Page 80 of Second Story

I catch it, almost dropping my phone in the process, and up until now, I’ve been in a hurry. Time stops when my screen fills with an email sent from a prison.

Got the photos you sent of Joe.

That should be good news after so many of the shots I sent never made it to her.

This isn’t.

Don’t let him anywhere near Lenny.

I can’t parse what I’m reading. Can’t compute why this email also instructs me to come a day early for an emergency welfare visit. It might as well be written in the same code only someone like Joe’s brother could make sense of. I’m still trying to understand when I get to the closing sentences of this desperate message.

Joe’s train starts to pull out of the station. I lurch like it does. Then I stagger towards his window, walking alongside to turn my phone to face him, and a frown returns that makes him look so much like his brother.

Joe shaking his head means he must have read her next lines.

You can’t trust him. Not after he watched the drug squad destroy our home.

Joe shakes his head again, so I guess he’s read another damning sentence.

He didn’t only watch.

Steam blasts from the train on the other side of the platform.

I still get a close-up view of Joe reading what feels like a final nail in a happy-family coffin.

He led the drug squad to me.

22

ISAAC

It wasn’t Joe. It couldn’t be. That only leaves one other option, a conclusion Joe must also come to.

He’s up and on his feet in an instant, and I’ve seen so many expressions from him. This devastation spellsJoshas clearly as if he shouted. I should know. I just saw the same heartbreak in a school car park when Joe remembered life without his brother in it.

That version only hinted at what I witness as the train picks up speed.

Joe’s so unsteady, he lurches like I did already.

Like I do again.

It doesn’t matter that both of my feet are planted on a concrete platform. Everything I took for granted as sure and solid fractures when I take a second look at a desperate message.

Don’t let him anywhere near Lenny.

Steam billows from the old locomotive behind me, clouding my view of the high-speed London train departing with my brother’s hero aboard. It doesn’t only carry away someone he trusts.

Lenny loves Joe.

I let that happen.

Me.

The one and only person left to keep him safe in Mum’s absence.

My phone rings, Joe calling, and part of me wants to drop the handset like Noah once dropped an envelope into a time capsule as if it burned him. The other part of me that a librarian once had to give survival lessons hasn’t learned a single fucking thing—I clamp my phone to my ear in a hurry to listen.

“None of that happened.” Joe must realise that he just called my mother a liar. He backpedals so fast he stutters. “I-I mean, she didn’t see me because I wasn’t there, and she can’t have seen Josh.”

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