Chapter 19 Graham
CHAPTER NINETEEN
GRAHAM
Jamie came up that weekend despite me telling both her and Olivia not to.
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 who watched 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 not weakness. 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 found me 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.
“This remind me of your father,” she said finally.
That stopped me. Not because she never mentioned him, she did, but always carefully. Always in the past tense, the way you talk about weather that’s moved on.
“How?”
“He had a friend named Callum Muir. Business partner. They started the joinery together when they were twenty-three. Your father did the work, Callum handled the books.” She pulled her jacket tighter.
“For fifteen years, that arrangement held. They built it into something real. Good reputation, steady clients, enough money that your father could buy this house and feel like he’d made something solid. ”
“What happened?”
“Your father came home one day and told me everything was gone. The business, the savings, the contracts. All of it.” She paused. “He thought it was his fault. Thought he’d missed something, made a bad decision, expanded too fast. He blamed himself for years.”
“Was it his fault?”
“No.” Her voice was flat. “Callum had been skimming. Not a lot at first. Small amounts, the kind you don’t notice if you trust the person keeping the books. But over time it added up, and when the debts came due, there was nothing left to cover them because Callum had already taken it.”
The parallel was so obvious it hurt.
“Did Da find out?”
My mum was quiet for a long time. Long enough that the mist turned to proper rain, the kind that soaks through a jacket in minutes, and neither of us moved to go back.
“No,” she said. “He didn’t. Not the whole truth.” She looked at me. “And that’s what killed him, Graham. Not the money. Not the business. The not knowing. The wondering.”
The rain was running down my face. I didn’t wipe it.
“Your father didn’t drink because he lost his business,” my mum said.
“He drank because he lost his ability to trust his own judgment. Because the not-knowing rotted him from the inside out, and by the time I understood what was happening, the bottle was the only thing that made the questions stop.”
She reached up and put her hand on my arm. Small hand. Strong grip. The hand that had held mine at a funeral when I was nineteen and too numb to cry.
“Rose doesn’t know that her friend betrayed her,” she said.
“She thinks she lost the ranch because of bad luck and bad people, and because a famous man brought the wrong kind of attention. She thinks that because you told her so. You went on camera and confirmed every doubt she already had about letting you in.” She paused.
“And right now she’s blaming herself for trusting the wrong people, the same way your father blamed himself.
Walking the same path. And you have the one thing that could stop it. ”
“If I release the proof now, it looks like I lied in the video. Like the whole thing was a performance.”
“It was a performance,” she said, not unkindly. “A generous one. You took the blame to protect her. But protection built on a lie is still a lie, Graham. From what you’re telling me, Rose sounds like the kind of woman who’d rather have a hard truth than a comfortable fiction.”
I stared at the loch. The rain was coming down properly now. We were both soaked. Neither of us moved.
“I don’t know how to get it to her without it looking self-serving.”
“Then don’t give it to her yourself.” She said it simply, like the answer had been obvious all along. “You said she has a cousin. The one she’s staying with.”
“Maggie.”
“Send the proof to Maggie. Let her decide how and when Rose hears it. Let the people who love Rose be the ones who carry this to her.” She squeezed my arm. “You don’t have to be the hero of this story, Graham. You just have to make sure the truth gets where it needs to go.”
I stared at her. At this small, fierce woman who’d survived a husband’s disappearance into a bottle and a son’s disappearance into a persona and had somehow stayed standing through all of it.
Who’d made tea when I came home broken and hadn’t asked questions and hadn’t pushed and had waited, the way she always waited, until the moment arrived when waiting wasn’t enough anymore.
“Your father was a good man,” she said quietly. “He deserved the truth and he didn’t get it, and it destroyed him. Don’t let that happen to someone else because you’re too busy being noble to be useful.”
She patted my arm. Turned back toward the house. Got three steps before she stopped.
“And Graham?”
“Aye?”
“Eat a proper dinner. I made shepherd’s pie and you’re going to sit at the table and finish it. The whole thing. Not half of it pushed around your plate while you stare at your phone.”
“Yes, Mum.”
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 glanced up, 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.
I watched the whole thing.