Every Monday

Chapter 1: Tuesday

The first thing Madison Olson noticed was the light.

It came through the bedroom curtains at the wrong angle — too high, too bright for early morning. She lay still for a moment, blinking at the ceiling, her body heavy with the particular exhaustion of someone who has slept too long rather than too little. The digital clock on her nightstand read 9:47 AM. Tuesday.

Tuesday.

She sat up slowly, pressing her fingers against her temples. Her mouth was dry, her thoughts sluggish, as though her brain were wading through something thick. She reached for her phone on the nightstand and thumbed the screen to life.

Seven text messages. Three missed calls. One voicemail.

The texts were unremarkable on their surface — a confirmation to her colleague Peter about a viewing time, a message to her daughter Bea about picking up milk, a reply to a client named Humphries about square footage. All sent yesterday. All on Monday.

Madison read them twice, then a third time. She did not remember writing any of them.

She swung her legs out of bed and stood, catching herself on the nightstand when a wave of dizziness rolled through her. The bedroom looked normal — her clothes from Sunday evening were draped over the chair by the window, her reading glasses folded on top of a paperback she'd been working through. But on the floor beside the chair was a pair of shoes she didn't recognize wearing yesterday. Low-heeled court shoes, the kind she wore for property viewings. They had dried mud along the soles.

Madison picked one up and turned it over. The mud was reddish-brown, like clay. Not the kind of soil you found in Dunmouth, where the ground was chalky and pale near the coast.

She set the shoe down and walked to the bathroom. The mirror showed her a face that looked older than forty-two — dark circles beneath her grey eyes, a crease between her brows that had deepened since the divorce. She splashed cold water on her face, dried it with a towel, and went downstairs.

The kitchen was clean. A single mug sat in the drying rack — rinsed, not just abandoned. Madison always left her mugs in the sink. She opened the fridge: a carton of semi-skimmed milk she hadn't bought, a packet of sliced ham from Tesco, and a small punnet of cherry tomatoes. She checked the receipt crumpled beside the kettle. Purchased Monday, 11:23 AM, at the Tesco Express on Harbour Road.

She had no memory of going to Tesco.

Madison stood in her kitchen, holding the receipt between her fingers, and told herself it was nothing. Stress. Exhaustion. She'd been running on fumes since the divorce was finalized in March, and Bea's behaviour had been getting worse — the skipped classes, the slammed doors, the silences that lasted entire weekends. It was now late September, and the autumn had arrived with a heaviness that seemed to press down on the whole town.

She made herself a cup of tea — one she would actually remember making — and sat at the kitchen table. Through the window, she could see the grey sweep of Dunmouth Bay, the water flat and colourless under an overcast sky. The town was built along a crescent of chalk cliffs, its high street winding down to a harbour that still functioned but only barely. Madison had lived here for sixteen years, since she and Neil had moved from London with romantic ideas about coastal living and a baby on the way. The romance had lasted about as long as the good weather.

Her phone buzzed. A text from Peter Ainsley.

*Morning! Just checking — did Humphries confirm on the Cliff Lane property? He seemed keen yesterday.*

Madison stared at the message. She typed back: *I think so. Let me check my notes.*

She had no notes. She had no memory of showing anyone anything on Cliff Lane. But she opened her work email and found it there — a sent message from her own account, timed at 2:15 PM Monday, to Gerald Humphries, thanking him for attending the viewing and confirming she would follow up with the vendor.

Professional. Competent. Entirely unlike something written by a woman who apparently hadn't been conscious at the time.

Madison closed her email and pressed her palms flat against the table. Her hands were trembling slightly.

*It's stress*, she told herself. *You've been under enormous pressure. People forget things.*

But she hadn't forgotten a detail or misplaced an afternoon. She had lost an entire day.

---

Bea came downstairs at half past ten, still in her school uniform from the day before, her dark hair tangled and her expression closed off in the way that had become her default setting.

"You're not at school," Madison said.

"Neither are you at work."

"I'm going in late. Are you ill?"

Bea opened the fridge, inspected its contents without interest, and closed it again. "I don't feel well."

"You don't feel well, or you don't want to go?"

Bea looked at her with Neil's dark eyes — that same flat, assessing gaze that could make Madison feel like she was the one being unreasonable. "Does it matter?"

"It matters to me."

"Fine. I don't want to go. Happy?"

Madison took a breath. The parenting books said to pick your battles. The parenting books had clearly never met Bea Olson at fifteen, armed with her father's stubbornness and her mother's sharp tongue.

"Stay home today," Madison said. "But we're talking about this tonight."

Bea shrugged and retreated upstairs with a glass of water and a packet of biscuits she'd extracted from the cupboard with practised stealth.

Madison watched her go and felt the familiar ache — that mixture of love and helplessness that had defined the last year of her life. The divorce had been necessary. Neil had made that clear enough with his affair, his lies, and his spectacular talent for making everything Madison's fault. But Bea hadn't asked for any of it, and she was paying the price with the particular cruelty that adolescence reserves for children of broken homes.

Madison rinsed her mug, put on the muddy court shoes because they were the only work-appropriate pair by the door, and drove to the office.

---

Ainsley & Trotter Estate Agents occupied a narrow shopfront on Dunmouth High Street, wedged between a charity shop and a bakery that made excellent sausage rolls. Madison had worked there for nine years, surviving two recessions and one pandemic, and had risen to senior negotiator largely by being reliable, organized, and willing to show properties in the rain.

Peter Ainsley was at his desk when she arrived, a tall man in his fifties with a receding hairline and the permanently worried expression of someone who had chosen estate agency as a career in a town where property values moved like tectonic plates — slowly, and occasionally with devastating consequences.

"There she is," Peter said, looking up from his computer. "Feeling better?"

"Better?"

"You said you had a headache yesterday afternoon. Left early."

Madison set her bag down beside her desk. "Right. Yes. Much better, thanks."

"Humphries was pleased with the viewing. I think we might get an offer on Cliff Lane."

"That's great."

"You showed him the garden extension plans?"

"Of course," Madison said, because what else could she say? *Actually, Peter, I have no memory of yesterday whatsoever. I appear to have conducted a full day of work while completely absent from my own consciousness.*

She sat down and opened her computer. Her calendar showed Monday's appointments: 10 AM staff meeting, 11:30 AM Humphries viewing at 14 Cliff Lane, 2 PM follow-up emails, 3:30 PM left early (headache). Everything tidy. Everything accounted for.

Madison spent the morning in a state of controlled panic, answering emails and returning calls while privately scrolling through every digital trace of her Monday. Her car's odometer had added twenty-three miles — consistent with the drive to Cliff Lane and back, plus the Tesco run. Her bank account showed the grocery purchase and nothing else. Her browsing history was unremarkable: property listings, BBC News, a recipe for chicken stir-fry she'd apparently looked up at lunchtime.

By noon, she had almost convinced herself it was nothing. A stress-induced fugue. A blip. The kind of thing that happened to overworked, recently divorced women who weren't sleeping properly and whose teenage daughters were waging a quiet war of attrition against them.

She ate her lunch at her desk — a sandwich from the bakery next door — and called her GP surgery to make an appointment. The earliest slot was Thursday. She took it.

That afternoon, she drove to 14 Cliff Lane and parked outside. It was a semi-detached Victorian villa with a view of the bay, the kind of property that sold itself in summer and languished on the market through winter. She sat in her car and stared at it, willing herself to remember standing in its hallway, showing Gerald Humphries the original cornicing, pointing out the south-facing garden.

Nothing.

The house stared back at her, blank and unhelpful.

Madison drove home, made dinner for Bea — who ate it in her room — and sat on the sofa with a glass of wine she told herself she deserved. The television muttered in the background. Outside, the wind picked up off the sea and rattled the windows.

She fell asleep on the sofa and dreamed of nothing at all.