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Georgie came round on a Sunday, the way she usually did these days, with a carrier bag full of things she insisted they needed and absolutely did not. She was wearing a coat too warm for the weather because she ran cold, always had, according to Jamie, since she was a girl.
Roy heard the doorbell go and the particular scramble that followed it, socked feet on the hallway floor, far too fast for a grown man. By the time he had made it out of the kitchen Jamie already had the door open and his mum halfway through it, wrapped in a hug that lifted her clean off her feet for a second.
"Put me down, you great lump," Georgie said, while laughing into his shoulder.
Jamie set her down and kissed the top of her head like it cost him nothing at all. "You look cold."
"I'm always cold."
"You're always cold," he agreed, already reaching to take the bag off her whilst steering her in towards the warmth. Roy stood in the kitchen doorway and watched it happen the way he always did.
It wasn't the first time. Georgie had been round enough now that there ought to have been nothing new left in it. But there was something about the two of them together that still caught him a bit off guard, every time, like turning a corner and finding unexpected weather.
"Roy," Georgie said, and came straight over for a hug of her own, brisk and certain, the kind that didn't leave room to be awkward. "You're looking well."
"You saw me a fortnight ago."
"And you looked well then, too." She patted his arm like that settled that, and swept past him into the kitchen like she had lived here longer than he had.
⋆˙⟡
The thing about Jamie and his mum in the house was that he went soft at the edges in a way Roy didn't get to see anywhere else. Not soft like careful, not the way he was around Phoebe, all performance and exaggerated wonder for a nine-year-old's benefit. This was different. Quieter. Like something in him just switched off the need to keep his act up.
He made her tea without being asked, and in the exact way she liked it, which Roy hadn't known involved half a sugar and a specific amount of milk splashed in before you could even think of removing the tea bag, which was some ritual passed down that made no sense and that Jamie performed anyway with total confidence. He also let her fuss over his hair, which had gotten too long again, without ducking away from her hand the way he ducked away from everyone else's. He laughed at things that weren't even that funny, just because she had said them. A private kind of laugh Roy recognised because it was the same one Jamie gave him sometimes, late in the dark, over something stupid neither of them could explain afterwards.
He called her Mum in a voice that dropped a register lower than his usual pitch, and every time he said it Roy felt something in his own chest shift slightly, like a piece of furniture being moved a few inches to the left. Not unwelcomed, just noticeable.
"You've gone quiet," Georgie said to him at one point, over her tea, eyes sharp in a way that suggested she had clocked him watching.
"M'always quiet."
"Not like that, you're not." She said it kindly, like she already knew the answer and was only giving him the chance to say it himself.
Roy didn't say it himself. He instead picked up the kettle and put it back on, even though nobody had asked for more tea. Georgie let him get away with it, with the same easy patience she seemed to extend to everything, and went back to needling Jamie about something from years ago that made him groan and put his head in his hands and insist he had been eleven, Mum, that doesn't count.
"Right," Roy said, mostly to have something to do that wasn't standing there feeling things. "Who's eating? I'm doing lunch."
"You don't have to do that," Georgie said, the way people do right before sitting down and letting you do exactly that.
"Didn't ask." Roy said, already pulling things out of the fridge. "Sit down."
Jamie hopped onto the counter instead of sitting somewhere sensible, swinging his heels against the cupboard door in a way that would have earned anyone else a smack. "He's dead good at this, actually. Better than the pub."
"You said that about my food once and I still don't know if it was an insult."
"Wasn't. Promise." Jamie reached over and stole a bit of pepper straight off the board, got his hand swatted for it, and grinned like it had been worth it anyway.
Georgie watched the two of them with a particular expression of someone enjoying herself far too much to interrupt it. "He never let anyone near the kitchen when he was little," she said. "Thought it was women's work. God knows where he got that idea from."
"Wasn't me," Jamie said quickly.
"No, love. It wasn't you." Something flickered behind her eyes briefly, gone as fast as it came, before she smoothed it over with a smile that didn't quite reach as far as her usual ones. "Anyway. He got over it. Used to come help me do the potatoes Sunday nights, once he worked out standing on a chair meant he could reach the counter. Used to dice them like he was defusing a bomb."
"Mum," Jamie groaned. "I was seven."
"You were nine, and you still cut them wrong." She turned back to Roy, entirely unbothered by Jamie's protests. "Ask him to peel a carrot sometime, see what happens."
Roy caught himself laughing, properly, the sound surprising him a bit on the way out.
"Don't encourage her," Jamie muttered, but there wasn't any heat behind it. And when Roy handed him a peeler and a carrot without a word just to see what he would do, Jamie took it while rolling his eyes, and set to it with far more concentration than the task required.
They all ate at the table, all three of them, which didn't happen nearly enough in Roy's opinion, as most meals were eaten standing up or off a lap while watching whatever was on the telly. Georgie kept the conversation moving without seeming to try, asking Roy about pre-season, asking Jamie about a teammate he had mentioned once weeks ago, catching every thread and pulling it back out at exactly the right moment.
"He talks about you a lot, you know," she said to Roy, as easy as anything.
"Does he," Roy said.
"Mm. Won't shut up, if I'm honest." She smiled into her tea. "It's nice. He didn't use to talk about people like that."
Roy didn't know what to do with that, exactly, so he didn't do anything with it. Just reached over and topped up Jamie's water without being asked, and if Jamie's ears went slightly pink at the whole interaction, nobody at the table mentioned it.
⋆˙⟡
Georgie had found the photo completely by accident. She’d been digging around for her reading glasses, buried at the bottom of the bag next to a tub of biscuits she was still very insistent they eat before they went stale, when her fingers found something else. Instead of the glasses, she pulled out a battered little envelope with corners soft with age.
"Oh," she said, like she had forgotten it was there at all. "Here, I meant to show you this ages ago."
Jamie took it without much interest, the way you take something you've been half-promised for weeks and stopped expecting. He tipped a handful of photos out onto the kitchen table, and went still.
Roy leaned over without really deciding to.
The photo on the table was of a boy, seven or eight maybe, gap-toothed, messy hair, squinting at the camera as the sun got caught in his eyes. He had a football tucked under one arm like it might get taken off him if he loosed his grip, and he was laughing at something off to the side of the frame.
Roy had seen photos of Jamie before. Team ones, mostly. The odd tabloid shot Jamie cringed at and Roy had privately enjoyed more than he would admit. But he hadn't seen this. This boy who hadn't learnt yet what his face needed to do to keep people out.
"God," Jamie said, with something in his voice that wasn't quite a laugh.
"You were seven there," Georgie said, settling into the chair beside him, tapping the edge of the photo with one finger. "Behind the leisure centre. You'd just scored past a lad twice your size and you wouldn't stop going on about it the whole way home."
"Don't remember that."
"'Course you don't. You were only seven." She smiled, soft around her eyes. "I remember it, though."
Roy looked at the photo for a while longer than probably normal for someone who hadn't even been there to begin with. It was the mouth, mostly, that drew him in. The way it curved. He'd have known that laugh anywhere, could have picked it out of a hundred photos of a hundred kids, because it hadn't changed at all. Not really, just had become better at hiding it when he wanted to.
But it was the rest of the photo too. The shape of his eyes narrowed against the light. The set of the jaw even mid-laugh, stubborn under the joy of it. He glanced sideways, from the photo to Georgie and back, and there it was again, plain as anything once you knew to look. It wasn't James Tartt's face staring back out of the past, but hers.
He hadn't thought about it in those terms before. Jamie so wholly made of his father's damage that Roy had never quite let himself wonder what was left underneath that hadn't come from him at all.
Turned out quite a lot had.
"You've got her chin," Roy said, before he had decided to say anything.
Jamie looked up. "What?"
Roy nodded at the photo, then at Georgie, feeling something close to caught out. "In the picture. You've got her chin. Her laugh, and all."
Georgie looked pleased in a way she was clearly not trying to make a whole thing of. Jamie just looked at Roy for a second too long, something working behind his eyes that he didn't put words to, and then looked back down at the photo like he was seeing it new.
"Didn't used to mind that," he said, quiet. "Being told I looked like her."
Nobody asked what he meant by used to. Georgie reached over and put her hand briefly over his on the table, and Jamie let her. Everything that needed saying was folded into the width of her palm over his knuckles.
Georgie went through the rest of the photos slowly, holding each one up before she let anyone else take it, like she was rationing them out on purpose.
"This one," she said, a photo where Jamie couldn't have been older than five, sitting in what looked like a shopping trolley with an expression of total outrage on his face, "was because he refused to walk another step and I refused to carry him. He sulked the whole way around Asda."
Roy let out a chuckle as he looked at the photo. "Seems like you've always been a drama queen then."
Jamie looked between the two of them with an expression somewhere between betrayed and fond, and reached for another photo before either of them could say anything else at his expense. This one made him go quiet in a different way. He was older in this one, maybe ten or eleven, standing outside of a house Roy didn't recognise, with a kit bag over his shoulder and Georgie crouching down beside him fixing up his shin pads.
"That was the day of the county trials," Georgie said, her voice had gone a bit softer. "He was sick with nerves the whole morning, wouldn't touch his breakfast."
"You made me eat it anyway."
"Course I did. Can't play football on an empty stomach." She looked at the photo for a moment longer. "I stood at the side the whole match, absolutely freezing. Of course I would forget my coat and everything, but I wasn't leaving early, not for anything. You scored twice and looked over at me both times before you even celebrated properly. Had to make sure I'd seen it."
"Mum."
"I'm just saying," She nudged his shoulder with hers. "Always did want me watching. Don't know why you're embarrassed about it."
Jamie didn't say anything to that, but he didn't put the photo down either, just held onto it a bit longer than the others, his thumb smoothing over the corner of it. Roy watched him do it and thought about all the away weeks over the years when there hadn't been anyone in the crowds in the cold, and didn't say anything about that either, because it wasn't his to say.
Instead he reached over and took the photo gently out of Jamie's hand when he was done with it, and set it carefully back with the rest, and let his fingers brush Jamie's on the way.
Roy sat back a little and watched him instead, watched the whole shape of him at the table, and thought, not for the first time but definitely more clearly, that this wasn't the Jamie anyone else got.
Not the one who did press with a grin built for cameras, all easy chat and nothing underneath it you could get a hand on. Not the one who deflected a hard question with a joke before it landed, who could talk for ten minutes about nothing and leave you no wiser than when he started. That Jamie had edges built specifically to be looked at and nothing else, a whole surface designed to give people somewhere to land that wasn't him.
This Jamie didn't have any of that up. He was sat easy in his chair, feet tucked under, laughing without checking first whether it was the right kind of laugh to be having. And the thing underneath it wasn't nothing, wasn't some careful blank he'd built to survive on. It was her. The way he argued a point just to keep the conversation going rather than to win it. The way his hands moved when he told a story, restless, needing to act half of it out. The stubbornness that came out fond rather than sharp, the same stubbornness Georgie wore across the table right now.
Roy had spent a long time thinking of Jamie as a lad who had built himself out of nothing, out of whatever scraps were left once his father had taken what he wanted from him. He understood now that wasn't quite right. There had been something to build on. Somebody had been steady in the cold at the county trials, and all of that had gone somewhere. It hadn't been erased by the rest of it. It had been waiting, tucked in under the wall, for somewhere safe enough to come back out.
Roy was starting to think that this might be it.
⋆˙⟡
They stayed at that table for a good while after that, going through the rest of the photos one by one. Jamie at a birthday party with cake around his mouth. Jamie asleep sideways on a sofa Roy didn't recognise, younger than he could easily picture him. Jamie and Georgie together, her hair different, both of them squinting at whoever was holding the camera, an ordinary Tuesday captured for no particular reason except someone had thought to.
Roy didn't say much. He wasn't sure there was anything useful he could add to it, and also it didn't feel like his conversation to steer. He topped up teas that didn't really need filling and let himself sit at the edge of it, close enough to see, which turned out to be enough.
At some point Jamie's shoulder came to rest against his, unhurried, and Roy didn't move away from it.
"You should take one," Georgie said eventually, gathering the loose photos back into the envelope, "of the two of you. I never have any of you together, not proper ones. Just whatever gets sent round the newspapers."
"We're not exactly a photo-taking household," Jamie said.
"Well, you should be." She was already pulling her own phone out, unbothered by the protests, the way mothers generally were. "Go on then, budge up."
Jamie rolled his eyes teasingly, but he was already turning, leaning into Roy's side properly now instead of just resting against it, an arm coming round his shoulder like it belonged there, which it did.
"Smile like you mean it," Georgie said, "not like you're being arrested."
"I don't smile like I'm being arrested."
"You do a bit."
Roy huffed something that wasn't quite a laugh, causing Jamie's arm tightened around him, and whatever his face was doing in that moment he wasn't able to control. He was thinking about the boy in the photo with the football under his arm, laughing with his whole undefended face, and the man beside him now who still had that same laugh somewhere in him, just further down, and how it kept surfacing more often now than it used to.
Georgie held up the phone and said something about how neither of them were looking at the camera, and neither of them fixed it, so she took the photo anyway.
"There," she said satisfied, as she turned the screen around to show them. "That's the one."
Roy looked at it. Jamie, laughing properly, caught mid-word about something. Roy himself, not exactly smiling but not too far off either, was looking sideways at Jamie instead of at the camera as if it hadn't been the point at all.
It wasn't a good photograph, technically. It was slightly blurred, badly lit, with the pair of them off-centre in the frame.
But it looked like something. It looked like a regular day that wouldn't be remembered until it was rediscovered in the photo. It looked, if he was being honest with himself, like the start of something rather than the middle. The kind of ordinary you only got to once whatever came before it had finally stopped weighing quite so much.
"Send us that," Jamie said, still not moving his arm.
"Already have," Georgie said, pocketing her phone, entirely too pleased with herself. "Now. Who's putting on the kettle properly this time?"
Roy excused himself to do it. He didn't mind, not really. It gave him something to do with his hands while the rest of him still caught up with whatever had just settled into place, quiet and unannounced, the way most good things with Jamie tended to arrive.
Behind him, Georgie was already teasing Jamie about something else entirely, and Jamie was laughing that same easy laugh, the one that had apparently always been hers first.
⋆˙⟡
By the time Georgie was finally ready to leave, the sun had started setting, leaving a beautiful golden hue to the sky. She stood in the doorway doing up her coat with an exaggerated slowness, trying her best to drag out what was left of the afternoon.
"Right," she said. "I'm off before the traffic gets silly."
Jamie hugged her the way he had greeted her while saying something into her hair that Roy didn't catch and didn't try to. Georgie held on a beat longer than the hug strictly needed, and patted his back twice before finally letting go.
Then she turned to Roy, and instead of pulling him into a brisk hug like earlier, she looked at him for a moment. "Look after him."
"Yeah," Roy said. "Course."
"I know." She smiled, properly, showing the same curve Roy had seen an hour earlier in a photo of a boy with a football under his arm. "That's why I said it."
She kissed Jamie's cheek once more on the way past, told them both to eat something green at some point this week, and let Jamie walk her to the car while Roy hung back in the doorway, giving them a final minute of privacy.
He watched them from the step, the two of them stood by the open car door for longer than a goodbye required, Georgie saying something with her hand on Jamie's arm, Jamie nodding along with his head ducked slightly in the way it always did when he was actually listening. Roy couldn't hear the words from there, nor did he try to. Some things were better left at the distance they were happening.
Whatever she had said managed to pull a proper laugh out of Jamie, the sound carrying back up the path, and then she was pulling him down for one more fierce hug before letting him go and climbing into the car.
Jamie shut the door and leaned back against it for a second, exhaling like he had been holding something in all afternoon without noticing.
"Alright?" Roy asked.
"Yeah." Jamie scrubbed a hand over his face, and when he dropped it he was smiling, it was a bit crooked, and definitely worn around the edges in a way that suggested he had been completely unguarded for the past few hours. "Yeah, m'good."
Roy didn't push it further than that. Just held out a hand and they went back into the house together.
⋆˙⟡
Later, once the dishes were done and the house had gone quiet, they ended up on the sofa with the telly low and neither of them truly watching it. On the coffee table was the envelope full of photos that Jamie had carried in without saying why.
"You keep looking at it," Roy eventually said, nodding at where Jamie's hand was itching towards the envelope without opening it.
"Yeah." Jamie didn't move his hand any closer. "Weird, innit. Seeing yourself like that. Before you knew what you were gonna turn into."
"Wasn't weird. You looked happy."
"I was happy." Jamie said plainly. "Didn't know it wasn't gonna stay like that, is the thing. Just thought that was what being a kid was. Mum, football, staying out all night with my friends. Didn't know to be grateful for it while I had it."
Roy shifted, turning enough to look at him properly. "You're allowed to just have the good bits, you know. It doesn't always have to lead anywhere bad to count."
Jamie huffed something that wasn't quite a laugh, but wasn't far off one either. "I didn't used to believe it, though. Thought the good bits were just waiting rooms. For whatever came after." He finally opened the envelope again, and thumbed to the photo of the county trials. "She stood there in the cold for me. Every week. Even after everything went to shit, she was always there."
"She still is."
"Yeah." Something eased in Jamie's shoulders, like he had been holding a bit of himself braced without noticing. "Yeah, she is."
Roy took the envelope gently out of his hands, same as he had at the table earlier, set it on the side, and pulled Jamie into his side. Jamie went easily, head finding Roy's shoulder like he had done it a thousand times, which by now it more or less had.
"Today was good." Jamie said, muffled, into Roy's shoulder.
"Yeah. It was."
"You were good with her, my mum."
Roy considered pointing out that he hadn't done much beyond making lunch and putting the kettle on many times, and decided against it. "She's easy to be good with."
"Not everyone thinks that," Jamie said, tipping his head back to look at him. "You do, though. Reckon that's half the reason she likes you so much."
"She likes me because I feed you."
"That an' all!" Jamie agreed, grinning now, some of his earlier weight lifting off him. He settled back against Roy's shoulder, comfortable and unhurried, and they stayed there a little longer until it had gone dark outside the window neither of them had bothered to draw the curtains on.
Eventually, Jamie levered himself up, stretching until something in his back clicked, and wandered off to the kitchen, with the day finishing the way it started.
Roy followed him through a minute later and found him standing by the draws, the envelope of photographs tucked under his arm like he wasn't quite ready to put them away yet.
"Alright?" Roy asked, taking two mugs down from the cupboard without being told to.
"Yeah." Jamie set the envelope down on the counter where it would be easy to find in the morning. "Just thinking."
"Dangerous."
"Piss off." But Jamie was smiling when he said it, and flicked the kettle on for the final time today.
Roy leant against the counter and watched the kettle come slowly up to the boil. He thought, not for the first time, that the past didn't have to trail a person into every room they walked into. Sometimes it just sat quiet in an envelope on the counter, harmless now, worth taking out every so often and holding up to the light.
Sometimes it was just a boy with a football, laughing.