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Except perhaps he didn’t. Three years of counselling had certainly told him otherwise. Rationally, he understood all the things people had spent countless hours trying to make him understand.

Knowing them and believing them were apparently two entirely different things.

“Jake isn’t Chris,” Nigella said quietly.

“No.”

“And you’re not the man you were three years ago either.”

That almost made it worse.

Because less than twelve hours ago Jake had turned up at his cottage demanding answers about the woman in the river, and Harrison had done something he never would have contemplated three years ago. He let Jake in. Told him more than he should have, then allowed the night to become something else entirely. And this morning, when the woman and Robyn had followed them into bed anyway, Harrison had let Jake drag him beneath the covers and make it all disappear again. Let touch become want, want become pleasure, until for a few frantic minutes there’d been no unidentified body, no thirteen-year-old disappearance and no answers Harrison couldn’t give him.

Just Jake.

And it had worked.

That was the part Harrison didn’t particularly want to examine. How easily he’d let Jake become an escape from everything neither of them could fix. How readily he’d reached for the distraction Jake offered and given himself over to it. Because Harrison knew how easily another person could become the place he went when the rest of the world became too much.

He’d had that once.

And he’d lost it.

So quietly, he reached the point. “I cannot do that again.”

“Do what?”

“Build my entire fucking life around someone and discover I wasn’t enough when it mattered.”

Silence.

Nigella sighed softly. “Oh, Harry.”

“And I certainly don’t need Jake deciding I’m something he has to fix.”

“From the very little I know of the man, I’m not sure he’s under the impression anything needs fixing.” A beat. “Other than your roof.”

Despite himself, Harrison almost smiled.

“But he might want to know you. All of you. Even the bits you’ve decided are too much trouble to hand over.”

Harrison’s smile disappeared, and he glanced down at the paperwork scattered across his desk. Robyn. The woman from the river. Thirteen years of someone else’s grief spread beneath his hands while his own had just reached six hours south and dragged itself back into the light.

“And what happens when I do?”

“What do you mean?”

Harrison hesitated. Saying it aloud felt considerably more exposing than anything he and Jake had done in bed.

“What if he knows all of it and doesn’t want me anymore?”

A knock sounded sharply against the open office door. “Guv?”

Harrison looked up so fast, he almost dropped the phone.

Calder stood there, one hand braced against the frame, expression already telling Harrison that something else had gone wrong.

Nigella must’ve heard the change in his breathing. “Harry?”