Page 168 of Too Close To Home

Or what was left of it, anyway.

Because he’d once again become the main attraction in Hartswick. This time not for whispers in the pub, or the potential of making it big, but for anyone with a camera and a headline to fill. It started with the local paper. Politely enough, knocking on his door, asking for a comment. Then the regional lot picked it up. After that, it turned into people waiting. Outside his flat. By his van. Across the road, with long lenses they didn’t even try to hide.

“Jake—a quick word.”

“How did you know where to look?”

“Do you think this links to your sister?”

“Was Andy Mitchell involved in both?”

He stopped answering his door. Started coming and going out the back when he could, timing it between when they’d drift off for coffee or a smoke. It didn’t always work. Once they caught him halfway down the alley and followed him all the way to the van, shouting questions as if he owed them something.

He gave them nothing.

Only what he’d already given at the station. His statement. Clinical. Factual. Missing everything that mattered. The way his heart had nearly stopped when he’d seen a girl lying in the dark. The desperate certainty that this time it had to be Robyn. Then the relief of finding Emily alive colliding head-on with the brutal realisation that his sister was still out there somewhere... or wasn’t. It left him carrying a guilt he couldn’t admit aloud. Because Emily deserved to be found. She deserved every ounce of that relief. And yet some selfish, broken part of him still mourned the girl she wasn’t.

But that didn’t stop the vultures. If anything, it made it worse. Because they filled in the gaps. Online was worse. Always was. People who’d never set foot in Hartswick suddenly had opinions. Theories. Threads picking apart timelines, linking Emily to Robyn as if they were characters in some drama instead of real young women. Some of them had him down as a hero. Others weren’t so generous. Convenient, they said. That he’d found her. That it was the same stretch of land. Same family name. Same story circling back around again.

He stopped reading it.

He told his mum to stop posting on the Facebook page and inviting comments. He knew she never would, though. She wanted to keep Robyn alive despite what everyone else thought had happened to her.

He kept a closer eye on Teddy through it all too, making sure the noise from it didn’t get under his skin. Even if the police said it wasn’t connected, gossip didn’t care about that. Townsfolk remembered what they wanted. And Robyn always came back up. So Jake kept him busy. Dragged him along to jobs after school, showing him the basics, letting him feel useful. Took him to rugby. Fed him Greggs on the way home. Normal things. Routine.

Deacon came round to the bedsit one night, too, Raff in tow after Jake finally bought himself a proper bedframe. Deacon had practically forced the money on him as an advance from their next gig, then insisted he and Raff would help put the bastard together. Which, predictably, ended with Jake doing the entire thing himself while those two sprawled across the floor with Teddy and giving him what had somehow turned into a proper guitar lesson.

Still, it kept the kid off his phone.

Jake would take the win.

“See?” Deacon glanced up as Jake tightened the last bolt. “Told you he had it in him. Just needed someone who knows what they’re doing.”

Jake sat back on his heels. “You volunteering for that, are you?”

“Always, mate.”

“You’ll charge me tuition.”

“Course.”

“Or I could charge you rent, seeing as you’re apparently moving in.”

“Fuck that. I’ve seen your bathroom.”

Raff looked around the bedsit. “Place is dead nice now, though. Bit more effort, you might even pass for a functioning adult.”

“Don’t encourage him.” Deacon nodded solemnly. “Next thing you know, he’ll cut his hair and buy a bedside table.”

Jake flipped them both off and wrestled the bedframe into the gap where his mattress had been dumped on the floor for longer than he cared to admit.

Half an hour later, they were all eating pizza on and around the new bed, because apparently buying furniture immediately meant inviting everyone to sit on it. Teddy and Raff had gone back to arguing over bass lines at the other end of the room while Deacon sat beside Jake with a beer in one hand and a slice of pepperoni in the other.

Kept fucking looking at him, too.

Jake tried to ignore it. He knew that look. Deacon had been his mate far too long and had developed the irritating belief that this gave him unrestricted access to Jake’s head.

It didn’t.