Blake
"Where is he?"
I'd left Shayne a giggling wreck when I’d gone back to find Sophia at the church. How he managed to afford his high was now very clear. He’s a useless twat and I can’t believe he’s sold us out.
"He can’t help it." I round on the woman who’s protected him, always given him what he wants. "You know how disturbed he is. He’s broken after what happened to Erin."
"Disturbed? He sold Sophia out. He’s no idea what she’s been dealing with." I pull at strands of my hair. "What happened to Erin was years ago, and yes it was tragic but he can’t let it ruin everything for all of us."
Mam sighs and drops her head into her hands. "You boys are such bloody hard work, do you know that?"
"Yes, yes, I know, you wish we were all perfect like Amanda." I pull a face. I love my sister but she’s the goody-two-shoes out of us. Even Darren has more dirt, and he’s a sodding Vicar.
"He’s just jealous, Blake." Mam sighs again as if she’s explaining something exceptionally simple to a young child. "He’s always been jealous because you’re the one who got out."
"Oh my god, Mam, that is such crap. He could have got out too, but he didn’t want to, he wanted to wallow and make us all feel like shit. And anyway I’ll be out of his hair in no time, because we won’t be able to stay here, not now." My tone is laden with the heavy irony of the situation.
Mam raises her eyebrow, scoring the old kitchen table with her thumb nail. "It’s we now is it?"
"You know that, it’s always been a we."
"All I’ve ever known is you waste your life on that girl, and she is a girl, Blake. She’s twenty-two for God’s sake. What happens when she wants to go partying with her mates, but you can’t be bothered because you want to stay in as that’s what people in their thirties do?"
"Not all people," I grumble under my breath before adding slightly louder. "She’s not like that."
"Now." Mam’s face is set, her expression immovable. "And when she’s bored of that because she craves the limelight, or she needs something new, are you just going to trail after her, carrying her coat and bag?"
"That is not what I do."
"No? Your dad always said he spent too much time carrying around other people’s shit and not enough time actually doing any work."
"Dad was too bloody kind then, clearly." I feel like shit trash talking the old man but my day is plummeting from bad to worse at an incredible rate.
I hit a reporter. I mean who actually did that in this day and age? Now I was going to get sued, and I’d make Sophia’s name all the worse.
Bloody Shayne. "If we are talking about wasting a life over a girl, at least mine’s been over one that’s alive." It’s a fucking awful comment to make but I’m so mad I want to tear the house down.
A flash of anger burns in the pit of my stomach. He isn’t going to get away with ruining us all with his crooked ways, not anymore.
I run for the stairs and Shayne’s room, the last door on the left of the landing. Mam always imposes a door open policy. Always has since Shayne was a teenager and his dicey relationship with weed began. I still don’t think he knows she used to clear out his room on a weekly basis, removing the hidden empty beer cans, scraps of foil and empty money bags which had never been used for counting coins.
I don’t knock. I barge straight in. The wind puffs from my sails when I find the room empty, the bed made with an almost military precision. I so expected him to be there smirking about the mess he’d made for me.
How had he called the razzers? How did he even know how to do that? What had he made by selling his older brother out? Enough to get as high as a kite that much was apparent.
I pull on his cupboards, sliding out his clothes as I look for evidence of what else he may have been doing. Who knew? He could have a meth lab in his closet and we wouldn’t know because he’s such a sneaky bastard.
The bottom drawer floors me. It takes a moment to make sense of the things I see.
Pictures of Sophia, most of them defaced, are spread along the Ikea furniture. Pictures of her on set before she’d gone to rehab. Pictures of her with Johnny Fairweather, him kissing her neck, her eyes glassy. My fingers tremble as I rifle through them, lifting at the edges. There are more than I can count. A splash of red catches my eye and with my tentative fingers I lift it, tilting it to the light. Sophia lays at an odd angle, red droplets dripping down from her wrist into her upturned hands.
Holy fuck. It’s the night she’d cut herself and overdosed.
Had someone been there taking pictures and not helped?
I'm sick in my mouth and it takes all my restraint to swallow it down and not puke on the floor.
Does Shayne know who’d been taking the pictures?
I grab at a folder, spilling the contents out onto my lap. Letters, all the same as the ones Sophia had been receiving since before rehab. How did Shayne know about these, have copies?
A silver digital camera is on the top of the chest of drawers. Standing from my crouch, my knees creaking with the strain, I grab at it and switch it on. I want to puke. It’s last night, in all its bare, exposed detail. Sophia and me.
I know the papers aren’t going to be focusing on the story of me hitting the reporter tomorrow. They have something far juicier and more lucrative to print. Sophia Jennings in a sex tape.
How had Shayne got these? He’s never been to America in his life.
It all makes so much sense.
I’ve always known Shayne resented me leaving when he endured his first rehab, but did he hate me and the girl I’d left him for so much that he would try to destroy us ten years later? What price was he willing to exact?
My eyes fall on another flash of silver and the frigid chill that steals the oxygen from my chest leaves me gasping for breath. Sophia’s security bracelet.
I’ve been thinking that the blackmailer was close to her home. It’s home alright, just the wrong one. I slip my phone from the back pocket of my jeans and hit Sophia’s number. It goes to voicemail and a tight band spreads across my chest.
I try again, my palms beginning to slick when it clicks through to my own grouchy voice telling callers it’s a number that can’t be reached.
"Mam!" I holler so loud my lungs resemble overblown balloons. "Mam." I pace from the bedroom, sliding down the stairs and clattering into the kitchen. Mam hasn’t moved, but as I come charging through the door, I see a glimpse of her I’ve never acknowledged before. An older lady with greying hair sat worrying her rings on her fingers as she tries to keep her family together. "Mam." I lower my voice a little. "Mam, where do you think Shayne is? I think he has Sophia. I need to find her."
My pulse beats erratically. Her eyes are filled with water when she turns. "He’s sick, Blake. I’ve been trying to help him, trying to get him to move on."
The bottom falls out of my world. She knew.
"Did you know he was threatening her?"
"It’s just his way of exacting revenge for taking you away. He loved it when the papers found out she was an addict. He laughed about it for days, said it was God’s way of paying her back." Her head shakes slowly.
"Mam." I lock my teeth and shut my eyes, rubbing my hand against my forehead. "Mam, he’s dangerous. He’s been spying on her, taking it too far." How he had done this, God alone knew. How did a boy from Wales end up stalking one of the world’s most famous women? How did his brother not work it out? I don’t have time for these thoughts. I beseech her with an imploring glance.
"He only ever wanted what you had, that was all."
"He can’t bloody have her, she’s mine." The words roar from my throat and I grip the back of her chair to stay upright.
She nods vacantly. "He’ll be at the beach, he’s always at the beach. He’s always where he lost Erin."
I start to run, my head still reeling, as I shout back. "Call the police and an ambulance." But I don’t know if she’s heard, or even wanted to hear so I hit the screen on my phone, and shout at Amanda when she answers. Someone will call the police, I hope.
It doesn’t matter how fast my legs run, they don’t seem to go quite fast enough. I slide onto the wet sand, my feet sinking as I scan the space wildly. It’s nearly empty, just a few dog walkers wrapped up against the out of season elements. I start to run heading east along the beach. At the end of the day it’s a fifty-fifty decision to make: east or west. There’s no other way apart from into the sea itself.
He’s always where he lost Erin.
Oh god, no.
Running on a reel in my mind is a film of what my life would be like without her. If I really was without her, unable to own her, to hold her. Even before, when I left, I kept a piece of myself remaining there with her—my heart. If she didn’t exist, then that connection would be gone.
"Shayne." I scream his name, the veins in my neck ache with the ferociousness of my call. "Sophia?" I run harder, my breath stinging in my windpipe as the harsh cold air slips a burning path down my airways.
This is useless. This desolate beach goes on for miles. I force myself to stop so I can concentrate, so I can pull myself together and actually think.
How can I think? How can I think anything apart from the fact my brother hates me and he has the woman I love at his mercy?
Think, Blake.
I bend down, catching my winded breath and then I see it, drag marks in the sand leading to the water’s edge. I move. How I move I will never know but I do, one foot in front of the other, each step taking me to the end of everything I know.
It will come down to the wire and I won’t be able to protect her because I love her. It’s the one thing I fear above all others.
I see him then, his dark head out in the frigid water. She isn’t there. I splash in, the cold not even registering as I power towards Shayne. "Shayne, please, stop."
His eyes meet mine but they aren’t the eyes of my brother. They are the wild stare of a madman. "Shayne, where is she?" A bubble of water erupts from next to him and he laughs as Sophia’s head surges from under the surface, coughing and spluttering, her skin a deathly pale.
"Let her go, Shayne, please." I want to step closer, but freeze when he lets out a maniacal laugh and lifts his other hand from the water. Clutched within his grasp is a syringe filled with a dirt brown liquid.
"Please don’t." My pleas become more of a sob. "Please don’t give her that." Last time heroin had entered her veins she’d overdosed, tipping over the edge. It had led me back to her, but then so had Shayne and his letters.
"Do you even realise you’re the reason I’m back in her life?" I edge a step closer, trying to keep as still as possible so as to not disturb the ebbed tide. "If you hadn’t sent those letters I would never have gone back to her."
Sophia is dangling from his hold almost as pallid as the sea.
He laughs, and it’s a horrific squall of emptiness. "So funny, that she turned out an addict too, yet you didn’t hesitate to help her did you? You ran straight back."
I shook my head, somehow attempting to claw in some calmness. "That wasn’t how it was. I didn’t go back, not straight away. It’s only when the letters arrived that I went."
"You still would have, eventually. You wouldn’t have been able to fight your obsession."
Maybe he’s right—but it didn’t change the way things had been.
"Who misses their own father's funeral, Blake, for a girl?" Shayne’s teeth chatter with the cold. Sophia’s eyes meet mine and a dark flicker of regret burns within their depths.
"I’m sorry," she mouths, but I ignore the communication, not wanting to give Shayne any other triggers to send him over the edge.
"It wasn’t like that, and Dad understood, Shayne. I spoke to him, he told me not to leave her unprotected."
Shayne’s dark eyes meet mine at this. I carry on now I have his attention, the whole time edging closer and closer. "Dad and I, we said our goodbyes. We aren’t like you and Mam, we just walk away."
Did he think it hadn’t hurt me? Did he think as I’d sat outside a sleeping young girl’s bedroom I hadn’t thought about them all that day; that I hadn’t missed Dad every bloody day since?
I can’t say this though. I can’t argue with him. This isn’t about us, it’s about Sophia. It will always be about protecting her.
Though I’m close enough to grab her I hold on, still not wanting to make the wrong move and fuck it up. "I never thought I’d have to protect her from my own brother." I lower my voice. "Shayne, this isn’t you. How did you do it, did someone make you?" I’m grasping at straws and I know it.
One side of his mouth lifts into a smile. "That’s the thing, brother, you don’t know anything about me. You left me before you had a chance to get to know me. I was just a kid, and you left. You left Erin and I to die."
I reel at his words.
"Her death had nothing to do with me. She was dangerous, Shayne. She nearly ended your life out in this sea that day, did you ever think about that? It could have been both of you.
But I’ve said the wrong thing because he screams into the air.
I can’t stop though, it’s all coming out. "I couldn’t join the police because of you. You ruined everything, was I supposed to sit around and play happy families?" I want to lurch forward and throttle my hands around his neck, but I hold still, even though my legs are burning with a need to move.
A demented smile on Shayne’s face transforms into a manic leer. "There is no happy family, and you don’t know anything big brother. The internet is a wonderful place to make new friends, especially when that friendship is based on a mutual hate of a washed up has been." His teeth chatter as the cold sea batters his internal temperature—what must it be doing to her?
A delirious laugh booms from his mouth, screeching above the rush of the sea. “You will never ever know who else wants her, and I’m going to love watching it eat you away inside. You will always wonder who wanted her dead.”
Just like that he lifts the syringe directly for Sophia’s neck. I see it in slow motion and I launch myself forward, knocking into Shayne’s chest and pushing him off balance. Sophia shrieks as she’s set free, her hands grasping for my body but I’m being towed under, the weight of my brother dragging me down as the sting of a sharp scratch jabs against my arm.
"No." She cries, her sobs running in time with the sea, but it doesn’t matter because I know I’ve saved her just like I always promised and at the end of it that's all that ever really mattered.
I. Saved. Her.