Epilogue Richie #3
I scooped her up, got a face full of biscuit breath and damp curls. “I know, munchkin. We all know.”
I then carried her inside while Tristan followed with the overnight bag and the cake box.
Friday nights had found their own rhythm here.
Fish and chips spread across the low table.
Maisie talking a mile a minute until she burnt herself out and Keeley carried her upstairs, warm and heavy against her shoulder.
Then the three of us on the sofa with the TV turned down low, picking over the week.
What still needed doing on the house. What had gone right.
What hadn’t. Plans for the next day. How Keeley was settling so far from everything she’d known.
Not just settling. Thriving.
Maisie went to the little community preschool at the church down the lane now, which gave Keeley a few hours in the mornings to get to college.
She was finishing her beautician course and already talking about moving into hair once Maisie hit school age.
She’d made friends too. Mum friends. Older than her by years, most of them, but Keeley had never really been the age she was anyway.
Life had pushed her forward quicker than most. Same as it had me.
Keeley yawned, stretching her arms. “By the way, Mum ain’t coming tomorrow.”
I glanced over Tristan’s head, my arm around his shoulders as he leaned back on me. “Why the fuck not?”
Keeley shrugged. “Busy.”
Yeah, okay. Not everything was all rosy.
Mum was still…Mum.
Keeley jumped up. “S’alright though. I’m looking forward to what the Hale-Fitzroys bring for her.” She winked at Tristan.
Tristan smiled. “You have made room for the pony, right?”
Her mouth fell open.
But she then kissed us both on the cheek and left us with a bottle of wine and the quiet of the place settling for the night.
We finished the wine, talked about nothing and everything, then headed up to the room that was ours.
Closed the door. Cause, yeah…we fucked. Or I reckon Tristan would prefer I called it “making love” now.
Whatever. We knew how to do it all the ways. Quietly, too.
And sometimes, those close times, where we held our breaths through it, they’d sorta become my favourite.
Who fucking knew, right?
* * * *
By nine the next day the place was chaos.
Tables dragged out onto the patchy lawn. Folding chairs borrowed from somewhere. Balloons tied to the fence posts in pastel colours that didn’t belong to any world I’d grown up in. The smell of cut grass and charcoal already in the air.
By lunchtime, the troops started arriving.
A bunch of mums and their kids from Keeley’s group.
All squeals and presents and wet wipes. Then Lennon.
With Amara and the boys in tow. The twins burst through the cottage, shouting for Maisie before their coats were even off, while Lennon headed straight for the garden to take up position beside me at the barbecue as if it had always been our post. Not so much a barbecue as a fuck off outside grill Tristan had insisted on. Came with a drinks cooler as well.
His money, I s’pose.
“Smells decent.” Lennon lifted the lid and gave the grill a critical once-over, the way his foreman checked his brickwork.
“Don’t start.” I nudged him aside and handed over the tongs. “When you’re expected to host people raised on caviar, sausages suddenly matter.”
He snorted. “Razor Slade, cooking for the elite. Never thought I’d see the day.”
“Richie,” I corrected without looking up.
Lennon smiled. “Richie.”
Not long after came Marcus and Eloise, carrying the now toddling Arthur.
Eloise took him out to the garden where the kids were running riot, balloons bobbing against the fence and toys scattered across the grass.
Tristan set up a drinks table with an efficiency he applied to everything, then drifted over to stand with Marcus.
The two of them fell into conversation immediately.
About work or politics or whatever it was men in their world discussed.
Henry arrived next. Dr Redmayne. And with him—Zara.
They were back together. Properly. Apparently, because Tristan’s choice in partner hadn’t brought the entire upper-class establishment crashing down around them, Henry had decided he could survive dating Zara after all.
At least that was Tristan’s version of events.
I didn’t fully understand the hierarchy of it all.
She looked just as polished and well-bred as the rest of them to me.
But apparently there were levels. Expectations. Lines you weren’t meant to cross.
Considering I’d bulldozed straight through most of them just by existing in Tristan’s life, I figured the system could cope.
Henry wandered over, Zara having been swept away by Eloise and Amelia toward the drinks.
“Rich.” He eyed the grill as if it might bite him. “You know how to work that?”
“Henry.” I shook his hand. “It’s a barbecue. Not brain surgery.”
“Oh, brain surgery is significantly easier.” He took a swig of beer.
“You’d know.”
“How to operate on a brain, absolutely. Operate that? No, thank you.”
“We all have our individual skills.”
“Couldn’t have just gone for a coals, no?”
“Top of the range. You know Tristan.”
“I do. Unfortunately.”
Henry Redmayne was halfway through surgical training now, which sounded both impressive and absolutely fucking exhausting from what Tristan had said.
And Zara, apparently, was setting her sights on politics.
Running the country one day, if you believed her ambition.
To me that sounded like a dangerous combination.
A surgeon and a future prime minister in one relationship.
Power couple shit.
Usually, people like that would’ve made me uncomfortable.
Too polished. Far too removed from the world I’d grown up in.
But somewhere along the way that had changed.
Cause the four of us had done dinners in London.
Drinks after work. A few awkward attempts at hosting them at Tristan’s where I’d nearly set off the smoke alarm twice.
They’d come here. We’d even ended up on a couple of double dates.
And somehow, without me really noticing when it had happened…
We’d become friends.
Weird.
Henry gestured toward the tongs in my hand. “You do realise if you poison half of Tristan’s family, I’ll be the one dealing with the aftermath?”
“Exactly why I’m doing it.” I winked at him. “You need the practice.”
He snorted. “I’m training to be a surgeon, not perform emergency sausage resuscitation.”
Henry bumped my shoulder as he reached for a beer from the cooler. “Try not to burn the place down, Slade. I am off duty.
“No promises, Redmayne. I’m never off duty from giving you work.”
He chuckled.
Pretty good having friends in high places.
Tristan’s parents arrived last. His father slower than I remembered, thinner still, but upright. Clear-eyed. Recovered in the way that meant something. His mother fussing with gifts and coats and making sure everyone had enough to eat within seconds of stepping through the gate.
The place felt… full.
Kids everywhere. Laughter carrying across the lawn.
Music low from someone’s speaker. Plates clattering.
Someone opening a bottle of something fizzy too early.
It wasn’t perfect. The paint on the back wall still needed another coat.
One of the windows stuck when you tried to open it.
The decking had a slight dip where we’d misjudged the level.
But it was lived in.
Lennon stood beside me at the grill, smoke drifting up between us as we turned sausages and burgers, an easy working rhythm coming from being side by side long enough not to need words.
Then I felt someone step in close, along with another presence behind me. Tristan’s father. With Tristan just off my shoulder. Lennon clocked it instantly and made himself scarce, muttering something about checking the gas and retreating with admirable speed.
Charles stood there for a moment, drink in hand, taking it all in.
The garden full of people, the house alive with noise, the barbecue smoke clinging to the air.
Then his eyes settled on me. He was in full recovery now.
Remission, if that’s what they called it.
Had retired too. Spending time with his wife. His family. Being a Grandpa.
“You’ve done good work here,” he said at last.
I shrugged, heat from the grill warming my face. “Needed doing. And… I owed it.”
He nodded, accepting that without fuss. He couldn’t argue with it.
He and his family had done so much for me and mine, me fixing a few things here and there was the least I could do.
Beside me, Tristan rested his head on my shoulder, sliding his hand up and down the sweat on my back.
He’d been doing that more lately. Easy touches.
Public ones. It had taken me a while to stop bracing for it.
Stop feeling as if someone might notice, might object.
I knew why he did it. Proof, maybe. To them. To himself. To me.
No one had expected us to last. Least of all me.
And yet here we were. A year on. Me hosting his family in a country cottage. Me running a charity. Me back standing shoulder to shoulder with Lennon. Me being… steady. A boyfriend to a bloody barrister.
Life had a sense of humour.
“You’ll be pleased to know,” Charles said suddenly, almost conversational, “that a line has been drawn.”
Tristan lifted his head from my shoulder. “What line?”
I flipped a burger, watched the fat hiss as it hit the grill, and waited.
“There was an internal review.” He took a sip of drink. “Quiet. Professional. Focused on… influence. The handling of intelligence. Charging decisions.”
I listened.
“Nothing criminal.” He shook his head. “There never is, with men like him.”