Page 123 of Claim

“Are you sure?”

“If travel’s an issue, we’ll send a car. Be ready for six.”

“Tris—”

“Yeah?”

Of course, I wanted to see him. And not just to touch him again, though that was there, simmering under the surface. But more because I wanted to hold him. Check he was okay. Feel him in my arms and breathe him in. I hadn’t pictured our reunion to be so…formal. Not with how we started.

But the need to see him outweighed my fear.

“What the fuck am I meant to wear?”

He laughed. Warm. Familiar. “It’s just a house, Richie. I wouldn’t care if you turned up in grey joggers.”

“That might genuinely be all I own.”

“Then wear them.”

“Fuck…” I squeezed my eyes shut, pressed the phone briefly to my forehead, then lifted it back to my ear. “Alright. See you later.”

“I’ll be waiting, Richie.”

I smiled. “Yeah? I have been too.”

I ended the call and stayed there on the floor, pressing the phone to my forehead as if it might steady me. Lennon came back in, took one look at my face, and chuckled.

I glanced up at him. “Fancy going shopping?”

He rolled his eyes, then reached down and hauled me back onto my feet.

The way he’d been trying to do for years.

* * * *

A few hours later, I was sitting in the back of a black Range Rover probably costing more than every place I’d ever lived put together, dressed in a version of myself I barely recognised.

White top. Clean one. Fitted overshirt that didn’t smell of anyone else’s life. Dark jeans that still creased when I moved. New boots that hadn’t learnt my step yet. Fresh cut. Clean shave. Even fresh boxers. The full transformation, courtesy of the first benefits package I’d ever seen that didn’t come with a knife hidden inside it.

I’d scrubbed myself raw in the poxy little shower at the bedsit, mould and all, then stolen a tester of Hugo Boss from Boots because apparently that was what I was meant to smell like now.

Clean. New. Revived.

London slid past the windows in streaks of colour and light, and I chewed my thumbnail, the first real craving for a cigarette I’d had in months hitting hard. I didn’t have time to tell the fella to pull into the nearest petrol garage so I could get my fix as the car slowed. Then it stopped.

I looked up. “Fuck me.”

“Excuse me, sir?” The driver glanced over his shoulder at me.

I gestured weakly out the window. “This is… this it?”

“The Hale-Fitzroy residence.” He nodded. “They’ll be expecting you.”

Yeah. That was the problem.

The house rising behind wrought-iron gates did not belong on the same map as me. Cream stone. Tall windows glowing warm behind heavy glass. Perfect hedges. A sweep of garden looking assembled from flat pack rather than grown.

It wasn’t a home.