“Wednesday. Pope was my last release, so I’ll be picking up some new cases.”
“They’re lucky to have you.” Fen winked again. “Like me, maybe…find me on Wednesday? Unless you don’t want to go out with me, in which case I’ll accept a flustered middle finger right now.”
Flustered didn’t even come close, and I only had a split second to react, but there was no way in hell I was ever hitting the reject button for Fen Hawthorne. “I’ll find you.”
“Wednesday?”
“Wednesday.”
Then he was gone, leaving me alone with the abrupt and welcome turn our encounter had taken. For a moment, I stared at the locked gate he’d disappeared through, heart thudding like an overexcited metronome. Then an appointment on my iPad dinged and real life called me home.
Wednesday. It was five days away, and it couldn’t come soon enough.
I held onto that thought as the rest of my day played out, and all weekend long, but by the time Monday morning rolled around I knew I wasn’t going to make it back to HMP Manchester on Wednesday.
In fact, it was six hellish months before I made it back, and by then everything had changed. My brother was dead and I had part-time custody of his baby son. And Fen?
He was long gone too.
2
Rami
Now
I was an educated professional. I had a first-class degree in criminology and a goddamn-fucking masters on top of the diploma I’d earned while working in the probation service. And yet here I was, scraping jam off my kitchen floor while my nephew screamed blue murder because he was as fed up with me as I was with him.
“I know, mate. I know.” I swiped at the sticky mess with a wad of kitchen paper, then decided I didn’t care enough to carry on and left it to fester. “Your mum will be here soon. She’ll make it all better.”
If toddlers could channel cynicism, it was burning strong in the coal-dark gaze of Charlie Stone. He sent a blistering scowl my way and kept crying, and I didn’t blame him. I’d been promising his mum was on her way since last night and she still hadn’t shown up.
It was slowly dawning on me that she wasn’t coming back. That every threat she’d made to me in the last few months was now my reality.
“Having Charlie was Damon’s idea. What am I supposed to do now he’s gone?”
“Raise him. He’s your son.”
Leanne shook her head. “He’s your brother’s son. And he ditched me.”
“Damon didn’t ditch you. He left, after he caught you having sex with his best friend and you made it impossible for him to stick around without getting killed.”
For fuck’s sake. How many times did I have to endure this argument?
Too many. And the irony that Damon had died anyway didn’t hurt any less than it had eighteen months ago when he’d relapsed and OD’d on a park bench.
Since then, I’d had Charlie part-time while I’d continued to work, but I’d known this day was coming since Leanne had looked me in the eye and flat out told me she didn’t give a flying fuck about her son.
Didn’t stop me packing Charlie into the car and driving out to search for her, though, and wasn’t that two hours of my life I’d never get back? Especially considering I had zero intention of handing Charlie over, regardless of whether she wanted him or not.
You literally just want to call her a cunt.
Facts. And here was another one: I was ill-equipped to be a full-time parent. A few nights a week, I was handling it, but the truth was I was a hot mess trying to keep up with my job and the hundred-and-one other things parenting a toddler came with, even on a part-time basis.
It was 9 p.m. when the cold, hard truth coalesced in my frazzled brain, and I was still driving around Manchester searching for Leanne. Anger deflating, I eased my ancient car to a stop. Charlie had long ago fallen asleep, and I gazed at him in the rear view mirror, my heart pounding as I imagined the next sixteen years with his life in my hands—hands that were currently white-knuckling the steering wheel so hard my coat sleeves had ridden up, revealing the faint scars on my arms from a time where I hadn’t managed my own life particularly well. That was a long time ago. But it didn’t seem to matter how far I’d come since then, as I sat alone in my shit car with my brother’s kid snoring in the back, somehow I felt like the same troubled teenager I’d been back then.
I can’t do this.
In a daze, I started the car again and drove out of the city, heading north, to the top of the world and the one place I knew I could take Charlie and he’d be safe and loved with family stronger than I would ever be. My sister lived on a goddamn mountain, off-grid and eco-friendly with her husband and three kids. They raised sheep and goats and made fucking cheese in a shed that overlooked a wild and desolate land. Paradise, when the weather was right. A natural prison when it wasn’t, but I was familiar with prisons, literal and otherwise.
The tangible interpretation made me think of Fen Hawthorne. Of his ash-brown hair and petrol-blue eyes, always sparkling with humour and mischief. With heat. Or maybe I’d imagined that. It had been so long since I’d seen him it was hard to believe he’d existed, let alone that my god-like memories of him were real.
A flash of pain lanced my chest. I pushed it away, along with every image of Fen as they tried to bombard my thoughts. Thinking about him hurt more than I could explain, and I had enough pain in my heart to last me a lifetime, or at least the fucking ice age it was going to take me to reach Safia’s place in rural peaks of the Cumbrian Lake District.
Because of course it had started to snow.
I whacked my fog lights on and pushed north until the M61 became the M6. In the back, Charlie slept on, leaving me the increasingly loud rattle coming from the car engine for company. Road signs I recognised began to appear, daring me to ignore it and push on. Don’t be stupid. You think the RAC are going to come and rescue you from Durdle Fell?
The conversation with my more sensible subconscious took me back to Fen Hawthorne again, and this time I lacked the inclination to push him away.
“…my car is a piece of shit.”
“Get a new one then.”
I shrugged. “I don’t care enough to spend the money.”
“You’ll regret that when it breaks down when you need it most.”
“Not if the RAC tows me all the way home and I get a day on the couch.”
“You’d get the bus.” Fen’s gaze drilled into me. “You’re way too committed to this gig to bunk off.”
Untrue, evidently, as I was due in the office at 7 a.m. for a leadership meeting and there was zero chance of me making it. My saving grace was I had no open cases.
I drove farther north, leaving civilisation behind. The weather worsened, snow pelting down in thick waves of white—well, grey, as it happened, as it was pitch dark on the deserted roads that led to Durdle Fell.
Visibility dwindled to nothing. I slowed to a crawl, leaning forward, and tracked the road as it brought me to the foot of the steep fell, situated in the highest land before England became Scotland, and colloquially known as Christmas Mountain—fitting, given it was the end of November, but light years away from my mood.