She stood in the kitchen doorway with her bag over her shoulder and her jaw set in the expression I recognized from every content argument we’d ever had, the one that said she’d already decided what was happening and was just waiting for me to catch up.
“Before you say anything,” she said, “I’m not here to pitch content. I’m here because you’re my friend and you look like you haven’t seen sunlight in a month.”
“We live in Scotland. Sunlight is theoretical.”
She didn’t laugh. She came in, set her bag down, and sat across from me at the kitchen table.
“I’ve been reading the comments,” she said.
“Dex already walked me through the damage report.”
“Not those comments. The other ones.” She pulled out her phone and set it on the table. “The ones from people whowatched the ‘Taking a Break’ video and actually heard what you were saying. There are thousands of them, Graham. People talking about their own relationships, their own fear of being honest, their own experiences with hurting people they loved.” She scrolled. “‘This is the most honest thing I’ve ever seen on YouTube.’ ‘I’ve watched Fraser Kincaid for eight years and this is the first time I’ve seen Graham Fraser.’ ‘Whoever this person is that he’s talking about, I hope she knows what she has.’”
My throat tightened.
“The loudest voices aren’t the only voices,” Jamie said quietly. “The people who are angry, they’re performing outrage because that’s what the internet rewards. But the people who actually watch your content, who’ve been with you for years, they heard you. And they’re waiting.”
“Waiting for what?”
“For you to come back. When you’re ready.” She met my eyes. “Not Fraser Kincaid. You.”
I looked at the phone screen. At the comments she’d found, the quiet ones, buried under the outrage, from people who’d listened instead of reacted.
“I can’t come back yet,” I said.
“I know.” She picked up her phone. “But when you do, don’t come back as him. Come back as this.” She tapped the screen. “The kitchen. The honesty. The guy who sat in front of his phone and told the truth because someone taught him it mattered.”
She stood up. “And Graham? For what it’s worth, what you did in that video, owning it like that, in front of everyone? That’s notweakness. That’s the bravest thing I’ve ever seen you do. And I watched you jump off a waterfall in Iceland.”
I didn’t have a response for that.
My mum foundme on the path along the loch one evening.
She fell into step beside me without a word, a small woman in wellies and a waxed jacket. The sky was doing the thing it does in the Highlands in late autumn, turning the color of a bruise, purple and grey and heavy with rain that hadn’t decided whether to fall.
We went a quarter mile before she spoke.
“Tell me about the girl,” she said.
“There’s nothing to tell.”
She gave me the look. The one that had been cutting through my bullshit since I was old enough to produce it. Small woman, my mum. Five foot two. But she could fill a room with that look.
“Her name is Rose,” I said.
“I know her name. Dex told me. Dex also told me you went on camera and took the blame for everything that happened to her, and that you’re sitting on proof that it was actually her best friend who did it.”
I was going to kill Dex.
“It’s not that simple.”
“It never is.” She started walking again. I followed, because what else was I going to do. “Tell me why.”
So I told her. All of it. Not the abbreviated version. Everything. Rose’s parents dying when she was a toddler. Growing up in a house full of people who loved her but never quite feeling like she belonged. Building the ranch from nothing. Denise showing up and staying. The embezzlement, the shell companies, Taylor as the front man, Denise as the architect. The bank signature Malcolm had found. The proof sitting in my inbox, untouched, because using it now would look like I’d lied in the video to harvest sympathy and was pivoting to a new story when the first one stopped working.
My mum listened the way she always listened, completely, without interruption, her face giving away nothing.
When I finished, we walked in silence for a while. The loch was flat and dark and the rain had started, not heavy, just a thin Highland mist that settled on everything.
