Chapter Thirty
From: lysander.huxley@ To: dane@
Subject: Podcast interview — professional enquiry
Dane,
This is a professional email, which I’m aware is an unusual register for us to communicate through, so I’ll keep it brief.
I’m developing a podcast about how the internet shapes real lives. Going into the gap between what gets uploaded and what actually happened. It’s interview-led, independently produced, and backed by Meredith Walton at Detour Audio. If that name doesn’t mean anything to you, google her. It should.
I want to do an episode about us. About TheoTheO, specifically.
How the channel started, how it grew, what it did to both of us, and what the industry looks like now from the outside.
I’m not interested in a hit piece. I’m not building a prosecution.
I’m not going to pretend I was dragged along for the ride.
I made choices too, and I intend to own them on the record.
What I am interested in is an honest conversation between two people who built something enormous and never talked publicly about what it cost. You were there for all of it. Your perspective matters to the piece, and I’d rather have you in the room than narrate in your absence.
The format is a recorded sit-down, about ninety minutes, edited for broadcast. You’d have the right to review your own quotes before publication. I won’t ambush you. You know me well enough to understand that if I wanted to go behind your back, I wouldn’t bother emailing you about it first.
If you’re open to a conversation, I’m in London for the foreseeable. Happy to meet wherever works for you.
Lysander
? ? ?
He read the email twice, changed “happy to meet” to “happy to meet wherever works for you,” which was the same thing but somehow felt less desperate, then hit send before the part of his brain responsible for self-preservation could stage an intervention.
The email vanished into the ether. The iPad’s screen went dark in his hands. He waited for the regret to arrive.
It didn’t. He’d spent weeks circling this decision, running through every possible scenario in his head, and now that the message was sent, an eerie calm settled over him. Dane would read it and respond, or he wouldn’t.
He set the iPad face-down on the desk, climbed the basement stairs carefully, and followed the layered noise of too many people talking over one another into the kitchen of the Ledbury Road house.
Diwa had a full production line going. Every surface was occupied: a clay pot steaming on the hob, a chopping board covered in garlic cloves that someone had peeled badly, and a colander of green beans in the sink.
The alpha stood at the island with his sleeves rolled to the elbow, separating lumpia wrappers, while Ryland hovered at his shoulder holding a digital kitchen scale.
“The filling-to-wrapper ratio is critical,” Ryland was saying. “If you overfill by more than eight grams, the structural integrity of the roll is compromised during the frying process, and you get a blowout.”
“I’ve been making lumpia since I was six, Ryland.”
“I’m not questioning your technique. I’m offering data and actionable methods to improve your output significantly.”
Cassian had stationed himself at the far end of the island with a chopping board, a knife, and what had once been spring onions. His blade hit the board in rapid, percussive strikes that reduced the lot to a wet green smear rather than anything that could be used.
Colin was in the chair at the head of the kitchen table with a mug of rooibos and a clear sightline to every station. He looked like a retired general surveying a campaign, too knackered to lead the charge but entirely unwilling to relinquish command.
“More garlic, Diwa,” Colin instructed. “That’s not enough garlic.”
“I’ve used up a whole bulb, Colin.”
“And I said it needs more.”
Stephen sat beside their father with Max on his knee, one hand bouncing the baby in an absent rhythm while the other scrolled his mobile. He looked up when Lysander appeared in the doorway.
“Oh, lovely. He surfaces.” Stephen’s mouth curled into a smirk. “You know, Sander, most people let their guests unpack before they shag them into a coma. The rest of us haven’t even had a proper look at your alpha.”
Colin’s lips pressed against a laugh, and he smacked Stephen’s arm with no force behind it. “Leave your brother alone.”
“You’re a prick, Stevie,” Lysander said, and pulled out the chair beside his brother. He leaned over to brush his thumb across Max’s cushiony cheek. “He really is a gorgeous baby. Thank fuck he took after his alpha father.”
“You’ve just insulted yourself. We’re identical, Sander.”
“Not in the ways that really matter.”
“Yeah,” Stephen said. “Like brains wise.”
Colin lurched out of his chair so fast that his tea sloshed onto the table, startling Lysander into following his wide-eyed gaze.
Lysander hadn’t seen him move like that in weeks. His father had been good about conserving his energy, but Cassian had just brought the blade down mere millimetres from his fingers in a great hacking motion. Colin moved across the kitchen just as Cassian raised the knife high for another pass.
“Sweetheart.” Colin arrived at Cassian’s elbow and laid his hand over Cassian’s on the knife handle, stilling it mid-chop. “That’s not how you do this.”
Cassian blinked up at him. “I’m helping.”
“You are, and you’re doing beautifully, but you don’t need to raise the knife that high.” Colin eased the knife free of Cassian’s grip. He set it on the chopping board, then took Cassian’s hands in both of his and turned them over, running his thumbs across Cassian’s palms as if checking for nicks.
Lysander watched his father’s gaze catch on the scars.
Colin’s breath hitched. His thumbs stilled on the insides of Cassian’s wrists, resting over the pale, raised lines that circled the skin there. He kept his expression neutral, even as he swept his thumb across one of the scars, before he let Cassian’s hands go.
“Come upstairs with me,” Colin said. He pressed himself against Cassian’s side, one arm looping through Cassian’s elbow. “Tala will be waking up from her nap, and she gets ever so cross if there isn’t someone there when she opens her eyes. You can help me get her up.”
“I would love that,” Cassian whispered reverently.
Colin patted his arm and steered him towards the door. The two of them disappeared into the hallway together, his father leaning into Cassian’s side more than he’d ever admit, Cassian matching his pace without being asked.
? ? ?
Diwa’s arm appeared through the kitchen doorway first. Just his arm, bent at the elbow, holding Tala at chest height so that the gathered family got the full benefit of her before they saw her accompanying human conveyor.
Pink tights. A soft grey cardigan with a hand-knitted koala face over the left breast, its ears protruding from the fabric, and on her head, a knitted hat with two round koala ears at its peak, pulled down so low that it nearly swallowed her eyebrows.
Tala blinked at the room, and Cassian gasped so loudly that Ryland flinched.
“Oh,” Cassian breathed, both hands flying to his mouth. “Oh, she’s a koala.”
He was already clapping, a rapid, delighted patter that drew Tala’s unfocused gaze towards him.
Diwa stepped through the doorway behind his daughter, and Colin, who had clearly been waiting in the hallway for exactly this moment, followed at his shoulder, beaming so hard that ten years fell off his face.
“Bonpoint,” Colin announced to the room, as though naming the designer of a couture gown on a red carpet. “The cardigan’s hand-knitted. Feel the ears, Sander. Go on. Feel them.”
Lysander reached over and rubbed one of the koala ears between his thumb and forefinger. It was, he had to admit, incredibly soft.
“Right,” Colin said, and produced a second hat from behind his back.
This one was brown, with two round bear ears at the peak.
He crossed to Stephen, lifted Max out of his lap with a grunt of effort that he immediately tried to disguise, and fitted the hat onto his grandson’s head with both hands, adjusting the angle twice before stepping back to assess the result.
Max’s face crumpled beneath the brim, his lower lip jutting forward. Colin ignored this entirely.
“There’s my little Maxie-bear,” Colin murmured, smoothing the hat down over the dark tufts of hair at Max’s temples. “There he is. Oh, you’re gorgeous. You’re the most gorgeous boy in London.”
“He looks furious, Daddy,” Lysander said.
Colin paid him no mind. He gathered Max against his chest and turned so the room could admire both babies in their respective animal hats, side by side. Tala in Diwa’s arms, round-eyed and oblivious in her koala ensemble. Max against Colin’s shoulder, seething beneath his bear ears.
Cassian was taking photos on his mobile, crouching and tilting for angles, narrating his process to nobody in particular.
“This one’s for Hamish. And this one’s for me.
And this one’s for the lamb and cat video lady on YouTube, because I think she’d appreciate it.
Colin, can we get lamb and cat outfits too? ”
“Yes, of course,” was Colin’s immediate answer.
Hamish’s arm settled around Lysander’s shoulders and pulled him in closer.
His father fussed with Max’s hat and murmured nonsense into his grandson’s ear while Diwa stood beside him with Tala tucked to his chest, his free hand resting at the small of Colin’s back as though it had always belonged there.
Stephen had given up pretending not to be emotional and was wiping his eyes on the sleeve of Ryland’s hoodie.
His family was all together again, filling a kitchen in Notting Hill, ridiculous and whole.