months after Aleksy died without this place, and without those two.
Tonight, feeling as though she might never stop reliving the caving in of the stash, she had instinctively sought this place out. Brett had let her in with an expression of understanding, and she could see the same shadow to his eyes that she’d seen in her own in the mirror.
“Come and drink tea,” he’d said quietly. He’d put an arm round her briefly and squeezed her shoulders, and then walked ahead of her to the sitting room without speaking. She was as grateful for his silence as she had been for the brief gesture of sympathy.
“You can have your usual spot,” he said. “Anna’s already making coffee and cookies.” He gave her a briefly worried look. “Will you be OK if Daniel comes, too? He called earlier.”
Jojo grinned at him, and curled into the corner of the sofa. “I’ll be fine. But I can’t promise we won’t gang up on you,” she said.
“I’d miss it if you didn’t,” Brett said wryly. “I’ll get you a cuppa.”
Jojo watched him leave, feeling a sudden stab of uncertainty. For the first time, it really struck her that nothing was going to be the same after this. How could they all trust each other, when it was overwhelmingly likely that one of them had killed Aurora Jackson?
Her customary spot on the sofa was just as comfortable as it had always been, but she couldn’t feel the implicit safety anymore. It had gone, and she doubted that it could come back.
* * *
—
BRETT RUBBED THE back of Anna’s shoulder once he’d returned to the kitchen. She was poised, a little nervously, in front of the oven, watching a timer.
“How are we doing?”
“Almost done, I think.”
Brett moved her gently out of the way, and pulled the door of the oven open, peering in at the slightly browned cookies.
“They need to come out now,” he said, and pulled the tea towel off the handle on the oven door.
“Sorry,” Anna said. “I was waiting for the timer to beep.”
“You have to look at how brown they are,” he said. “Nobody likes an overdone cookie.”
He slid the tray out, using the tea towel to keep the heat off his hands, and deposited it on the stovetop. They smelled right—chocolaty and wholesome—twelve of them in perfect circles.
“I should have done two batches,” he muttered to himself. “The others might turn up, and Connor will probably have four….”
“We’ve got biscuits if we run out,” Anna said, moving back over to the coffee pot and giving him a reassuring smile over her shoulder.
Brett wasn’t in the mood to be reassured. He felt like he had to get this exactly right, or it meant some kind of disaster was on the horizon. It wasn’t an uncommon thought process for him. That not being able to control a small thing meant that everything would slip.
It was a side he tried to hide from his friends. Only Anna really knew the anxiety that went into every social event, and that it had invariably been Brett doing all the shopping and fussing around making food beforehand.
It was more than control, though. It was how the group functioned now. Somehow, as Benners had morphed into Benham, and had become both a parent and a more solemn individual, Brett had become the glue that held them all together. He wasn’t convinced that the others really saw it, but he was conscious of the pressure on him, as much as he enjoyed it. He felt instinctively that without his willingness to soothe, to listen, and to persuade, the group would fracture.
He took a spatula and slid the cookies one by one onto a large plate, and thought they at least looked good. He wondered whether he ought to feed Jojo one or two now, or wait until Benners arrived. And whether he should have asked the other three, too.
Although neither Jojo nor Daniel had been invited, it somehow felt a little like complicity in something. The thought made his stomach knot up. He hated the idea that Aurora being found was going to finally, thirty years later, set them all against each other.
There was a clatter from behind him, and he turned with his heart thumping to see that Anna had knocked the jug of milk over before it had made it to the steamer.
“For fuck’s sake,” he said immediately. And then equally immediately regretted it.
“Oh God,” Anna said, grabbing for the dishcloth. “I’m so sorry.”
“Just