Page 90 of Second Story

“Your brother’s only clucking because he cares.” Joe does some mother-henning of his own by carrying Noah’s backpack for him and by making a promise to the one person who might just save my mother, “Yes, he’s spitting feathers about how youwent about it. About you not communicating your plans. You still did a good thing.”

“Yeah. You really did.” I should say more than that. Right now, I can’t find the words. All I can do is get into the cab Joe hails and listen to his rough but gentle pep talk.

“I’m taking you someplace safe. Your brother knows where and is on his way. Mr. Lawson will talk to you tomorrow.” He’s even gentler. “But I’m wondering if either of them are who you’re worried about right now. Are they?”

Noah shakes his head.

“I’m guessing that you’re worried about what this means for your trial. About what happens now and what will come next?” He doesn’t need Noah to nod. Joe tells him what he needs to hear the most. “We’ll find out together. I’ll be with you every step of the way, mate.” His leg presses against mine, and this sounds like a question. “All of us will be?”

It’s easy then to set fight aside and listen to a story that Noah tells once we reach a safe place that turns out to be a family home where a nursery needs more colour.

That’s where I get a glimpse of my future, I hope—Joe’s dad could be him, only with deeper care lines and all of his twin’s abruptness. His eyes are a reminder of someone else who Joe mentions when his phone next rings.

“Hugo? Yes, Noah’s safe. I’ve got him.”

Like the padre, Joe’s dad sees straight into my soul. “If you’re the reason he keeps running off to Cornwall, how about you keep him there?” He closes a door on Joe’s phone call, then brings Josh’s gruffness to a whole new level by asking Noah, “You think you’re in trouble?”

Noah nods.

“Trust me, people worrying about you is good. Means you’re important to them. Want to know what’s important to me?” He hands Noah a roller. Gives one to me as well. Picks up a third forhimself and tells us. “Getting this finished early so my daughter-in-law won’t keep climbing ladders.”

He pours paint, and everything Noah has held in pours out too once his hands are busy.

I’m meant to be a storyteller. Noah blows me away with his, and each twist stops my heart like a knife almost stopped his own from beating.

“Then what happened?” Joe’s dad inspects Noah’s paintwork, not making eye contact, which I think helps him to keep going.

All three of us cover drab grey with sunny yellow as Noah describes a stairwell splashed with scarlet. “Didn’t know I had that much blood in me.” He sets the scene for a stabbing that ended with a phone falling down a stairwell. “The screen smashed but it was the same make and model as mine. One of my mates found it. Got it to me in hospital. Mine had already been taken as evidence, so I knew it could only belong to one other person. I didn’t know what to do with it, so I hid it in my schoolbag and tried to forget about it.”

Joe’s dad rollers more sunshine over greyness. “How’d that work out for you?”

“It didn’t. I kept trying to forget and couldn’t. Got even worse when we heard from the court about the trial coming up soon. Then Joe turned up, and I recognised him from Wintergreen. I must have seen his brother. His twin.”

He hangs his head and crosses his heart the same way I once saw Joe do under a full moon when he’d thought he was all alone on that beach. When he was sure even the sight of him wasn’t welcome. Now Noah describes someone praying for a happier outcome.

“That’s what I saw him do outside a tower-block flat. He crossed himself before going inside. Did it over and over like he was desperate to have a prayer answered or something. The doorwas all smashed in and splintered, so I guessed Joe was police. I couldn’t talk to him, even when I found out he wasn’t. Sorry.”

He nods at Joe in the doorway whose call with Hugo is over, and I saw heartbreak from him earlier, but I don’t have a name for this expression that so closely mirrors Noah’s.

His dad does.

“You felt trapped. Kept your mouth shut about that phone to protect your family.” The close confines of the nursery mean I get to see this land for the two people who need to hear it. “Trust me on this: Family would always rather hear tough stuff than let you struggle. I think that every time I see Joe’s scars. What a mess.”

Joe closes his eyes, and I come close to lashing out for the second time today until I see the mess his dad means—his hand must have shaken to paint a line this wobbly. I can’t say his voice is much firmer as he corrects his mistake.

“That’s when I miss his mother the most. She would have talked Joe’s ear off until he spilled who scarred him. Could have got him and Josh talking sooner too after that happened. And she definitely would have stopped him from heading down that road in the first place. All he had was me. The best I could do was teach him how to keep his guard raised. Still would have done anything to save him from hurting. Me not doing that?” He shakes his head, more paint going off course. “Worst moment of my life.”

My heart has clenched so many times lately. It squeezes the hardest to hear Joe’s reaction.

“That’s why you can’t look at me?”

“Why else?” His dad sets down his roller, and Joe rocks as his dad clasps one of his hands to trace old wounds with paint-spattered fingers. “Getting to see and hear you help those schoolkids so they don’t have to be as brave as you were? That was my proudest.”

Hours later, we get back to Joe’s place, and he repeats what his dad told him.

“Never knew he saw me that way.” It’s almost midnight when he whispers, “Thought he was ashamed.”

Wintergreen is visible in the distance through the gap in his curtains, spotlit by circling police helicopters. He turns his back on the view of where things went wrong for so many of us and circles back to what else his father called him.

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