her attention to her computer hardware.
    With the precision of an army sniper, she stripped the machine down to its component parts then rebuilt it. She rewrote the customised operating system—her own design—and loaded it, spending hours testing and retesting it, losing herself in the code.
    She cooked. She cleaned. She rearranged. She watched old movies she had seen a dozen times before. She ran on the treadmill. But there were only so many times she could repeat these tasks.
    Though Casey considered it, she hadn’t taken up her father’s offer of the beach house. The thought of leaving the protective cocoon of her apartment was too much. Her fear of driving, of being on the open road in the wide open spaces beyond Melbourne’s urban