Chapter Twenty-One

The first sign was small enough to dismiss.

A parent emailed asking what time their child’s birthday pottery session began on Saturday.

Sally frowned at the screen.

Mayfield did not run birthday sessions.

Not officially.

Not anywhere in the calendar.

She checked the booking system.

Checked the diary.

Messaged Ruth.

Nothing.

She replied politely, assuming the family had confused Mayfield with another studio.

The answer came back immediately:

“We have the receipt. Our son is very excited.”

The attachment opened with the slow dread of medical imaging.

Mayfield logo.

Mayfield ABN.

Photo of the roller door.

Everything looked real except the platform itself.

Sally had never seen the website before.

Someone had registered Mayfield on another booking system.

By Saturday afternoon the family arrived carrying balloons, supermarket cupcakes and three children vibrating with sugar.

Ruth intercepted them gently at the door.

Tea appeared.

Refund promises appeared.

Apologies arrived in calm administrative tones.

The family left disappointed rather than furious.

Still:

something fundamental had shifted.

To the outside world Mayfield now looked unreliable.

Sloppy.

Disorganised.

Exactly the accusation Tracey had always implied.

Only now the accusation had infrastructure.

It did not stop there.

On Monday morning Sally tried to open the studio inbox.

Password incorrect.

She tried again.

Password incorrect.

The reset email redirected to a Gmail address she did not recognise.

Her stomach dropped so fast she physically steadied herself against the bench.

Stripe inaccessible.

Booking platform inaccessible.

Mailing list inaccessible.

Even the domain login redirected somewhere strange.

She walked into the kitchen carrying the laptop like evidence from a crime scene.

Ruth looked up once and immediately understood this was no longer ordinary chaos.

Together they began retracing permissions, logins and recovery accounts.

The pattern emerged slowly.

Weeks earlier — during Sally’s illness, during the grievance hearings, during all the emotional fog — Tracey had quietly changed the “primary recovery email” across multiple systems.

Every reset now flowed back to her.

Ruth exhaled sharply.

“She’s sitting inside the system.”

Sally lowered her forehead onto the cool laminate table.

“I can’t even read my own mail.”

At home, the teenagers watched her unravel in shifts.

One evening she sat at the kitchen bench trying to explain what had happened while staring into cold tea.

The eldest frowned.

“Mum. That’s literally illegal.”

The youngest looked up from pasta.

“Unauthorised access to computer systems. Crimes Act. Maximum penalty two years.”

The whole table went quiet.

The child shrugged.

“I read things.”

Sally laughed accidentally.

The sound broke halfway through and turned into something else.

Meanwhile the sabotage multiplied.

Families arrived expecting NDIS pottery mornings.

Couples turned up for “wheel-throwing wine therapy.”

A corporate team arrived in matching polo shirts demanding their “Clay Intensive Leadership Journey.”

All carried confirmation emails.

All had paid deposits somewhere.

None of the bookings existed inside Mayfield.

Ruth handled each disaster with terrifying composure.

Refund forms.

Phone calls.

Insurance notes.

Quiet apologies delivered with enough dignity to stop people yelling.

But the reviews still appeared online:

“Turned up. No class.”

“Waste of time.”

“Disorganised.”

Sally read them at midnight while her chest tightened one vertebra at a time.

The studio no longer looked like a sanctuary.

It looked like a scam.

Ghost emails flickered through the hijacked accounts.

Refund requests.

Subscription confirmations.

Complaints.

Things vanished while she watched.

Sometimes she tried forwarding them to Ruth only to have the messages disappear mid-click.

It felt less like administration than haunting.

One morning the middle child wandered into the kitchen holding up a phone.

“Why is there a TikTok about you?”

Sally took the phone carefully.

Tracey’s voice.

Tracey’s captions.

Tracey’s version of events.

Unsafe workplaces.

Gaslighting management.

Worker harm.

The comments flooded beneath:

“Protect workers.”

“Solidarity.”

“This is why collective care matters.”

Sally handed the phone back slowly.

The strangest part was not the lies.

It was the speed.

How quickly strangers assembled certainty from fragments.

Inside the studio, Ruth fought back with paperwork.

Disclaimers appeared.

Refund policies tightened.

Access logs were printed.

Password spreadsheets emerged from somewhere deep inside Ruth’s soul.

Sometimes she muttered sections of Fair Work legislation under her breath like medieval prayers.

“Adverse action.”

“Coercion.”

“Unauthorised representation.”

Sally barely absorbed any of it.

Her body had begun revolting openly.

Flushes.

Nausea.

Retching at three in the morning while the dog sat anxiously outside the bathroom door.

One night she leaned against the sink shaking and whispered:

“Maybe she’s right. Maybe I can’t run this.”

The dog pressed his chin silently against her foot.

She stayed there until dawn.

Thursday brought a new catastrophe.

Three classes appeared online:

• Clay for Climate Grief
• Inclusive Pottery for Neurodiverse Teens
• Wheel Therapy with Wine

All used Mayfield branding.

All included Canva graphics in Ruth’s colour palette.

None existed.

And still people arrived.

Every mistaken booking damaged trust.

Every refund drained money.

Every online post hardened the narrative another fraction.

Late one night Sally found Tracey’s latest story:

SAFE SPACES DON’T NEED LAWYERS

Thousands of views.

Heart emojis.

Applause.

Sally shut the laptop carefully and sat in darkness.

She had believed openness would protect the studio.

Instead she had built something porous.

And porous things could be entered.

That was the real lesson arriving now.

Not cynicism.

Structure.

Boundaries.

Systems.

Late that night she opened a fresh notebook.

At the top of the page she wrote:

What Mayfield needs to survive

Then underneath:

• systems
• boundaries
• rules that hold

Her hand shook while writing.

But she kept going.

The ghost bookings still arrived.

The inbox still flickered.

The internet still shouted.

But underneath the panic, something else had begun returning.

Not optimism.

Not innocence.

Something steadier.

The beginning of resolve.

The dog lifted his head from beside her feet and thumped his tail once against the floorboards.

Sally pressed her hand into his fur.

“This can’t be the end.”

The dog, to his credit, did not disagree.