She walked back up the path, small and steady in the rain.
I stood by the loch for a while longer. The water was dark and still and the heron was back, standing in the shallows, patient and precise, waiting for the thing beneath the surface to show itself.
My mum was right. I knew she was right. The not-knowing had killed my father as surely as the whisky had, and Rose was walking the same path in a different pair of shoes, blaming herself for trusting the way Da had blamed himself for trusting Callum. And I’d made it worse. I’d gone on camera and handed Rose another reason to believe she shouldn’t trust.
But knowing my mum was right and knowing what to do about it were two different things. I’d told fifty million people I was the match that lit the fire. If the Denise proof came out now, the story became: first he says it’s his fault, then he says it’s someone else’s fault. Which version is real? Is this another performance?
I went inside. Ate the shepherd’s pie. All of it.
Went to bed and didn’t sleep.
Two days later,Dex called at seven in the morning.
I was on the loch path again, running this time, trying to outpace the thoughts that had been circling since the conversation with my mum. The phone buzzed in my jacket pocket and I nearly let it go to voicemail. I’d been letting most things go to voicemail.
But Dex didn’t call at seven unless something had shifted.
“Are you near a screen?” he said.
“I’m out running.”
“Stop running. Find a screen.”
His voice made me stop. Not panic. Dex didn’t panic. But urgency, the kind that meant the ground had moved and he hadn’t finished calculating where it had settled.
“What happened?”
“Rose did an interview.”
The world went very quiet. Just my breathing and the loch and Dex’s voice, thin and tight through the phone.
“What kind of interview?”
“Livestream. With a journalist named Melanie Parker. It went up about two hours ago and it’s—” He paused. I heard him swallow. “Graham, you need to watch it.”
“Is she okay?”
“She’s more than okay. She’s—” Another pause. Longer this time. “Just watch it. I’m not going to describe it. You need to see it for yourself.”
He hung up.
I stood on the path with my heart hammering and the morning mist rising off the loch and the whole world suddenly rearranged into a shape I hadn’t expected.
Rose did an interview. Rose, who built a ranch in the middle of nowhere so nobody would look at her and once told me that being seen was the thing she feared most. Rose went in front of a camera and talked.
I ran back to the house faster than I’d ever run anywhere. My mum was in the kitchen, already dressed, already aware. Dex must have told her. She had her tablet open on the table and a cup of tea beside it and the look on her face, when she glancedup, was the look of a woman who’d been waiting for this exact moment.
“Sit down,” she said.
I sat.
She turned the tablet toward me and pressed play.
Rose’s face filled the screen. She was in a studio, seated across from a woman whose presence radiated the particular gravity of someone who asked hard questions for a living. Rose was wearing something simple, dark, her hair pulled back, and she looked tired in a way that wasn’t just physical. But her eyes were clear. Steady. The eyes I’d seen in the barn during the storm when she’d told me about her parents and hadn’t looked away.
She was looking at the camera the way she’d looked at me.
Like she’d decided that being seen was worth the cost.
