Chapter 1
CHAPTER ONE
JUNE—FORTY-SEVEN YEARS LATER.
MADIGAN
The Toyota headed down the driveway, flanked by the wintering magnolias. In another two months, the trees would be a mass of crimson and white flowers, lightening my heart during a generally wet and grey August.
Lee was ferrying his brother to Aaron’s nine-thirty appointment with his therapist. Aaron was doing a lot better, but he wasn’t comfortable driving Lee’s second-hand car in the chaos of peak Auckland traffic.
He continued to suffer the odd nightmare, a hangover from his experience in Kettleworth.
He remained tight-lipped about what had actually happened that fateful night, but his eyes had finally lost that cowed, haunted look they’d held for far too long.
He’d recently moved out of the spare bedroom he’d been sharing with Lee and into a quickly converted storage room at the end of our hall.
It barely fitted a single bed and a chest of drawers, but the small window looked out on miles of pasture and Aaron seemed more than happy with the space.
The Toyota turned left onto the road at the bottom of the driveway, and I returned to my bowl of muesli.
With Lee and Aaron gone for a few hours and Gazza taking an admin day to do God knew what, Nick and I had the house to ourselves .
. . for once. Hard to believe that just six months earlier I’d been living in this place alone, convinced that the dream of sharing my carefully curated, quiet, peaceful life with somebody else simply wasn’t on the cards for me.
I was happy enough, or so I’d told myself, but it had been a lie.
Because here I was, not just living with a man I loved more than I’d ever thought possible, but another two men shared our house, our space, our table, our kitchen, our .
. . everything. And I’d never been more deliriously content. Go figure.
Not that the chaos of four grown men living under the same roof didn’t drive me to distraction at times.
Did nobody know how to clean a damn bathroom anymore, let alone fold laundry?
And don’t get me started on replacing the milk in the fridge or putting coffee pods on the list when they used the last one of a certain flavour—goddammit.
It was like herding cats some days, and Nick was as bad as the others.
When I’d called a family meeting to address my growing list of issues, Nick’s eyes had rolled dramatically skyward.
It might’ve had more impact if he wasn’t the biggest coffee-pod culprit of them all so I ignored the man, which I’d discovered was generally the best strategy for dealing with a lot of Nick’s frustrating ways.
After that, the meeting had gone surprisingly well, albeit with far more hilarity than I felt the topics warranted.
Everyone had given me shit, naturally, but their compliance after the fact was telling and I appreciated it more than I could say.
I also hadn’t missed the shine in Aaron’s eyes when he saw the word family tacked in front of the word meeting on my fridge note.
With everything else that had happened to our two flatmates, I sometimes forgot they’d also lost their blood family after coming out.
For Aaron, that was as recent as the previous year.
It was a particular and painful type of loneliness that I’d never had to deal with and I didn’t envy them one bit.
Nick, on the other hand, knew exactly what it felt like.
It helped that Aaron and Gazza had struck up an odd friendship born of many hours spent gaming together.
I’d caught Lee observing them from a distance at times, an odd, troubled look on his face that I wasn’t silly enough to push him about.
Regardless, or maybe because of everything Lee had been through, he was a hard man to read and even harder to talk with about anything of significance in his life.
Nick had been a little more successful with Lee, their troubled childhoods providing some common ground.
But even then, Lee kept thick walls around his tender spots and ignored all suggestions about considering some therapy himself.
The young man was as stubborn as they came.
Not too dissimilar from someone else I knew.
Speaking of, I looked up from my muesli to find Nick scowling at his toast and marmalade like it personally offended him.
His hair was growing out from the brutal buzz cut he’d sported during our trip to Australia, and I couldn’t decide whether I was happy about the reversal or not.
I kind of liked the extra edge it had added to his sexy bad boy image and fuck-the-world attitude, but I also liked this softer side.
Nick took another bite of toast, moved the lump around his mouth, then reluctantly swallowed. All done while studiously avoiding my gaze. What could I say? The man was a multitasker.
I sighed and studied my complicated boyfriend .
. . lover . . . partner—take your pick. I wasn’t up with the current buzz label for whatever Nick and I were actually doing together, and I didn’t really give a shit.
As long as the frustrating man continued to live in my house and sleep in my bed like he’d been doing full-time for almost two months, I’d call him anything he wanted.
Which would’ve been just dandy if Nick had provided any hint about how he actually saw us—a conundrum not helped by him introducing me to his and Davis’s friends and colleagues simply as Madigan, no label provided, and with a decidedly ruddy tinge to his cheeks like the introduction required an apology of some sort attached to it.
Assume what you will.
I was trying not to.
This was in stark contrast to Nick’s introduction to my brother, Jonas.
He’d flown in not long after we returned from Kettleworth to check I was still in one piece, and to rip me a new one about what the hell I thought I was doing.
He also came over to grill me about the man who’d captured my heart.
If I’d been worried, I needn’t have. The two men got along, if not exactly like a house on fire, then a small dog kennel, at least. They shared a dry sense of humour, a low threshold for bullshit, and it warmed my heart to watch them argue and laugh about anything and everything from politics to Love Island. Don’t ask.
In contrast, when it came to Nick and Davis’s friends, it wasn’t like we’d been flaunting our new .
. . whatever. God forbid. But word had spread regarding the change in Nick’s relationship status and we kept ‘bumping into’ people who required an introduction.
Garden centres, cafés, bookstores—no retail space was safe from lurking and overly concerned friends of Davis wondering if Nick had lost his goddamned mind.
A situation not helped by Nick’s ghosting of almost everyone after Davis had died.
I chewed on my muesli and mentally slapped myself because it couldn’t be an easy thing introducing the new man in your life to a million and one best friends of the very popular old one. The man who’d died less than a year ago. The husband whom everyone had loved to bits.
Queue a number of very awkward meetings.
Some of their friends had accepted me with grace, happy that Nick had found someone he cared about to move on with.
But those people were in the minority. More than a few regarded me with obvious sympathy, like I was some rebound hookup who wasn’t going to last and was only deluding myself that our relationship could be anything more.
Those people mostly ignored me once the introductions were done, like it wasn’t worth their time getting to know me since I wouldn’t be hanging around.
And then there were some for whom I was likely an unwelcome reminder of life moving on without Davis while they were still grieving.
I could handle all of those friends.
Who I found difficult were the few who were overtly caustic at the idea that Nick could’ve found someone else so quickly, making their suspicions clear via accusatory looks and comments not so discreetly implying that Nick must’ve been unfaithful to Davis, with me, while Davis was still alive.
It was the only way they could explain the suddenness of it all.
Those people I wanted to slap into the next century and then catch up with them and do it all over again.
I wanted to scream at them about how wrong they were.
If they only knew how very close Nick and I had come to never even being friends after Davis died.
How terrified and racked with guilt Nick had been at the very thought of opening up his heart to another man so soon.
And how difficult it had been to forge a path for ourselves with the constant shadow of Davis hovering over our lives.
But nothing I said would have made an ounce of difference to those arseholes, and I had the sense to know that, thank God. In their eyes, I was, and would always be, the interloper. The new kid on the block. The . . . replacement.
God, I hated that word, especially since I knew that’s how some of them saw me.
All of which came to a head during the get-together we’d attended the previous night—a party organised by Davis’s friends and hosted by his best mate, Luther.
He’d wanted to commemorate Davis’s final book earning an international crime-writer’s award just the week before.
It was an honour, for sure, and of course Nick needed to go and celebrate with those who knew Davis best.
Me? Not so much.
I’d pushed him to go on his own, to reconnect with his friends, reminding him that Davis wouldn’t want him to lose contact with them. But Nick wasn’t having a bar of it. He’d reminded me that my name was on the invitation as well and that we’d agreed on a relationship premise going forward.
Together, or not at all, right? He’d parroted my words back to me.