Page 165 of Too Close To Home

Jake hung his head, teeth catching on his bottom lip. The reaction wasn’t pride. Not relief either. That was uncertainty. Fear. “Am I in trouble?”

Harrison frowned. “For what?”

“Breaking in.”

“You had grounds. I’d have done the same with the information you had.” Then, softer, “Though next time, you can call me first.”

“Can I?”

“Course.”

Jake seemed to think about that. Then he took a breath, chest rising, making the pendant on his necklace glint against the blue lights. “Can I call you for something that isn’t…this?”

That caught Harrison off guard in a way nothing else had. Highly inappropriate. Poor timing. Entirely the wrong place. And yet…it was the way Jake looked at him. Open. Unfiltered. Not asking for anything more than the possibility.

So Harrison gave him it, “Yeah. I’d like that.”

Jake smiled, but it was brief. Then he shook his head. “I could’ve been wrong. I didn’t know if he’d come back. Or what he’d done. I didn’t…” He dragged a hand through his hair, leaving more dust behind. “I didn’t think. I just…went in. Like I always do.”

Harrison stepped in, rubbing his hand up and down Jake’s arm. “Hey. It’s alright. You did what needed doing. Nothing is coming back on you about this. You followed your instincts, and it paid off.”

“This was luck. That’s all it were. I was wrong about Andy. About Brodie. I could’ve been wrong about this but—”

“You weren’t.” Harrison lifted his hand from Jake’s arm to cup his face. “You were right. You got her.”

Jake stilled under his touch. And he looked at him, as if trying to take that in and couldn’t quite make it fit. Then his eyes shuttered, lashes lowering as he swallowed hard. As if struggling with what he felt. What he was going to say.

God, Harrison ached for him.

“When I saw her…” Jake swallowed. “When I pulled that blanket back and saw her hair…” His voice faltered, catching somewhere between his chest and his throat. “I wanted it to be Robyn.” The confession hung between them, stripped of everything but the truth. “And I were…” He shook his head. “I were so fucking gutted that it weren’t.” He looked up then, meeting Harrison’s gaze head-on, not hiding from it, not softening it. “I hate that. Hate that I have to feel fucking guilty about that.”

Harrison drew a breath. Not because it surprised him, but because it didn’t. He understood it. Too well. And he brushed his thumb along Jake’s cheek, feeling the grit of dust and stubble, the heat of his skin beneath it, and wanting, so very badly, to tell him. To share the pain. But it wasn’t that moment.

He wasn’t sure he’d ever get the words out anyway.

So he said, “That’s understandable.”

And it was.

God, it was.

He knew that thought. Knew it in a way that sat too deep to ignore. Though…he knew the other side of it. But he knew that split second, before reality caught up, before it became fixed and permanent, when the mind reached for anything else. Anyone else. Because he’d had it too. When standing in the garage, the smell of oil and cold air, the world narrowing to that single, unbearable sight, and when, for one fractured, shameful moment, he’d hoped it was someone else hanging from the end of a rope.

Someone else’s husband.

Someone else’s everything.

That he hadn’t been lied to.

“I had to, baby. Had to.”

Harrison forced a breath through the most horrific memory of his life, bringing himself back to the present. To Jake. The man standing in front of him, carrying a different version of the same impossible grief. And the heart didn’t care how wrong it was. It reached. Clawed for the version of the world where the person you loved was still there. Still alive. And Harrison knew, as Jake would too, that letting go of that thought hurt more than holding onto it ever would. Because while they could still remember them, it was as if they’d not really lost them at all.

Jake shuffled closer, as if he’d sensed where Harrison’s head had gone, and for a second, Harrison thought he might close that space between them. That he’d lean in, rest his forehead on his, kiss away those memories and give him new ones.

And God, he wanted him to.

More than he should.