Chapter Thirteen Tristan
Chapter thirteen
Tristan
The flat felt different once Razor had gone.
As if the air itself had shifted the moment the door clicked shut behind him, tension released in one place only to knot somewhere else. And I stood in his bedroom, barefoot on cold concrete, listening to the echo of his footsteps fade down the stairwell.
I told myself not to read into it.
Not to assign meaning where there might be none.
Easier said than done when I was wrapped in his towel.
So I whipped it off to run it through my hair and found the remnants of my clothes slipped over a soft chair in the corner.
He’d folded them. My suit trousers and shirt, the tie draped along the back.
Hugo Boss, tended to with the same quiet consideration as I’d been.
But I stepped back into my underwear, then the trousers, then the shirt, fastening buttons with dedicated focus, doing my best not to think about why my chest felt tight. Or why I was still here.
It wasn’t about me.
It was practical. Self-preservation.
He’d asked me to stay because it suited him. Because it made things easier. Safer.
That was all.
And I held onto that explanation as if it was solid and wouldn’t slip the moment I stopped watching it too closely.
Once dressed, I glanced at the flat. The open space.
It was one vast, uninterrupted space. No door separating the bedroom from anything else.
A single sweep of room with its life laid bare.
Bed to sofa to kitchen to balcony, all visible from everywhere, nothing hidden.
Warehouse bones ran through it: exposed brick in deep rust tones, steel beams crossing the high ceiling, pipework tracing the walls like a map of the place he came from.
Sun spilt in from one enormous industrial window, pooling in squares across the floor.
And the air smelt faintly of Razor’s smoke, Razor’s skin, an intoxicating mix clinging to the open room as if carved into its walls.
From the bed, I could see everything.
Where he slept.
Where he lived.
Where he thought.
Where he would break me apart if I let him.
I then drifted towards the kitchen. It was oddly grounding. Utilitarian, sparse. No ornamental clutter. No chaos. Everything here existed because it did a job. Kettle. Knife block. A fruit bowl holding nothing but lemons and one slightly alarming banana.
I opened cupboards I had no right to open.
Mugs. Plates. Mismatched cutlery thrown in without care or attention.
Protein bars shoved to the back of a shelf like an afterthought rather than a treat.
A half-empty bottle of olive oil sat beside something aggressively labelled MCT.
All caps, black plastic, designed to turn food into fuel and nothing more.
Of course he drank oil on purpose. Of course he stripped eating down to function. Strength. Control. Efficiency.
Nutrition without pleasure.
I leant against the counter, familiar ache settling low in my chest as the picture filled itself in without my permission.
Razor was a man who didn’t eat because it was good, or comforting, or shared, but because he had to.
Hunger was an inconvenience. Staying sharp mattered more than indulgence. Indulgence was a luxury.
For me, food had always existed in excess.
Small plates delivered in endless succession.
Always available. Always exquisite. Pleasure as a baseline, abundance disguised as refinement.
But for Razor, it had been different. Food hadn’t been a given.
Not regular. Certainly not good. Hunger, for him, hadn’t been a concept but a condition. Something endured, managed, controlled.
Another thing he’d learnt to master before it could master him.
Standing in Razor’s kitchen now, cupboards open, habits exposed without him ever having to say a word, that difference hit harder than any confession he’d ever offered me in the quiet that existed between us.
The realisation that while I’d idly abandoned half-eaten meals without a second thought, there might have been a time when Richie had gone to bed hungry.
And somehow, that hurt more than all the violence he’d ever admitted to.
To curb my guilt, I found the fridge next.
Beer. Milk. A takeaway box I did not trust. A bottle of orange juice with a date that made me grimace.
On the door, a magnet shaped like a boxing glove held up a folded piece of paper.
I hesitated before pulling it free. But I read it.
Of course I did. It was a schedule. Handwritten.
Blocks of time pencilled in. Deliveries. Meetings. Names I didn’t recognise.
One I did.
So I folded the paper back exactly as I’d found it and replaced the magnet. No point borrowing trouble I wasn’t ready to face.
The quiet pressed in again, and I found my phone in my trouser pocket. I checked it. No messages. No missed calls. Not even from Marcus.
I needed to do something before I started pacing.
So I made tea.
It felt absurdly domestic. Boiling water in Razor’s kitchen. Using Razor’s chipped black mug. The kettle clicking off like punctuation. The small ritual steadied me, giving my hands something to do while my thoughts tore themselves into tighter and tighter loops.
Dad.
Why hadn’t he told me? Why was I always the last to know?
Always reading the footnotes of my own family?
How bad was it? Did he have years? Months?
Was there even such a thing as optimism with lung cancer, or was that what people said to soften the word terminal?
No amount of Mayfair money could buy breath back into damaged lungs. Prestige didn’t cure cells.
But beneath all of that, coiled and ugly, I felt the damage of the question I hated myself for thinking: Would I never get to show him what I could do? Who I could be without his shadow cast over every success? Would I never get my day across a courtroom from him? Equal, opposing, undeniable?
The kettle steamed. My hands shook.
I stared at the mug and realised, distantly, that I was being selfish in a moment that didn’t belong to me at all.
So I took the tea out to the balcony.
From there, the city looked nothing like the London I’d been raised in.
The canal slid past below, slow and dark, edged with slicks of oil catching the light in fractured rainbows.
Brick walls wore layers of graffiti like history rewritten in spray paint.
Old warehouses loomed beside new glass, neither pretending to belong to the other.
It was real. Unfiltered. There were no clipped hedges.
No uniform terraces. No polite silence broken only by traffic and espresso machines.
This was louder. Rougher. Honest.
And yet… it was strangely calming. Distinct. Alive in a way West London had never been. Baron’s Court had been constructed. Controlled. Designed to reassure. This place didn’t reassure at all. It simply existed.
I sipped my tea as I leant on the railing, feeling strangely, and ridiculously at home.
My phone rang, reminding me I wasn’t.
I frowned at the screen. Henry. Right. I’d forgotten I’d called him.
I answered. “Hey, Hen.”
“Tris.” His voice came through winded, breath rough with movement. Traffic hissed in the background. “I’m legging it home from work. Just crossing the bridge.”
I leant my hip against the railing, tightening my hold on the mug.
Henry lived out in Chiswick now. Tree-lined streets, clean pavements, a house his parents had helped him into.
Legally his. Technically though without the trust fund waiting in the wings he’d never have touched that postcode on his salary alone.
That was how things worked for us. Soft landings.
Deferred payments. Safety nets disguised as independence.
“Good shift?” I asked.
Henry let out a short, hollow laugh. “They’re never good shifts, Tristan. That’s why we strike. To make this mess better.”
“Mm.” I leant my forearms on the balcony rail, tea cooling between my palms, and stared across the canal.
The brick opposite was layered in graffiti.
Old tags bleeding through newer ones, paint flaking where the damp had eaten it back.
Nothing here tried to be pretty. It just was.
“You know you could choose a different profession. Literally anything.”
“So could you.”
I chewed my lip in realisation. “Look at us, eh? Locked into the decisions we made at twelve, when the world bent itself out of shape to make them possible. Funded academia. Tutors. Placements. Networks. All very noble. We should be grateful.”
“What else would we do? Join a circus?”
“I think you’d make an excellent clown, Henry Redmayne.”
“Most days in A&E, I already feel like one.”
I chuckled.
“So anyway…I re-read your message from yesterday. Came through while I was dealing with a bloke who’d tried to impress his mates by slamming a pint glass down on the table.
Hand went straight through it. Severed a tendon.
Blood everywhere. He kept apologising to me while I was fishing glass out of his palm.
” He tutted. “Friday nights, eh? Sorry I couldn’t call back sooner. ”
I closed my eyes. The smell of the canal hung in the air. Oil, old water, cigarette smoke trapped between concrete walls. It clung to my skin, unfamiliar and grounding all at once. Not Mayfair. Not Baron’s Court. Not Henry’s antiseptic corridors either.
“Dad’s got lung cancer,” I blurted.
The silence on the line was instant. Complete. As if Henry had stopped moving altogether.
“Shit.” I heard traffic pause, then resume. “When did you find out?”
“Last night.” My throat tightened. “Everyone else has known for months.”
“That’s—” He broke off, breath catching as he slowed to a walk. “I’m so sorry, Tris.”
“Yeah.” I stared out at the skyline beyond the water. Cranes, scaffolding, the sharp geometry of buildings that didn’t care who you were or where you came from. “Me too.”
“Do we know what stage?”