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“This is strange. But nice,” he said, mid-yawn, from behind my back.

“Easy,” I mumbled, half asleep. “And I’ll expect a cup of tea when we wake up.”

“Gonna have to start teaching you to make a proper cuppa, Dylan.”

I smiled.

I hadn’t felt happy in such a long time that I wasn’t sure how to feel anymore. Hope was a dangerous thing, and if I had been terrified before, this time was a hundred times worse, but in a different way.

I wasn’t alone, and I fell asleep holding on to that thought, the scent of my daughter’s hair still lingering in my brain.

Next thing I knew, my phone was ringing. I reached out and picked it up, my heart beating out of my chest.

“Dylan,” the voice said. Gravel. A puff from a cigarette. “I’ve changed my mind. I’m not going to ask you which way this is going. Instead, I’m going to grab Veronica Scotland by the balls and run with this. The decree was ex parte. And the temporary order from last year wasn’t filed properly. Who represents you?”

I tried to sit up. “Ehr…Parker Summers, first time around, and after that, I self-represented.”

“You absolute twat.”

“I’m a lawyer,” I tried to defend myself, but I knew. Of course I knew.

“One who needs to learn his limitations.”

That told me.

“You’d better get ready to fight because you have one hell of a match coming up. Don’t let me down, Dylan.”

“I won’t,” I managed to huff out.

She hung up. Bloody hell. I let the phone drop to the floor as my head hit the pillow. For heaven’s sake.

“Go back to sleep,” Stewart said. “I’ve got you.”

He had no idea how much I’d needed to hear just that.

Or perhaps he did.

I slept. And I didn’t dream a single thing.

11. Stewart

This was the thing.

Well, panic rising in my chest made it difficult to actually think clearly, but I’d woken up with my head against Dylan Scotland’s shoulder, and in my fragile masculinity and weird definition of who I was supposed to be and how I was supposed to behave, I’d gotup and fled.

I wasn’t proud. I wasn’t in any way happy with my behaviour. But now I was sitting on my sofa with my hands trembling, and I hadn’t even made a cup of tea.

What was even worse was that I was struggling to make sense of why I wasn’t making that tea and doing what any self-respecting man would have been doing: crossing that lawn with a tray of hot beverages and waking up the hardworking people so we could all sleep at night. It was four in the afternoon, and Jean was a surprisingly lovely human being, smart and decent at the same time as she was warm, and she obviously cared a great deal about Dylan and his family. She’d been gutted to have missed Constance’s visit, and I could definitely see where everyone was coming from. Constance was clearly struggling, and if she, as a sixteen-year-old, could communicate that as honestly as she had, I believed she probably was. Her siblings were struggling. Everyone was struggling.

I was struggling.

Mostly with admitting to myself what an absolute tool I was. Because I didn’t make that cup of tea. Instead, I stumbled across the room and curled up on my bed and lay there, wondering what the hell I was supposed to do.

I was astraight-laced man. I did not share beds with other men.

I had no idea why that was even an issue because I had spent a very large part of my life dealing with my son’s ideas of who he was supposed to be. When reading between the very blurry lines of the mixed signals he’d always presented, Reuben had never been straight. He’d been the most generous human being with that heart of his, and his crushes had been violently passionate and not easy to miss.

Yet here I was. I knew things. I knew how the human heart worked. How emotions and attraction made people do strange things. Also not-so-strange things, because at the end of the day, we were all just that: human beings in need of other humans. Touch. Affection. Understanding and…