Chapter 3 THE NAN AT MY DOOR

Tamsin

By the time the taxi reached Leeds, my phone had buzzed two hundred and fourteen times, and I had stopped looking at it somewhere around Huddersfield.

The driver was kind about it. He never asked why I was crying. He passed a packet of tissues over his shoulder at a red light, turned the radio down, and kept his eyes on the road like a man who knew better than to look. When I paid, he refused the tip. "Whatever it is, love," he said, "it'll look smaller in the morning."

I doubted that very much.

My flat sits above a bakery, up a staircase so narrow that the post always gets stuck behind the door. At five every morning, the smell of bread comes up through the floorboards and makes the whole place feel like a hug. I chose it for exactly that reason. It was cosy, it was cheap, and it was two hundred miles from London, from football, from anyone who carried the name Ashgrove.

For four years, that had been enough.

June was on my sofa when I walked in. She has a spare key, a bottle of red, and an expression I have learned to fear, the one she wears when she has read the comments so I do not have to.

"Tell me you didn't know about that recording," she said.

"I didn't."

"Then why does the entire country think you planned it?"

I stopped with one arm out of my coat. "What?"

She turned her phone around. The headline sat there in bold black letters: GRIEVING FIANCÉE OR CALCULATING OPPORTUNIST? Under it was a photo of me from the studio, caught mid-blink, looking guilty and faintly smug. Under that, thousands of comments, each one a small cut.

Four years she says nothing, and now this? Convenient.

Raff Ashgrove is a legend. Leave him alone.

Wonder who paid her.

"Paid," I said. My voice came out thin. "They think someone paid me."

"They think," June said carefully, "that you went on national television, called the best striker in England a liar about his dead brother, and then, what luck, an old voice message turned up." She put the phone face down on the cushion. "Tam. I believe you. But I need you to see how it looks."

I saw it. It looked like revenge. It looked like I had waited four years for the perfect moment, the perfect lighting, the perfect camera angle, and swung.

I sat down hard on the arm of the sofa. The silence in the flat felt too big. Downstairs, the bakery was closing, and I could hear the scrape of a metal shutter coming down.

That was when someone started pounding on my door.

It was not a polite knock. It was a fist, slow and heavy, each blow rattling the frame. June and I froze. Her eyes met mine.

"Reporters," I whispered.

"Reporters don't knock like they're about to kick it in." June stood and picked up the wine bottle by its neck. "I'll handle it."

"Don't you dare. You'll end up on the news." I wiped my face with my sleeve, smoothed my dress like that would help, and walked to the door on legs that felt borrowed.

I opened it.

For one long second, I forgot how breathing works.

Raff Ashgrove was standing on my landing in his training kit with a black jacket thrown over it, rain dripping from his dark hair onto my doormat. He was taller than I remembered. Broader, too, and sharper in the face, as if four years of fame and fury had carved off everything soft. The scar through his left eyebrow was new. But his eyes were the same grey as Silas's, and that was the cruellest thing about him.

"You," he said, in a voice so low it was worse than shouting.

"Raff."

"Don't." He stepped forward, and I stepped back before I could stop myself, which he took as an invitation to walk into my flat. He brought the smell of rain and cold air and something else, something I recognised and hated myself for recognising. Cedar soap. Same as when we were eighteen. "Don't say my name like we're friends."

"We were," I said.

His jaw flexed. "Do you have any idea what you've done?"

"I answered a question."

"You performed." His voice cracked on the word. "You sat in front of the whole country and used my brother's death as a stage."

"I didn't know about the recording!"

"Don't lie to me."

"I'm not lying!" I shouted back, and the force of it shocked us both into silence.

In the corner, June had not moved. The wine bottle was still raised, and she looked ready to use it.

Raff dragged a hand down his face. In the light from my cheap kitchen lamp, I saw what he had been hiding on camera for years. The shadows under his eyes. The faint tremor in his jaw. He looked like a man who had not slept properly since the funeral, and I had to remind myself, firmly, that he was the villain in my story.

"The club has pulled me from all media," he said flatly. "Two sponsors are reviewing my contract. My agent says if this isn't contained by Monday, I could lose everything I've built."

"That isn't my fault."

"No?" His grey eyes locked on mine. "At 11:42, Tamsin. That's what you said on air. That Silas called you, crying."

"He did."

"He never called me."

The words hung there. And for one unguarded second, something moved across his face that I had not expected. It was not anger. It was fear. The look of someone standing at the edge of a floor he had always assumed was solid.

"Raff," I said slowly. "What aren't you telling me?"

He stared at me for a long moment. I watched him make a decision. Then his jaw set, the mask slid back into place, and the frightened boy disappeared as if he had never been there.

"You're going to fix this," he said. "And you're going to say yes to whatever I ask."

Behind me, I heard June set the wine bottle down very, very slowly.

"Why would I do that?" I asked.

Raff looked at me with something that was almost pity.

"Because I'm the only one who knows what really happened that night," he said. "And I'm the only one who can get you in the room where the answers are."