The kitchen clock ticked past six in the morning, yet a thick gloom persisted outside. Burgeoning rainclouds doused any ember of sunrise, plunging the peaceful hills and streets into the depths of a dark, damp swamp. Between the clock's strokes, flurries of tumbling raindrops rapped against the window to announce the passing of a bracing wind gust. The pub's old bones creaked in the cold's determined clutches.
As another potent breeze whistled by the window, Gemma tore her eyes from the screen of Avery's laptop and pushed the device across the coffee table. She had scrolled through the files countless times and lost a night's sleep thinking about it, yet like the papers scattered beside her, the drive's contents refused to change. Silverlake possessed hours and hours of footage from every landmark in town, and her brother had personally backed it up onto a device no larger than her thumb. Jacob had known how to reach out to her, and he had decided this gross invasion of privacy was a better use of his time.
Except her brother did reach out to her. And now he was dead, leaving no trace beyond a web of questions that only wove broader and knottier the further along its threads she travelled.
Rising to refill her glass, Gemma paced her steps carefully to avoid disturbing the pair passed out on the sofa. Nathan's resolve to scour the drive's footage had abandoned him after one too many lightless hours, casting him into an unwavering sleep. Avery had been quick to quip about her friend's fatigue, yet soon she too had slipped from consciousness to drool beneath the flannel shirt she had spread between herself and Nathan. Despite the disruption of Nathan's powerful snores and Avery's obstructive feet perched on the coffee table, Gemma had not mustered the heart to wake either of them.
A hefty knock clapped through the air, and Gemma choked down her startled sip of water. After confirming that the racket had not stirred either her friends or her irritable host from their slumbers, she crept to the front door and peered through the spyhole. Graham waited at the top of the stairs, wordlessly glancing at his watch. "Mr Gatland?" Gemma began as she opened the door, her eyes suddenly heavy with her many missed hours of rest. "What are you doing here so early?"
"Just Graham'll do. I leave that blighter Mr Gatland at the council offices," Graham answered with a sly grin as he swiped the flat cap from his bald head. Large spots of fresh rain darkened the length of his wool coat. "I'm after our Nathan. He's missed the start of his delivery round, and my gut's reckoning he's holed up here."
"Your gut reckons right," Gemma said, inviting the man in with an amused glance towards the snoring from the sofa. "This might be my fault. I asked Nate to hang out with me and Vee last night, and we ended up staying out for a long time."
"And you can't half tell! I haven't seen him this stone-dead since the time he helped himself to too much cough medicine," Graham cackled over the thud of the closing door. A shimmering glaze covered his eyes as he regarded his sleeping son, yet it evaporated with a slow blink. "I'll give him a moment, seeing as he's usually dependable enough. Must've been something proper serious to keep him out all night."
Though obscured by the murk's dismal shade, Graham's diamond-tipped stare glanced by Gemma's face, nicking her cheek with a slim, shallow burn. "I wouldn't say it was serious," she answered as she swiped the flash drive from the laptop. No matter how she clutched the stick, its slight dimensions seemed to peek out of her hand or jab into her skin until she confined it to her back pocket. "We just chatted about Jacob. I guess we had more to get off our chests than any of us expected, and we lost track of time."
Running a hand over his beard, Graham leaned against the granite kitchen island with relaxed familiarity. "Aye, I imagine you did. Damned shame, all that. Jake was a decent lad, and he really took the town's spirit to heart. I swear, soon enough it was like he'd been here his whole life," he recounted as he stared through the far wall. With an indefinite sound, he turned to Gemma across the counter. "How about you, lass? I know you've not had the best of welcomes to our town, but I hope you've been managing to settle in somehow."
"I'm getting there, slowly, with a little help from these two." As Gemma looked to the sofa, Nathan shook through a forceful snore, while Avery slumped down her seat until her beanie dragged over her eyes. Huddled together for one shutter-snapped moment, her friends revived the dim room with a fond, irrepressible light. "Okay, a lot of help. They've really looked out for me, even though they barely know me."
"That's how we are here. We look after our own." Graham extended his curled cap towards Gemma, delivering his syllables with paced wags of its smoky herringbone fabric. "It doesn't matter whether they're someone's blood family like you or the North girl, or just someone with the spirit of the land in them, like Jake had. If they respect our community, we'll do right by them."
Water rocked up the sides of Gemma's glass as she paused her sip. "Vee came here too? Where from?"
A dismissive scoff stirred from Graham's weary face, and he worked his thick fingers over his head's bare flesh. "Never you mind that. She'll tell you herself if she's wanting to," he grumbled, his nose scrunching at the bitter taste of his coming words. "And you'd be best shushing questions like that for a spell. Folk here don't much care for newcomers prying, as that Silverlake lot found out the hard way."
"So I've heard." Resting her elbows on the island's worktop, Gemma followed the swirl of her water around its glass. "What do Silverlake actually do here?"
Graham pressed two fingers to his lips, thoughtful mist settling over his eyes. "Far as I know, they run security for Croftwick, the Cox estate. Cameras, gates, and the like," he eventually said with a resigned shrug. "I don't get told the details, and that's fine by me. As long as they stick to Edgar's land and send their bills to his post box, it's none of my business."
The pub building twitched in the wind, and a shower of raindrops splashed against the windows. Studying the man's body language, Gemma added an airy, casual spring to her voice's step. "But if they did want to do anything in town, they'd have to run it by the council first, right?"
"That they would. And judging by what I hear from the others, they'd be better off asking the river to run backwards," Graham answered through a rough laugh. As his humour's momentum ebbed away, he pulled at his ear and leaned into the counter. "There wouldn't happen to be a reason you're asking about Silverlake, would there?"
"No! I mean, not really." Hurrying back to the far side of the counter, Gemma hid her hands behind her back and shrugged off the weight of the flash drive in her pocket. "I just thought it'd be nice to know what Jacob did for a living. We only exchanged a few messages before I came here, and he hardly mentioned anything about his life here."
Her words failed to ripple in the deep pools of Graham's doubtful eyes. "Now, I know you don't want to hear an old man's lectures, but heed one bit of advice: let the dead lie," he said, honing each of his final words with his sharpened tongue. "Nothing's bringing Jake back, however much you rake over it. We've lost one bright young thing, lass. We can't be losing you too."
Gemma let her gaze fall and tucked her hair behind her ear. "Maybe you're right. I'd thought I was done hurting over Jacob, but this..." she whispered as her burning cheeks drew shimmering tears from her eyes. "Sorry."
"Enough of that. You've nothing to be apologising for, unlike this one," Graham said, holding for a pause in his son's snoring before he thumped his foot against the floorboards. He chuckled in satisfaction as Nathan woke with a jolt, his startled arm floundering into the side of Avery's stirring face. "Afternoon, son! And to yourself, Miss North."
"What? Dad? Afternoon?" With dazzled eyes, Nathan fired wild looks around the room until he spotted the wall clock. His hot flash of panic dissipated into the cool, dark air. "Very funny. Listen, I'm sorry I overslept. We were –"
"Save your worrying, lad. I've heard the story from your new friend here while you were busy snoring away," Graham interrupted, parting from the island with a wave of his flapping cap. "I'll wait downstairs while you put yourself back together, shall I?"
The man strode out of the room without waiting for his son's response, and Nathan rubbed the sleep from his tired face. "Been a while since I passed out like that," he murmured between thorough stretches. As he swept his stray locks into place, he met Gemma's eye with a smirking shrug. "Guess it's tiring being the smooth talker of the crew."
With a slow turn of her head, Avery skewered Nathan with a withering look. "Dude, stop. I basically had to shove your loser butt over to Nadine before you'd even try." Her scowl softened into a grin as she reclined and replaced her foot on the coffee table's edge. "Meanwhile, I sneaked past a bunch of security measures and nabbed a shady corporation's top-secret data. Don't try to deny it – that was cool."
"Sure, sure. Especially when you got stuck on a window," Nathan remarked, his gentle chuckle climbing to the summit of a booming laugh under Avery's indignant glare. "Or was falling flat on your face supposed to be the cool part?"
"Hen – harriers, Gatland. You tried to distract a security guard with birds," Avery said between whipping wafts of her shirt against Nathan's side. Her friend deepened his laughter in response, and she raised her arms in disbelief. A devilish flame crackled in her eye, popping in time with the twitch of her mouth. "Settle this, Gem. Who's cooler: me or Nate?"
Gemma hunched over the counter, her head hung low. "You two can't be serious right now," she said, a groan bubbling up from her gut. Despite the protracted silence she shoved into the discussion, the two sets of eyes across the room still stared at her expectantly. She studied them both, play-acted at deep thought, and drummed her fingers on the island. "I've got to give it to the badass rock chick bartender. Sorry, Nate, but cool's not your vibe. You're...soft and sweet, like a teddy bear."
The mock hurt bowled Nathan into the back of his seat. "Hold on – a teddy bear?"
"And we wouldn't have you any other way, Pooh Bear," Avery said, throwing her arms around Nathan's shoulders to coax him into a tight hug. After settling for a long moment, she pulled herself free and leapt to her feet, tossing her bundled shirt into her former seat. "So, what's next? Do we pass the drive to Nate's dad? I'm itching to take down Silver-snake for dragging Jake into their 'Big Brother' bullshit."
"Me too, but all that drive shows is that my brother's a rogue creeper. We need something that proves Silverlake's pulling the strings," Gemma answered as she rounded the island. She fell back until the counter's edge pressed against her lower back, any warm trace of Graham's recent presence departed. "It looked like things were missing from his office. Did he keep work stuff anywhere else?"
Fixing the rolled-up sleeves of his shirt, Nathan murmured to himself in thought. "There was a van he borrowed to move equipment to the Cox estate," he recalled as he rose to collect his jacket from the flat's coat hooks. "If the police haven't shown up yet, it'll still be at Croftwick where he left it. I should be on deliveries today, so I can run you by to check if you want."
A lone amused sigh fled from Avery's nostrils, the fleeting sound underpinned by the scratching of her nail against her necklace's cord. "Assuming your dad doesn't stick you on stable-cleaning duty all day," she said as she stared out onto the rainy street, keeping her back to the room. "Because you can't dump the dirty work on Jake anymore, right?"
The girl's words had flown through the window to join the flurry of winds that encircled the pub, yet the unmistakable thunder of a sob rolled through the flat. With light, measured steps, Gemma approached until she was a pace from Avery's back. "You okay, Vee?"
"Me? I'm super. All good here." Turning suddenly, Avery swiped at the corner of her eye, though the gesture was too brief to clear her eyelashes of their sparkling dew. "You can hop in the shower first. And look after the loser when you head out, alright?"
Years of half-hearted therapy sessions had taught Gemma little more than to conceal as much of her pain as possible. Revealing pain meant revealing weaknesses, openings through which stern examiners tied down and interrogated her every thought. Yet in that moment, framed by the gleaming gazes of her new acquaintances, there was no call to justify her emotions. There was simply the invitation to feel them.
For the first time in five years, Gemma did not bottle her feelings up. For the first time in five years, she let her pain flow, and the emotion carried her across the last pace of distance to her friend. Tension tightened Avery's shoulders as Gemma looped her arms around her, and a storm of doubts gathered at the margins of Gemma's mind. The clouds vanished with the first brush of the girl's fingertips against her back, however, and she sank into their close, warm embrace, Avery's free-streaming tears summoning Gemma's own to her surface.
Gemma eventually managed to step back, a featherlight calm tingling across her skin as her and Avery's trailing fingers locked together. "I guess I'll see you later," she began as she smoothed the tremors out of her reawakened voice. Dark patches had soaked into the side of her hoodie, the memory of their shared tears sprouting fond roses across her cheeks. "I'll take some pictures of the fancy house for you."
Red cracks crawled through Avery's eyes, yet the flaws proved no obstacle to their fiendish twinkle. "And take something pricey while you're at it," she answered with a swing of their linked hands, the air stirring with fleeting notes of her sweet, spicy perfume. "Maybe wreck their cars too – you know, if you get the chance."
Caught between Nathan's perfunctory eyerolling and Avery's winking glee, Gemma did not want to utter a word. She only wanted to bask in the honeyed belonging that filled her heart to its very brim.