Page 139 of Too Close To Home

“Jesus, Harry.”

“I know. Bit out of character. So, if you could tell me you’re surprised it’s taken this long for me to completely lose my mind and how Chris wouldn’t think any less of me for wanting to sleep with another man, that would be very helpful right about now.”

She waited a beat, to wreak havoc, no doubt. Then, finally, “Chris doesn’t get to think anything about it, Harry. He gave that up.”

“Yeah.” Harrison dropped his head back against the seat with a dull thud. “That’s sort of the problem, though, isn’t it?” He wiped a hand over his mouth before staring unfocused through the rain streaking the windscreen. “He left me to fucking do this. We said forever, didn’t we? I was fine with my version of that. It made sense.” He tightened his fingers around the steering wheel. “I don’t want this. I don’t want to start over at forty-bloody-three years old. I don’t know how to be with somebody else. I don’t know who I am with somebody else.”

“Oh, Harry…”

“I knew how to be with Chris. And now I’m sitting in my fucking car wanting to turn around and go back upstairs to a man I’ve known for barely a week.”

That one hurt to admit.

Harrison closed his eyes.

“And of all people, why Jake bloody Whitton? He’s younger. More than ten years younger. He’s involved in my fucking investigation. He’s impulsive and infuriating and apparently incapable of staying out of trouble for longer than five minutes.” Harrison breathed out. “And he’s offensively attractive.”

“Offensively?”

“Yes.”

“That bad?”

“Worse.”

Nigella laughed softly.

Harrison didn’t. He carried on. “And you know what the really fucking inconvenient part is?”

“Other than him being a suspect?”

“Person of interest.”

“Harry.”

“That I fucking want him.”

“Oh, Christ, Harry.” Her voice softened, the humour dropping away. “All right. Slow down a second.”

Harrison did. Or tried to. He drew in a breath, held it, let it out again, slower, causing the windscreen to mist.

“Good. Again.”

He obeyed, eyes fixed on the blur of rain ahead.

“Okay.” Her tone returned to that familiar cadence, the one she’d learned somewhere between interview rooms and counselling suites. “Right. Let’s start with this. What you’re feeling? Completely normal. Messy, inconvenient, badly timed, but normal.”

There she was. Professional, but never detached.

Nigella always had that balance. Even back when she’d been in the job. Uniform first, then safeguarding, then years buried in domestic violence cases where the lines between victim, survivor, and system failure blurred more often than anyone liked to admit. She’d seen things. Carried them. Same as him.

Same as Chris. Her brother.

Being a Boswel, she’d never really had a choice. Chris’s family were police through and through. Generations of it. Service. Duty. An expectation so ingrained it didn’t need saying aloud. They were both meant to follow. And they had. Chris had gone into firearms. Nigella had started on response, same as him. They’d met on their first day of training at Hendon, became fast friends from the start, then she’d introduced him to her big brother, and Chris had smiled at him across a kitchen while clutching a beer, and not long after, Harrison became her family. Properly.

But safeguarding had worn her down in ways she hadn’t expected. Not the violence itself; she could compartmentalise that. It was the pattern. The repetition. Women cycling back through the same doors because there was nowhere else to go. Systems set up to protect them missing the mark by inches, yet feeling like miles.

Then Chris died, and her trust in all of it went with him.