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Too close.

Everything about this felt too fucking close.

He moved nearer the roof edge, crouching beside the gutter channel as if inspecting the standing water while his attention stayed fixed on the scene below. Because there was Harrison. Standing near the tape, talking to a CSI officer, coat collar lifted against the wind. Even at this distance, Jake recognised the posture instantly. The rigid shoulders. The stillness he wore when he was forcing emotion down deep enough that no one else could touch it.

Work mode.

Professional. Controlled.

As if less than a few hours ago Jake hadn’t had his mouth against the pulse in that man’s throat. As if Harrison hadn’t made that quiet wrecked sound when Jake kissed beneath his jaw. The memory slammed into him hard enough to make his grip tighten painfully on the gutter edge. Then Harrison turned, sweeping his gaze across the compound below. And for one impossible second, Jake could’ve sworn he was looking straight up at him.

Jake looked away first.

Dangerous, this. Especially at height.

So he exhaled hard, dragging himself back into the work before he stood there thinking about Harrison instead of where he’d planted his bloody feet.

The job helped. It always had.

By midday his shoulders burned pleasantly beneath the harness straps, and his gloves were black with rust, gutter sludge and sealant. He stripped warped overlap sheets from the east pitch, cleared standing water thick as soup from the box gutters, and exposed sections of old insulation gone dark and rotten beneath decades of leaks. Proper industrial roofing. Heavy work. Dirty work. The sort that forced his brain into its familiar rhythm.

Lift. Drill. Seal. Replace. Repeat.

His dad had worked these roofs before him.

Jake could still remember being ten years old, dragged to work with Donnie during the school holidays because there’d been no one else to watch them while his mum worked her shift at the bakery. He’d sit cross-legged on warm corrugated sheets with a packet of Salt ‘n’ Shake crisps balanced between his knees, drumming restless rhythms against the metal while his dad patched leaks in the rain and barked at him not to shuffle so bloody close to the edge.

Robyn had never come up onto the roofs. She’d been terrified of heights.

So while Jake sat above the estate listening to rain hammer steel, Robyn wandered below instead. Skipping along the river path in oversized jumpers. Climbing over broken concrete barriers. Picking wildflowers from cracks in the old loading bays as though the whole rusting place belonged to her.

She drew, too. Constantly.

Every birthday or Christmas she’d ask for another sketchbook, filling them with chimneys, bridges, battered warehouses and the odd twisted tree she’d decided had character.

Another memory surfaced then. Sudden and sharp.

One summer, he’d climbed down for lunch to find her sitting on the kerb outside Donnie’s van, tongue caught between her teeth in concentration, charcoal smudged along the side of her hand.

“Whatcha drawing?”

Without looking up, she’d pointed behind him. “That.”

Jake had turned.

It was the ugliest building on the whole estate.

Four storeys of stained brick. Broken windows. Rusting fire escapes.

“Why that one?” he’d laughed.

She’d looked up, giving him the sort of patient smile reserved for people who simply didn’t get it.

“Because everyone always looks at the new, shiny things.” She’d returned to her sketch. “The forgotten things deserve some attention too.”

At the time he’d thought she were daft.

Now, standing on a warehouse roof twenty years later, Jake found himself searching for that building.