‘Not like this.’
Another knock, louder still.
‘Whatever happens.’ He looks at me. Eyes clear. The glasses are on the bedside table, and without them his face is unguarded, younger, the face I see at 3 am. ‘We’re in this together. Yes?’
Together. He says it like there’s ground under it.
‘Yes.’
He walks to the door. I follow. Three steps behind. My heart, hammering is the wrong word. My heart is trying to leave my chest through my throat.
Laurence reaches for the handle. His hand doesn’t shake. Mine, at my sides, are not.
He opens the door.
Ronan fills the doorframe, bigger than I remember, not from growth but from anger, having a dimension and Ron occupying all of it. Jaw set, eyes scanning, he already knows. He moves past Laurence, finds me, takes me in an inside-out shirt, bare feet, hair that had Laurence’s fingers in it.
‘I knew it.’ Three words stripped bare, no explosion, no fist through the wall. Just Ron’s voice at its foundation. Just the verdict.
He steps inside. Doesn’t ask. Doesn’t wait. Laurence moves back, not retreating, making space.
Ron stands in the hallway. Looks at the coat hooks, my jacket, next to Laurence’s. Looks at the kitchen, two mugs on the counter, mine with the chip in the rim.
‘I knew it,’ he says again. But this time the voice cracks onit, a fracture so small you’d miss it if you weren’t his brother, if you hadn’t heard that voice break on the morning he drove meto Manchester and saidcall me if you need anythingand meantdon’t make me worry.
It’s not anger.
It’s pain.
In his face, something that has nothing to do with Laurence or me. Nothing to do with the bed or the shirt. Underneath. Raw.
Understanding hasn’t arrived yet.
The door is still open behind him. The gold light from the street falls across the hallway floor, the same light, and none of it is.
Three people in a hallway. Two in bare feet. One who followed his brother through Manchester and waited outside a green door for three hours and brought the cold in with him.
Laurence closes the front door. The latch catches, the flat seals shut.
He shifts that focus from Laurence to me: the assessment, the weighing.
The latch ticks as it cools. Then stops. Then: nothing. The silence of three people in a sealed space, holding their breath, waiting for the first one to exhale and shatter it all.
The living room is too small for this confrontation. For the full weight of what we’ve done, laid out. That’s the first thought. Laurence’s living room is twelve by fourteen and contains two Carricks and a career about to implode, and the space between us feels like inches when it needs to be miles.
Ronan hasn’t sat down. Standing by the window, blocking the light, casting interrogation-room shadows. Laurence is by the bookshelf. I’m between them—the middle.
‘How long.’ It’s shaped like a question, but it’s a deposition.
Laurence speaks, stops. Tries again.
‘Since autumn, Mr Carrick.’
‘I’m asking him.’ Ron’s eyes are on me. ‘How long, Ewan.’
‘Around… November.’
The face tightens, the reset happening. Autumn. Weeks into term. His brother, nineteen, in a city he doesn’t know, in his lecturer’s flat, and, ‘He’s your student.’ Ron’s voice turns straight to Laurence. ‘He’s your student, and you’ve been—what? Fucking him since October?’
