Breakfast is another archipelago of silences, his children isolated islands around the table, their small forms like shadows in the morning mist. The kitchen windows are blurred grey from the steady drizzle outside, the sunless room adrift from the outside world.

His hands, with overlong nails and cracked cuticles, wrap themselves around a chipped mug. The coffee, like his thoughts, is unfulfilling, leaving only a bitter aroma and dull ache. His burnt toast tastes of ash.

His youngest, Evie, lifts her bowl to drink the rainbow milk left over from her Froot Loops. Her eyes peer over the rim in his direction, as if searching for a beacon of light through the gloom. Unrewarded, she returns to her empty bowl. Across the table, Sam and Jess eat their Nutella on toast with practised silence, each in their own iPhone world. Evie shivers and looks away; there is no light coming from the head of the table. 

As Evie carries her bowl to the sink, his thoughts turn to the night she was born. Until that day, his world had felt whole, a Pangaea of pleasure and possibility. But as he drove home from the hospital, an oppressive silence descended, thick with clinical odour. The front passenger seat was empty; all that remained of her was a drying patch of fluid, leaked as she had laughed aloud to his jokes on the way to the hospital.

The two older siblings take their plates to the sink, and his chest tightens like a straitjacket as he watches them. He thinks he catches a whiff of eau de cologne as Sam stands, but he moves quickly, and it is lost in the gloom. He wants to speak to them, but his mouth is heavy, the words stranded. They collect their lunches and bags and silently float to the front door. He wants to follow, to wave them off, but his legs are immoveable, as if buried in wet sand. Evie goes after them, lingering briefly in the kitchen doorway, her small fingers grasping the jamb as she looks back at him, big blue eyes searching. The ocean between them seems unnavigable.

He averts his gaze back down to his cold, charred crusts. He listens until he hears the TV come to life in the front room, the cheerful melody of the Bluey theme tune filtering through the fog, discordant by the time it reaches his ears.

He stands and shuffles to the sink. He adds his plate to the abandoned bowls of stale-smelling milk, charred pans, and haphazardly lain cutlery, like ritual offerings to an indifferent god. He returns the milk to the fridge. His breath freezes in his throat as he opens the door. Grasping the handle, his knuckles turning white. Unable to move he stares at the mini-Victoria sponge, Sam’s achievement after school yesterday, with three pink candles planted hopefully like flags.

From down the hall he hears Bluey play with Bingo. Their voices become louder, and when he looks up from his slippers he is standing at the threshold of the living room. The TV is in the corner, the blue and orange cartoon dogs playing on a beach with a bird-shaped stick. He does not see Evie, the cushions in front of the TV vacant. A noise by the window catches his attention and. He glances over. The drizzle has given way to a bone-white fog which presses up against the glass. 

Evie sits, drawing on the fogged window with her finger - the wavy line of an ocean, the sun above, a boat with stick-figures, and a cluster of wonky islands. On the floor beside her lies an envelope torn open by eager hands; ‘Evie’ written across the front in Sam’s precise lettering. A birthday card stands next to it, Bluey and Bingo leaping spreadeagled holding a banner that reads ‘Birthday Girl’.

Like a drowning man he struggles to take a breath, his vision blurring as he watches his daughter. A croaky “Evie,” is all that he manages, a gulf filled with words he cannot say. Hearing his voice, she turns to him with those hopeful, ocean-blue eyes.

But those were her eyes.

Familiar waves of grief crash, and he wants to retreat as before, to shuffle back down the hall. “Is that us?” he asks, his voice barely a whisper. Evie nods. She reaches up for his hand.

Her eyes hold his gaze.

At last, he floats closer and takes her small hand in his.