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Thirteen


Ludub

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Thanks everyone for the continued support. I really appreciate all your comments :wub:  Hope you all like the next chapter.

WARNING: VERY ADULT THEMES

Chapter 11

 

16 hours ago...

 

Heath pulled his phone out of his pocket, and peered at the unknown number on the screen, wondering who would be calling at this time of night. Everyone that he and Bianca hung around with these days had small children and would have known not to call too late. It was nearly midnight! He glanced down at Bianca apologetically and cancelled the call. He figured if it was that important then they'd leave a message. Tonight was date night. He smiled at his wife, who was lying stretched out on the couch with her head resting on his thigh, and he gently stroked her hair in that way that she always liked. Harley had finally gone to bed and Darcy was at a sleepover, so they were enjoying a bit of a cuddle on the couch, free of Lego and toy cars, for once. Bianca had got some rubbish romantic movie to watch and he was doing his best to pretend that he was enjoying it. He was grateful that it wasn't one of those ones with subtitles that she sometimes forced him to watch with her! He was nearly sure that she just used foreign films as some kind of punishment when he'd done something to annoy her.

His phone began to ring again, and he looked at the screen, wondering if it was a number he should know. Maybe one of the new staff? If it was, he thought they could leave him a message, or better still, call him at a more sensible hour and not in the middle of the night! He cancelled the call again and smiled a little at himself at how staid and middle-aged he was becoming. A River Boy tutting about late night phone calls!

Nearly immediately the phone rang again and Bianca gave an exasperated huff. "Answer it, Heath!!!" she said, pulling herself into a sitting position. "Maybe it's something to do with Darce!"

He furrowed his brows and answered the call. "Yeah?!" he said, doing little to hide his annoyance. "Brax!" he exclaimed, with his eyes suddenly wide with surprise. "Mate! You okay?!"

Bianca turned to face him, crouching on the couch on her knees. She looked excited and she couldn't hide the fact that she wanted to know what Brax was saying. She raised her eyebrows at Heath questioningly.

"What?!" he said in a voice that sounded a little breathless with shock. "Slow down Brax! What are you trying to tell me?!"

Bianca went to speak, but he shushed her, and she was more than a little offended when he held his hand up to tell her to be quiet. She'd been going to shout at him, but her annoyance quickly faded when she noticed how serious his expression had become. She could see now that something was terribly wrong and that Heath looked quite shaken and upset. She put her hand on his knee and gave it a little squeeze in an attempt to be supportive. She looked at him as he sat there listening, and she noticed that his face had blanched white and he gave her a little shake of the head to tell her that it wasn't good news. Brax was clearly doing a lot of talking which wasn't usual for a Braxton, and Heath had barely uttered a word since he'd answered the call. She was getting worried now. She began to wonder if Kyle had been hurt or killed. Or maybe Ricky and the baby?! It seemed the only likely reason for Brax to get in touch and for Heath to be so upset.

"Oh God!" moaned Heath, rubbing his face in his hand. "Uh... Now? ...Yeah, just give me a sec..."

He motioned for her to hand him the remote control and she reached over and got it for him off the coffee table. He switched back onto the TV signal and said, "Okay, which channel?"

As he clicked onto the right channel, there was news coverage already underway and he caught the newsreader mid-sentence.

"…child pornography. The hunt for Simon and Jessica Hames continues, after sightings in Perth and Sydney have proven to be false leads.

Official statements released today have confirmed that a number of the bodies found on the property are those of very small babies, thought to be new-borns. DNA tests have concluded that they all share the same mother, and were in fact half-siblings. No details of any of the other bodies have yet been released.

A 36-year-old woman has been helping the police with their enquiries, and is known to have been the one who raised the alarm some weeks ago. Her identity cannot be revealed at this time, but it is known now that she was the victim of kidnapping at the age of nine, and has been held since that time in the Hames’ residence. On Friday 1st December, she is known to have entered a police station in Sandringham, just outside Melbourne, and identified herself as a kidnap victim, taken from her family nearly 27 years ago. Efforts are being made to reunite her with her family.

Some happier news in this case, is that one of the children discovered on the property at the time of the raid, has been identified as Hayden Albee, a child abducted at the age of three. This afternoon he was successfully reunited with his parents after being missing for nearly three years. The family ask that people respect their need for privacy at this difficult time.

Shockwaves today, at allegations that senior representatives of DoCS were connected to the paedophile ring operated by Simon and Jessica Hames. Two individuals, who cannot yet be named, have been implicated as having involvement and playing an active role, in the abuse and exploitation of children held for years in the Hames’ family home. Police are investigating.

Police are again appealing for any individuals that may have come into contact with the Hames’ to please get in touch with Melbourne police.”

 

“Have you spoken to him?” asked Heath, muting the TV as the newsreader moved on to another story. He sat forward with his elbow resting on his knee and his hand covering his mouth as he listened to Brax. “Yeah, I can do that” mumbled Heath, as he got up off the sofa. He grabbed the hair at the back of his head, pulling at it, and began pacing up and down the floor.

“You sure he’ll want me there?” he asked, looking worried. “You know I’m not good at this stuff… He needs you Brax” said Heath, with a sad sigh. After another moment he began to nod and he said, “Yeah, Brax, I know… I’ll do my best, okay?”

He hung up the phone and he stood for a moment staring at the floor with his fists clenched. When he finally looked up at Bianca, she could see that his eyes had welled up with tears, so she got up and put her arms around his waist. She looked up at him and said, “What was all that about?!”

“Kyle was one of those kids” he said, pointing at the TV. “That…. That’s where he grew up…”

 

*****

Present day…

 

“What kind of way is that to greet your brother?!” said Heath, giving Kyle a cheeky grin in an effort tot hide his nervousness.

"You haven't bothered to get in touch for months” said Kyle, furrowing his brow at him, “…and now you just turn up out of the blue... So, yeah... I wanna know why you’re here." repeated Kyle, narrowing his eyes and looking at Heath with suspicion.

Heath was holding baby Noah in his arms and was sitting with his feet up on Kyle's coffee table. He’d obviously been there for some time and there were coffee cups on the table as well as a screwed up empty biscuit packet. He and Tamara had clearly been getting on well. There was a huge and ridiculous oversized teddy bear sitting to one side of the room, and a selection of baby grows sitting beside Tamara on the arm of the couch. There was wrapping paper everywhere!

"I thought it was time I met my nephew... Isn’t that right, Noah?" said Heath, smiling down at the sleeping baby in his arms. Noah had a tight hold of Heath’s finger with his chubby little hand. “He's a bruiser, isn't he?!" he said, looking back at Kyle with a big smile on his face.

"Yeah, …he is" said Kyle, in a wary sounding voice. He looked at Tamara and raised his eyebrows at her in a questioning kind of way, and she smiled back at him and shrugged her shoulders. She didn’t know why he’d come either.

“That’s really why you’re here?” asked Kyle, throwing Heath a look that said he didn't believe him. "So… you just got a sudden urge to drive all the way here, mid-week, and without Bianca?  Just so you could meet your nephew?" he said, crossing his arms across his chest.

"Is that a problem?" said Heath, playing with Noah's tiny fingers. He was clearly glad to have the baby to distract him and to hide the fact that he was finding it hard to make eye contact with Kyle.

Kyle wasn't buying his story. It was all too much of a coincidence that Heath would just show up like this with everything that was going on. He was sure that either Ash or Phoebe must have taken it upon themselves to tell Heath. He glanced sideways at Ash, and the expression on his face told him everything that he needed to know. Ash's face had flushed bright red and he was looking decidedly guilty. He wasn't even able to look Kyle in the eye. Kyle nodded slowly, in a defeated sort of way, and threw himself in an armchair with a heavy sigh. "So you know then?" he said, leaning his head on his hand and looking thoroughly depressed.

Tamara looked around at each of the guys, surprised that both Ash and Heath seemed to know about Kyle’s history, and sensing the tension in the room.

"Yeah, mate... I know." admitted Heath, nodding sadly at him. He looked at Kyle sitting slumped in the chair, and wished that he was better with words, or that he was better at doing the supportive big brother stuff, like Brax. He didn't really know what to do or what to say. He'd never had to be the one that anyone came to for the emotional stuff. He was the fun one, the one you got drunk with, or who got you the drink when you were underage. He was terribly unprepared for this. Brax had sent him here to take his place, and be the support that Kyle needed in the most awful of circumstances, and he was going to have to step up and try not to make a terrible hash of it. He was incredibly nervous.

"Brax called me" said Heath, handing the baby back to Tamara, and sitting forward on the couch to face Kyle properly. "He asked me to come see if you're okay."

Kyle glared at Ash and then sat forward with his head in his hands, letting out a groan of frustration. "Seriously Ash! Is there anyone you haven't told?! Why didn't you just take out a full-page ad in the paper... Or maybe get a billboard outside the surf-club?!"

Ash's face burned red. "I'm sorry, mate. I just thought you could do with the support." said Ash in a low and mumbled voice. "They're your family... Let them help you." he said, putting his hand on Kyle’s shoulder.

“Can you just leave, please?” said Kyle, angrily pulling his shoulder away from Ash’s hand. He looked up at him with anger and sadness in his eyes and said, “…and I’d appreciate it if you could stop talking about me behind my back… It might be pretty juicy gossip but it’s my life that you’re gossiping about…”

“Mate! It wasn’t like that!” said Ash, suddenly feeling very guilty. “I didn’t mean to upset you” he said. He thought that Kyle had every right to be angry with him. When it came down to it, he was pretty sure now that he’d made a terrible mistake in telling Brax. It hadn’t been his secret to tell, and if Kyle hadn’t wanted to tell Heath and Brax about it, then that should have been his choice to make. He felt bad that he’d taken the decision out of Kyle’s hands, and forced this on him, especially now that he knew how much Kyle didn’t want people to know.  Brax had been shocked when Ash had called him, and explained what was going on with Kyle, and it had been the first time that he’d ever heard Brax lost for words. To know that his brother was going through something so difficult, and that he couldn’t be there to help him, was very hard on Brax. When Ash had realised how upset Brax was about it, he began to think that it might have been better if he’d kept it to himself and pretended that he didn’t know. He really wasn’t sure that Heath had been the best person to send in his place, but Brax had been adamant that Kyle needed family at a time like this, and if he couldn’t be there, then Heath was going to have to step up to the plate. Despite Ash’s misgivings, Brax had insisted on calling him. Still, he was here now. He just hoped that Kyle having Heath’s support would help.

“Just go!” said Kyle, looking away from Ash and clenching his teeth in anger. He wanted Ash to go before he ended up hitting him. His whole body felt tense, and one way or another, he was going to have to release the tension. Maybe he’d end up hitting Heath instead?

Ash looked at Heath and Tamara and threw them a nervous smile that was more like a grimace. He looked back at Kyle and said, “Okay, Kyle… I’m gonna go.” He turned and walked out the door, shaking his head at himself in a disappointed sort of way. He knew that he was in the wrong but there was little that he could do about it now.

Kyle sat staring into the distance, silently seething, and clenching his jaw. He was furious with Phoebe for breaking his confidence like this, and more than a little hurt. He was angry with Ash for telling Kat, and even more upset with him for telling his brothers. He knew that they’d always seen him as some sort of weakling, and not a real Braxton, and now with all of this, they had irrefutable proof. He glanced at Tamara and wondered if she’d gone and told people too. Was there anyone in his life that he could actually trust?!

After a few minutes of uncomfortable silence, Heath cleared his throat in an exaggerated manner, and said, “Well, are you gonna offer me a beer or what?”

 

*****

10 Years Ago…

 

Seventeen-year-old Kyle held his arms out and allowed the prison guard to pat him down, manhandling him in a way that was a little too intimate, and that brought back some very unwelcome memories that he tried to push away again. The guard nodded for him to move along so he put his arms down again and moved in the direction that the guard had indicated. He joined the large group of relatives waiting to go in and see their loved ones, and he shuffled from foot to foot anxiously, sticking his hands in his pockets to hide how much they were shaking. He was so nervous!

Another guard unbolted the large metal door and ushered all the people inside. He stood there, feeling very unsure of himself just inside the doorway, being bumped and jostled, as the others made their way to visiting tables around the room. All the prisoners were already waiting, dressed in yellow bibs to identify them, and he scanned the tables trying to see if he could recognise the man he’d come to see. All he had was an old 1980s photo from his case file, so he wasn’t sure if he’d know him when he saw him. He scanned the faces and suddenly one jumped out at him. It was a man with grey hair and a big handlebar type moustache and beard, like you see on motorcycle gang members. He was heavily tattooed, and pretty rough looking, and he looked like someone that might kill you if you looked at him the wrong way. He didn’t look like a very nice man, and seeing him sitting there now, Kyle couldn’t help but think back to some of the men who used to come to Simon and Jessica’s house. They had that same cruel look as this man, and a coldness in their eyes, a little like a lizard. Sometimes in his nightmares, those men that had waited for him upstairs, transformed into lizards with scaly skin and tongues that flicked in and out. He still woke up screaming every now and then. This man looked like one of them.

The man made eye contact with him and gave him a quizzical sort of look. Kyle dithered by the door, suddenly unsure that this had been a good idea, and wondering if he could just make a run for it. One of the guards had been watching and eventually approached him. He asked Kyle who he was there to see and then pointed at the man he’d been looking at. “That’s Danny Braxton, right there.” said the guard, giving him a pat on the shoulder.

Kyle took a deep breath, clenching his fists, and slowly made his way over to Danny’s table. He slid into the chair opposite Danny, staring at the table, and trying to summon the courage to look him in the eye. “I’m Kyle Bennett” he said, glancing up and sticking his hand out to him.

Danny shook his hand and started to laugh a little mockingly. “Well, aren’t you just the little gentleman?!” he teased. “I thought they said you were seventeen?!” he said, tilting his head at him and looking at him with an air of disappointment. “You’re a scrawny little thing aren’t you?!”

Kyle blushed a little red and stared down at the table in shame and embarrassment. “I turned seventeen a month ago” he said. “I’ve always just been a bit small… I guess.” He mumbled feeling that he owed him some sort of explanation, even though he didn’t really have one. Not one he wanted to talk about anyway… Everyone always said that he was small and that he looked young for his age. He figured that it must have been from all the years of malnutrition and near-starvation. Living in the dark probably hadn’t helped either. It was a wonder that he hadn’t developed rickets!  He was hoping that he’d have a sudden growth spurt one of these days and that he’d catch up eventually. He glanced up at Danny and tried to cast his mind back to when he was little. “I don’t remember you” he said, feeling a little guilty.

“Well you’re not what I thought you’d look like!” he said, looking him up and down with a strange expression on his face. “I mean, I haven’t seen you since you were about five and I don’t have any photos of you, but I always thought you’d grow up to be a bit of a bruiser… not some scrawny little thing…”

Kyle hung his head a little bit, feeling Danny’s eyes on him, and he wanted to hide somewhere that he couldn’t be seen. Having his father tell him what a weakling he looked was not what he’d been hoping for from this meeting.  

“I thought you’d look like Daryl… You looked so much like him when you were little” said Danny, as he reached across the table and took hold of Kyle’s chin, ignoring the fact that it had made him flinch, and then he tilted Kyle’s face back and forth for a better look. “Yeah, well… Looks like you’ve got your mother’s looks… That’s not a Braxton face… Far too pretty!” He began to grin from ear to ear and leaned towards him across the table. “What is it they call you again? Kylie, was it?!” he asked, as he started to laugh loudly.

Kyle glared up at him and his face flushed red with anger. He had no idea why he’d come to see this man when he had a perfectly good father figure at home. He and David hadn’t been getting on for some time, with all the usual teenage angst, but one thing was clear! David had been more of a father to him than Danny had ever been. He didn’t know what he was doing wasting his time visiting such a low-life like this!  “Better than your ugly mug!” he said, starting to get up from the table.

Danny caught his arm and said, “That’s what I was looking for! A bit of spirit!” He smiled at Kyle and pulled him back down into the seat. “Maybe there is a bit of Braxton in you after all! C’mon, we’ve still got half an hour… Let’s try to get to know each other… eh? …I was just kidding.” Seeing how angry Kyle still looked, he tilted his head at him a little apologetically, and said, in a pleading voice, “Please Kyle?”

Kyle sat back in his chair, staring him in the eye a little defiantly, and was suddenly a lot less worried about what this man thought of him. In one moment, it had become clear that Danny Braxton was a lonely and pathetic old man, with no-one to come visit, and no-one to really care about him. He had genuinely wanted Kyle to stay. It was the first time that the ball had been in Kyle’s court. He could leave now and never come back, or he could choose to stay and get to know his father. It was his choice. He held all the bargaining chips for the first time in his life. The ‘scary’ man sitting in front of him suddenly looked old and tired, despite all his bravado. Kyle smiled at him and crossed his arms across his chest as he leaned back and looked at him. “I really don’t remember you, you know.” said Kyle, “…and I think I’d remember a ridiculous moustache like that, don’t you?! I mean, what’s the look you’re going for? You do know that Freddie Mercury is dead, right?!”

Danny looked at him in shock at first. No-one ever spoke to him like that in here. So fearsome was his reputation, that he commanded respect no matter where he went. Having his scrawny teenage kid give him a dressing down like this had been refreshing and had actually made him a little proud. Maybe there was hope for the boy yet! His eyes lit up and he began to laugh a loud wheezing sort of chuckle. “That’s what I’m talking about!” he said, tearing up a little from the laughter. “Looks like you are a Braxton after all!”

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Thanks everyone for the continued support. :wub: Really appreciate all the feedback. Hope you enjoy this chapter! 

 

WARNING: ADULT THEMES & VIOLENCE

 

Chapter 12

 

Kat stared at the floor, avoiding eye contact, as she tried to slink past Ash in the hallway. He and Phoebe had been arguing for the couple of hours, and about twenty minutes ago Phoebe had come storming up the hallway, and slammed the door to their bedroom in Ash’s face. She’d been hiding in her room, waiting for things to calm down, but she had to go to work in about half an hour, and she needed to eat lunch before she left. She couldn’t wait any longer.

“Pheebs! Can you please open the door?!” yelled Ash, banging on the bedroom door once again. “Please Pheebs?! I’m sorry!”

“Go away, Ash!” came a shout from the other side of the door. “You have to be like the worst boyfriend ever!”

Kat smirked a little as she walked away, thinking how much of a hypocrite Phoebe could sometimes be, and shaking her head a little at the fact that Ash always let her get away with it. Obviously Ash shouldn’t have broken Phoebe’s confidence but she had done exactly the same thing in telling Ash in the first place. It was so like her to not be able to see that! She liked Phoebe but there were certain character traits that made her a little annoying, and if she was honest with herself, she was a little jealous of her relationship with Ash. She thought that Ash deserved better.

She glanced back at Ash and accidentally made eye contact with him as he slumped with his back against the bedroom door. He looked embarrassed and a bit defeated. She gave him a sympathetic smile and disappeared into the kitchen. She made herself a sandwich and sat down at the table, listening to Ash’s continued pleading out in the hallway. “Give it up, mate!” she mumbled to herself as she took a bite of one half of her sandwich, “She’s not worth it.”

“What was that?” asked Ash, standing in the doorway to the kitchen.

She nearly choked on her sandwich and turned to look at him, blushing bright red. Her mouth was full of half-eaten sandwich so she was desperately hoping that he hadn’t understood what she’d said. “Nothing!” she mumbled.

He wandered over, looking tired and depressed and slumped into one of the chairs beside her at the table. “She’s never going to forgive me for this!” he said, leaning his elbows on the table and putting his head in his hands.

“She told you!” exclaimed Kat. “She told you Kyle’s secrets, and then she gets upset because you told me?! Doesn’t she see that it’s pretty much the same thing?!”

He looked up at her and shrugged his shoulders. “You know Pheebs… It’s always about her.” he said. “To be honest… I’m more worried about Kyle… You saw him earlier! He’s in a really bad way, Kat! …I shouldn’t have told…” His eyes widened as he realised what he’d almost said, and he rubbed his face, letting out a frustrated sigh. He hated how stupid he was sometimes! “I shouldn’t have told you” he said, recovering himself quickly.

“I have to talk to him today” said Kat, looking quite serious. “I know he doesn’t want to, but the police in Melbourne need to speak to him… He might not get a choice in the matter.”

“Can you leave him alone today, Kat?” said Ash, looking at her pleadingly. “Heath is home from the city… Can you give them a bit of time to sort things out?”

She nodded and took another big bite out of her sandwich. Seeing Ash staring at the other half of her sandwich sitting in front of her, she rolled her eyes at him, and pushed the plate in his direction. “Go on then!” she said, smiling with a mouth full of bread. “You’re like a bottomless pit, you know?!”

 

*****

 

Kyle sat on the decking outside the house, sullenly staring into the distance, and occasionally taking a slug from the beer bottle in his hand. Heath sat beside him in silence, choosing to let Kyle initiate the conversation, if and when he was ready. He glanced at Kyle every now and then, seeing his jaw clenched and his nostrils flaring, and wondered what was going through his head. He wasn't sure that he really wanted to know the finer details of whatever he was thinking about. It made him feel sick just to think about it, never mind having it happen to you! How had he lived with this secret for so long, and how had he seemed so 'normal'? He knew that Kyle was angry right now, that much was clear, and he could see that it was taking every bit of strength he had to hold it together. When he'd pick up his beer bottle there was a small tremor in his hand that Heath might have missed if he hadn't been watching him so intently. Kyle was clearly in a bad way. He couldn't begin to imagine what he'd been through, and how hard it must be to admit it to other people. He didn't know how he was going to talk to him about it. What if he made a mess of this?!

Heath finished his beer and noticed that Kyle's bottle was empty too, so he picked Kyle's one up with his own, and got to his feet. "I'll grab us another couple of beers. Want anything else from the kitchen?"

"No" said Kyle, through gritted teeth. He didn't turn to look at Heath as he left. There was an anger building inside him and he thought that he might hit Heath if he had to look at him. He felt wound up tight like a spring, like every muscle in his body was tense, and he was trying very hard not to blow up at Heath. He knew that none of this was his fault. Of course he knew that. Not even being here, when he wasn't wanted, was his fault. But he didn't want Heath here! He didn't want anyone here... with their pity and their knowing looks. He wanted to be left alone and to hide away in some dark space where no one would find him. He thought about his cell at the Hames' house, and wondered at himself in disgust, at the fact that he sometimes craved the feeling of security that a cramped dark room gave him. Being able to curl up in the dark, with walls on all sides, and the door closed, keeping the rest of the world out, was a comfort to him when nothing else was. It had been his only solace in a world that was terrifying, and often physically painful, so he guessed that it made sense in some perverse sort of way. He sighed a heavy sigh, knowing that most people would think it was pretty screwed up, and resigned himself to the thought that nothing was ever going to fix his mixed up head.

"Here you go, mate" said Heath reappearing with two chilled bottles of beer and sitting back down beside him.

Kyle took a gulp of his beer and turned to look at Heath with his face pulled into an angry grimace. "C'mon then, let's hear them!" he growled at him.

Heath looked confused and said "Mate?" I..."

"Oh come on! You can do better than that! Where are the gay jokes? Where are the jokes about me being some kind of fairy, some kind of vampire emo kid out of Twilight?! You must have thought all your Christmases had come at once!" He was glaring at Heath now, veins bulging in his neck, as he snarled at him. "I'm disappointed, Heath! You've had years to hone your material. Here's your chance! It's not like I can deny anything now!"

Heath looked shocked and didn't know what to say. "Uh..." he stammered, shaking his head and holding his palms out at Kyle in an attempt to calm him.

Kyle got to his feet and grinned in an anguished sort of way, leaning over Heath as he spoke. "You must find this whole thing hilarious! Looks like you were right about me all along, huh? …Kyle, the pathetic weakling..."

Heath started to speak. "Kyle! I never..."

"C'mon, Heath, you know you all thought that! …Skinny, scrawny Kyle!  Not a real Braxton... Not a River Boy... Couldn't surf... Couldn't even swim! ....Well, HAHA!... Big joke... It's funny how you don't get to go swimming when you spend your whole childhood locked up in a basement!"

Heath got to his feet and started to move towards Kyle, wanting to put his arms around him. He suddenly looked like a child to him, like Darcy or Harley when they were upset about something. There was something so child-like and vulnerable about him in this moment.

Kyle gave him a shove in the middle of the chest, and his eyes filled with tears. "You never wanted me here..." he said, hugging his arms around himself. "You don't even think of me as your brother..." He looked down at his own body with a look of pure revulsion, as he stood there shaking in front of Heath. "Why would anyone want to be related... to 'this'?!" he said, gesturing at his own body with a sweeping motion of his hand.

"Come here, mate" said Heath, tilting his head at him and using that voice that he normally only used with Harley. He tried to put his arms around him but Kyle angrily pushed him away. "Get off me!" he roared, with his voice breaking into a hoarse cry, "Don't touch me!" He took a few steps, backing away from Heath, and hugged both arms across his chest. He was breathing very heavily and was suddenly very aware of how fast his heart was beating. He wanted to let Heath hug him more than anything, needing some sort of comfort, but he couldn't suppress his anger either. He could feel the rage building inside him and all he really wanted to do was punch something. He felt so confused! He didn't really know what he wanted.

Heath watched him as he stood there looking so lost and alone, and felt thoroughly out of his depth. Brax would have known what to do, he thought. Brax would have been better at this! He felt bad for Kyle, that he was all he had, when he was clearly useless...

“Mate, I’m so sorry!” said Heath, as he slowly approached Kyle again, and hesitantly put his hand on his shoulder.

Suddenly, Kyle’s fist caught Heath in the jaw with a loud smack, and he staggered back a few steps, putting his hands up to protect himself. He looked up to see Kyle nursing his bruised fist and looking at him with an expression of shock. It didn’t look like he was planning to hit him again.

“I… I’m… sorry” mumbled Kyle, with tears rolling down his cheeks. “I didn’t mean it” he said, before turning and running across the garden and out the gate.

Heath stood massaging his jaw, and watched his brother go, wondering whether he should go after him or let him cool down for a while.  He decided to let him have some space and if he wasn’t back in a bit he’d go look for him. It wasn’t the first time that Kyle had hit him, and he figured with the way that Kyle was dealing with things, that it probably wouldn’t be the last. He put his finger in his mouth and looked at the blood when he pulled it back out. Kyle had got him a good dig in the jaw, smashing his lip off his bottom teeth, and he could tell that he was going to have a nasty bruise tomorrow. Right now though, he really didn’t care. He just wanted to help Kyle if he could. If that meant letting him take out his frustration on him then maybe that was what he was there for.

Heath turned and walked wearily back into the house to let Tamara know that Kyle was AWOL. He just hoped that he was going to be okay.

 

*****

 

Kat set a cup of coffee down on Emerson’s desk, and carried hers over to her own desk, sitting down with tired sigh. She’d been sifting through the details of the Hames case, that had been emailed over to her by the lead Detective in the case, but she was finding it hard to make sense of things. There was no official record of Kyle Braxton, or Bennett, as he’d been known as a child, having been fostered in the Hames’ household. His case file had large sections missing. Between the age of eleven, when his mother was known to have died, and thirteen when he was placed in the Summers’ care, there was just one big gaping hole. As far as the Melbourne police had been concerned, Kyle Braxton was a total unknown. Detective Wainwright had gratefully taken Kyle’s details when she’d spoken to him, asking if she could get him to contact them directly, and requesting that she get a DNA sample if Kyle was willing. She wasn’t clear on why they wanted a sample but he’d been adamant that any and all victims needed to be tested as part of the investigation.

She looked at Kyle’s case file from when he’d been placed with the Summers, and pulled out the photo of Kyle as a child. It was a haunting image of an incredibly sad looking little boy. She could certainly see that it was Kyle, but at the same time he looked so different from the man that she knew today. He had the same big brown eyes and fine features, but there was such a vacant expression on his face, and he wasn’t looking at the camera or smiling. It said in the file that he was thirteen years old in this photo but he looked so much younger, and so very very thin! The black circles around his eyes gave him a very sickly appearance too, which made sense now that she knew where he’d been kept all that time. The more she looked at it, the more her heart ached for the little boy in the photo, and she imagined reaching out and putting her arms around him. She wanted to tell him that everything was going to be okay. She thought it would take an incredibly cold hearted person to look at that photo and not feel sad for him.

She set it down, and looked through the photos of the basement, with the dark and grimy cells where they kept the children, and she wondered which one had been Kyle’s. It made her shudder to think of any child sleeping on a cold cement floor like that, locked away like some sort of prisoner in a medieval castle. How did these things happen in this day and age?!

She pulled out the case file on the woman who was helping with the investigation and looked at her photo. It had obviously only been taken in the last few weeks while she’d been out of that house. She had brown hair and brown eyes, and a skin tone that looked like she might take a tan if she ever got near the sun. As it was, she had a sickly yellow tone to her skin, and dark circles around her eyes. She had that same haunted look on her face that Kyle had had in his photo, and she was sitting with her arms pulled around herself and the sleeves on her top pulled down to hide her hands. Everything about the woman in this photo screamed a lack of self-confidence. You could almost see her willing the ground to open up and swallow her, rather than have this photo taken. She wondered how she’d survived 27 years in that house! Kat felt sorry for her too.

Being a cop was hard sometimes… She sat with her head resting on her fist and gave an exasperated sigh. Emerson looked across at her and raised his eyebrows. “You still looking into that Hames case?” he asked, taking a sip from his coffee cup.

“Yeah, Kyle Braxton” she said, closing the case file and turning to face him. “It’s weird… There’s no record of him being sent there… but he was supposed to have been placed there through official channels. He wasn’t abducted like some of the others… Martin Ashford said that he’d been sent there through the foster care system and that he had members of DoCS actually working his case…” She picked up his file again and flicked through the pages for effect, “There’s literally nothing in here about it… It’s like someone just removed that part of his file… like there’s been some sort of cover-up…”

“Possible…They are investigating DoCS” he said, nodding his head and looking down again at his own paperwork. “There are sickos everywhere, Chapman… Sadly, it’s just something you have to get used to in this line of work.”

She turned back round to her computer and saw that an email had come through from Detective Wainwright with a request that she get in touch urgently. There was a PDF attachment on the email titled “KB 03-03”.  She clicked to open it and began to scan read through the details. Her face blanched white as it became clear to her what she was reading. Her heart thumped in her chest as she picked up the phone and called the direct dial number on the end of the email.  “Hello?! Detective Wainwright?! …Yes, it’s Constable Chapman. I got your email…. This can’t be right. There has to be some mistake!?”

 

*****

Kyle walked back through the door, looking pretty sheepish, and glanced back and forth between Heath and Tamara. Heath had a bag of peas, wrapped in a tea towel, pressed up against his chin at Tamara’s insistence, He gave Kyle a little nod as he walked towards the armchair and sat down.

“I’m sorry” said Kyle, giving him an apologetic shrug of the shoulders. “I just lost it… I shouldn’t have hit you.”

“I can take it” said Heath, giving him a little smile, despite his swollen lip. “Nothing that won’t heal.” He set the peas down, and reached over to pat Kyle on the knee.

Tamara shook her head at Kyle a little disapprovingly but then gave him a smile. She understood. Something had had to give sooner or later, and it was better that it was Heath he’d taken his anger out on, and not someone that would press charges against him.

“What do you want for dinner?” asked Tamara in as bright and airy a voice as she could manage, trying desperately to lighten the mood. She looked at Heath’s puffy lip and swollen jaw and smiled a little mischievously. “Maybe something soft?!” she asked, smirking at him.

“Very funny!” he said, laughing at her and pretending to punch her in the arm. She got up and went out to the kitchen to have a look at what was in the fridge, leaving the two boys fidgeting a little uncomfortably in the living-room.

Heath looked at Kyle, and gave him a little half-smile, unsure of what to say to him. He sat forward on the couch, wiping his sweaty hands on his shorts, and feeling incredibly nervous about the speech that he’d been rehearsing in his head for the last couple of hours. He wasn’t sure how Kyle was going to take it but it needed to be said. He cleared his throat and looked down at the floor. “I uh…” he said, faltering already. Heath had never been good at expressing himself, and he really wasn’t good at talking about his feelings with other guys. This was hard! He glanced up at Kyle who was looking equally embarrassed, and then fixed his eyes on the floor again. “Look, Kyle… I love you, mate…” he said, blushing bright red. “I don’t want you to ever think that I don’t… I might be an idiot sometimes and say really stupid stuff but that doesn’t mean I don’t care. You’re my little brother… and it… it… it hurts me to know that something so… so horrible happened to you when you were just a little kid…” He looked up from the floor, and met Kyle’s eyes for the first time since he’d started speaking, and was surprised to see tears streaming down Kyle’s face. He got up and put his arms around him, pulling him into a hug and squeezing him tight. He could feel Kyle sobbing in his arms. “It’s okay, mate” said Heath, stroking the back of Kyle’s head with his hand. “I’m here… Whatever you need… I’m not going anywhere.”

Kyle started to laugh, his whole body shaking as he began to giggle, but he wasn’t really sure why. It just seemed so surreal that Heath had been so totally sincere in his declaration of brotherly love, and that he was hugging him like this, when he didn’t think that they’d ever really hugged before. Even when Heath had moved away to the city, he and Heath had shaken hands, while Heath had hugged both Brax and Casey. He’d always thought that Heath had been the one that had accepted him the least. He’d never really felt that he thought of him as a brother, but rather some inconvenient ‘accident’ that happened to be related to him. Brax had been the one to really take him under his wing and look after him. Even Casey had ended up behaving more like a brother than Heath, and they weren’t even really related, as it had turned out! He was surprised and more than a little amused at this sudden show of affection on Heath’s part.

“You’d better let me go” said Kyle, giggling and smiling through his tears. “Tamara’s gonna get jealous!”

Heath let Kyle go, and they both turned their heads to look, when there was a loud knock at the door. “Hey Kat” said Kyle, wiping at the tears in his eyes and blushing red with embarrassment. He sat up, suddenly feeling very tense again and said, “I’m really not… I can’t…”  She was in uniform and looking very serious. That’s when he noticed that there was another officer standing behind her in the doorway. “What’s going on?!” he asked, getting to his feet and looking at Kat with a shocked expression on his face.

“We’re going to need you to come down to the station” said Kat, looking at him apologetically. “We need you to answer some questions” she said, taking hold of his arm by the elbow and leading him towards the door. Catching sight of Tamara, standing open mouthed on the other side of the room, she threw her a sympathetic look. Sometimes she really hated her job…

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Thanks once again to everyone who has taken the time to comment. Really really appreciated. :wub: Hope you like this chapter! x

WARNING: ADULT THEMES

 

Chapter 13

 

Kyle stared around the interview room, fidgeting in the chair, and wondering how long he was going to have to sit here on his own before someone explained to him what was going on. He knew that they liked to let people sweat before they came to interview them, but surely this was different? This time he was the victim. This time he hadn’t done anything wrong! He didn’t understand why he was being treated like this. He’d heard Heath and Tamara yelling outside, so he knew that they’d followed him down here, but they hadn’t been allowed to come in. He desperately wanted Tamara to come in and hold his hand.

Kat had told him that a detective from Melbourne was flying in to interview him, and that he’d have to sit there and wait until he got here, however long that took. Kat had been acting very strangely and she wouldn’t explain to him what was going on. He didn’t understand why he was being treated like a suspect and how they thought that they just could force him to talk. The more he thought about the questions that they were going to ask him, the more he began to panic. He could feel his whole body shaking as he sat there on the plastic chair and leaned on the table. There was a two-way mirror on one of the walls, and the thought that people could be out there now, watching him sit here and squirm, was making him feel more and more anxious. He tried to keep his eyes fixed on the table, unable to even look himself in the eye. He didn’t want to talk about what had happened in that house with anyone. He didn’t want to have to say those words out loud to total strangers. Or worse still, to have Kat know those things about him.

The thought of it was making him feel sick. He got up and began to pace the room in the hope that moving might help to ease the rising wave of nausea in his stomach. He could feel the panic taking hold now as every inch of his body told him to get out and start running. The adrenalin was rushing through his bloodstream and he could feel his heart thumping in his chest, so fast now that he thought it might burst. He staggered backwards and slumped down the wall until he was sitting on the floor. His chest hurt and he was struggling to breathe. He tried to tell himself to calm down, and that getting upset like this wasn’t going to help anyone, but it was easier said than done. He hugged his arms around his knees and started to rock back and forth like he had as a child, staring at the door and waiting for them to come and get him.

Kat opened the door, carrying a can of Coke and a packet of potato chips for Kyle, and looked shocked to see him crouched in a corner of the room. She kneeled down next to him and took his hand in hers to try to comfort him, putting her fingers on his neck to feel his pulse. He was a strange grey colour and was shaking badly. He looked up at her, with tears in his eyes, and said, “Kat, please don’t make me do this… I can’t… I can’t talk… not about this…”

She tilted her head in sympathy and said, “Kyle, I’m really sorry, but it’s out of my hands now.” She stood up, still holding his hand, and motioned with her head for him to follow her. “C’mon, come and sit down and I’ll keep you company till they get here.”

He got up, and shakily followed her to the table. “Kat, can you just tell me what’s going on? I mean… what is it that you think I’ve done? Do I need a lawyer or something?”

Kat shook her head and said, “You’re not under arrest Kyle… They just need your help with some enquiries…”

“If I’m not under arrest then I can just leave, can’t I?” said Kyle, fairly well versed at this stage in the rules that the police had to follow. He started to get to his feet.

“Sit down, Kyle!” said Kat, catching his wrist and pulling him back into the seat. “They have a court order. You don’t have a choice in the matter. You can’t leave until you’ve been interviewed.”

Suddenly the door opened and a middle-aged man with grey hair walked in. He sat down and pressed record on the tape recorder beside them. “Kyle Braxton interview commencing 21:05 at Yabbie Creek Police Station with Detective Wainwright and Constable Chapman.” He leaned back in his chair and looked Kyle up and down with what almost looked like a smirk. “Kyle, I’m Detective Wainwright” said the man. “I have to say… When Constable Chapman here told me about you, I didn’t even know that you existed. But some things have come to light now, and I can’t lie, I’m very interested to meet you” he said, giving him a little smile, and setting a thick brown folder down on the table. “Very interested indeed!”

Kyle gave him a quizzical look and wondered at his tone. He didn’t sound like he was in any way sympathetic to Kyle’s plight and seemed to be viewing him with suspicion and a look of distaste. “What?” stammered Kyle, unsure of what to say. “…What do you want from me?”

“An explanation would be a good start!” he said, opening the file and pulling an envelope out. He delved inside and pulled out a stack of photos, before sliding one of them across the table to Kyle. It was a magnified image showing a serial number imprinted into some kind of metal object.

Kyle looked at it in confusion, without the faintest understanding of what the object was, and then looked back up at Detective Wainwright. “I don’t… I don’t know what this is” he said, shaking his head. “What’s this got to do with me?”

“Nothing” said Wainwright, shaking his head and chuckling in a way that seemed threatening to Kyle. “That’s exactly the point!”

 

*****

13 years ago…

 

The man dragged Kyle by the arm up the steep steps, digging his fingernails into his flesh, and pulling at him roughly as they went. Kyle looked up, feeling dizzy and disoriented, at the outside of an old house that he’d never seen before. It was a wooden house, with green peeling paint and dirty sash windows, but it looked like it might have been beautiful once, when someone had cared for it. The man knocked on the door and waited. Kyle stood shaking beside him on the porch, terrified at the prospect of what lay beyond this door, but even more frightened at the vastness of the world out here. He couldn’t understand what had just happened and no-one seemed to want to take the time to explain it to him. Not that that surprised him. No-one had ever taken his feelings into account before. No-one had ever explained anything or given him any kind of say in what happened to him. Why should this be any different?! He looked at the cracked white paint on the door in front of him and wondered if this was where they were going to kill him. He imagined the door opening and rivers of blood washing out towards him. Maybe this is where all the others went when they disappeared.

The door suddenly opened, and a man in a grubby white vest and boxer shorts leaned against the doorframe, speaking with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. “Yeah?” he asked, glancing down at Kyle with interest.

“Is Jackie Braxton here?” asked the man, gripping Kyle’s shoulder a little too roughly and hurting him. “This is her nephew.”

The dishevelled looking man turned and yelled, “Jackie, the kid’s here!” before walking away and letting the screen door bang in their faces.

A rough looking woman, who looked to be in her early fifties, walked towards the door wiping wet soapy hands on her tracksuit bottoms. She pushed open the screen and looked down at the boy standing in front of her. “This is him, is it?” she said, in a hoarse smoker’s voice. She put her hand out and lifted his chin but he continued to stare at the floor. She looked back at the man standing beside him, and said, “What’s wrong with him?! Is he simple or something?!”

“No, he’s just a bit quiet” said the man, giving him a shove through the doorway. Jackie took hold of Kyle’s elbow and led him through to the living-room and over to the couch. She pushed on his shoulders to make him sit down. He stared at his shoes and waited for the inevitable.

She stood looking at him with her hands on her hips and said “So, you’re Kyle!? Danny’s little boy!?” She tilted her head at him and looked him up and down. Turning to look at the man that had brought him here, she said, “He doesn’t look like Danny… or anyone else in our family…”

The man shrugged and nodded a little. “Must look like his mother then.” he said, handing her a brown folder. “This is his case file, there’s a photo of his mother in there.”

He sat down beside Kyle on the couch and put his hand on the top of his head, razzling his hair, and giving Jackie a big smile. “Kyle’s a good boy” he said, “Very quiet, but I don’t think he’ll give you any trouble.” He looked at Kyle and gave him a smile, “Now you’ll be good for your Auntie Jackie, won’t you Kyle?”

Jackie asked if the man wanted a cup of tea and turned to go and make it before he even got a chance to answer. He put his hand on Kyle’s knee and gave it a cruel squeeze, digging his fingers into the flesh until Kyle made a little squeak, his eyes wide with fear. “Now, you remember what Simon said!” sneered the man, as he stuck his tongue out at Kyle with a wink. “I’ll be keeping a close eye on you!”

Jackie came back with a tray with three cups of tea, and set them on the messy coffee table in front of them. The cups looked chipped and a bit grimy. The man eyed his cup with distaste and said, “You know what? I’m actually late for another appointment, so I’ll have to skip the tea… Thank you though.” He got up to leave, and smiled at Kyle. “But remember, Kyle, I’ll be back to check that you’re behaving yourself!” he said.

After he’d gone, Jackie flopped down on the couch beside Kyle and tried to make eye contact with him, but he wouldn’t look at her. “Come on, Kyle!” she said, “Aren’t you going to talk to your Auntie Jackie?!”

He sunk his teeth into his tongue and made a promise to himself that he’d never speak again. He didn’t doubt for a second that Simon would cut his tongue out. He’d already seen it done. He didn’t know who this woman was, or what connection she had to Simon, so there was no way he was ever going to take the risk. What if it was all a test?! She’d called herself ‘Auntie’, but the word had lost all meaning to him. He’d had lots of ‘Aunties’ in the past, and more ‘Uncles’ than he could count. He didn’t know why they kept calling him ‘Kyle’ either. He didn’t remember ever having a name before. He’d been ‘boy’ and ‘kid’, and sometimes even ‘baby’ said in a way that made his skin crawl, but he didn’t think he’d ever really had a name. Suddenly he was ‘Kyle’ and everyone seemed to want to use the name incessantly. Even Simon and Jessica had called him that before he’d left. He didn’t really care what he was called, as long as they weren’t going to hurt him, and he figured that the only way he could protect himself was to keep his mouth shut.

 

*****

 

Wainwright took a pen out of the inside pocket of his jacket and tapped it repetitively on the table. “I tell you what, Kyle” he said, “Why don’t I tell you what I know about Kyle Bennett?” He opened the file and cleared his throat a little theatrically. “Let’s see now… Kyle Bennett was born on 12th December 1990 to a woman called Sarah Bennett. Single mother, bit of a substance abuse problem, lots of men coming and going within the home. Father, Danny Braxton, career criminal, in and out of prison so many times you’d lose count…”

Kyle, of course, knew all of this, and wondered where the Detective was going with it. He didn’t like the man already, and he glanced at Kat hoping that she might be able to help him out here. She stared at him passively and then looked away unable to maintain eye contact. He really couldn’t understand why this was being conducted like an interrogation rather than an interview with a victim.

“Here’s where it gets very interesting, Kyle… You don’t mind me calling you ‘Kyle’, do you?” He pulled out two A4 pieces of paper and what looked like a photocopy of an x-ray. “See, Kyle Bennett… well, he had a very nasty accident when he was five years old… A broken arm when he ‘fell down the stairs’. Strangely enough, that coincided with one of his father’s stints in the outside world.”

He slid the photocopy of the x-ray across the table to Kyle and nodded at it. It showed a forearm with what almost looked like scaffolding to hold the bones together. A long plate with seven screws to hold it in place. “Internal fixation screws and a metal plate, just like the one on that photo I gave you” said Wainwright.

Kyle looked at it and felt down the bones in his arm, half expecting to feel the screws inside there, as though he might just never have noticed them. He looked up at the Detective and said, “But I don’t think… I mean… I…”

“The interesting thing about any medical implant…” said Wainwright, cutting him off. “…is that any little bit of metal the surgeons put in you… well, they all have a tiny, barely visible, serial number on them… It means that we can trace the part to the patient”

Sliding the two A4 pages across the table, and raising his eyebrows at Kyle, he said, “So, I suppose the real question is this. Why did we find those surgical fixation screws, registered to Kyle Bennett, in the bones of a murdered child found at the house in Melbourne?”

Kyle stared at the pages in front of him, seeing his own name entered on the documents. A coroner’s report detailing the circumstances of his death at the age of twelve, and the death certificate with his name printed on it. ‘Cause of death: Homicide’. His world felt like it was tilting on its axis, and he felt like his whole respiratory system had simply stalled, as though he no longer had the slightest clue of the mechanics it would take to draw a breath in. He felt like he was suffocating.

“Kyle Bennett is dead… and his remains are currently sitting on a table at the city morgue in Melbourne. That is a photo of the metal implants he had in his arm… So, I think you might forgive me for asking… but who are you?” asked the Detective, staring him down without the slightest shred of sympathy.

Kyle looked at the name on the piece of paper and, with a terrible jolt to his stomach, he realised what the Detective was trying to tell him. He wasn’t Kyle Bennett! He’d been living someone else’s life for all these years, coveting their identity, and stealing the life that they should have had. Everything that he knew about himself, his identity, and his bloodline, had been a lie. He wasn’t a Bennett and he wasn’t a Braxton. He had no idea who he was. The rug had just been pulled out from below his feet, and the only sense of belonging he’d ever had in this miserable life of his, had just been taken from him. He had nothing now. All that was left was that filthy, used, and broken little boy cowering in the dark. He’d been worthless then, and he was worthless now.

Kyle started to try to get to his feet with no clear idea of what he was going to do. He felt strange and lightheaded, as the room began to spin, but a basic animal instinct was telling him that he needed fresh air. He stepped away from the table and began staring around the room, wide-eyed with fear, as though he was completely and totally lost.

“Kyle, I think you should sit down” said Kat, getting up and approaching him cautiously. He looked dazed and vacant, and was looking all around him as though she and the detective weren’t even there. She put her hand on his shoulder to gently turn him to face her but his eyes were looking through her. “Kyle? …Are you okay?” she asked somewhat redundantly. She knew that he wasn’t okay.

His heart hammered in his chest as he tried to make sense of his new reality. Things were starting to slot into place. He’d always had questions about the timelines of events but he’d tried to push them away and told himself that his mind was playing tricks on him. He had no real memories of his life before that house, apart from the things that he’d been told. He had flashes of images of days on the beach, and barbecues, and some woman with dark hair singing him to sleep at night. But he could see now that they’d been false memories, created from things he’d seen on TV, and built around the stories told to him by Danny Braxton. None of them were real. At least they weren’t real for him. They were Kyle Bennett’s memories. Memories that he’d stolen from him and taken as his own. His real life had been that dark and cold basement, a childhood filled with pain and misery, and nothing but that, for as long as he could remember. He’d never felt the sun on his face or been outside before they came to take him away. Somewhere deep down he’d always known that.

But what was he going to do now?! Who was he?! Where had he come from?! He could feel his heart thumping so fast now, and hear his own heartbeat in his ears. His chest felt so tight that he thought that taking a breath might shatter his ribs. The room was spinning and he couldn’t make it stop. He knew that Kat was saying something to him but he couldn’t concentrate on what it was. The world seemed deafening and muffled at the same time. He couldn’t think. Suddenly his world went black, and he fell heavily to the floor.

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Thank you everyone for the feedback! As always it's really really appreciated. :P I might not get to update this again for a few days, apologies. Hope you enjoy it.

WARNING: ADULT THEMES & VIOLENCE

 

Chapter 14

 

“All done” said Nate, snipping the thread neatly and looking at Kyle with concern. “Five stitches” he said, cleaning the wound with an antiseptic wipe. He covered it with a small bandage and then took his gloves off. “We’re going to keep you in tonight, Kyle.” said Nate, patting him on the shoulder gently. “That was a nasty knock you took to the head and I just want to be on the safe side.”

Kyle stared at the wall. He hadn’t spoken much since he’d woken up and Nate was becoming increasingly worried about him. According to Kat and the Melbourne detective that had come with him in the ambulance, he’d hit his head on the table in the interview room. They were adamant that he’d simply fainted, but Kyle’s behaviour was beginning to ring alarm bells, and made him wonder if there hadn’t been some police ‘persuasion’ involved. He just seemed very withdrawn. He didn’t seem to be suffering any neurological damage, as far as they could see, and they’d even sent him for a CT scan just to be sure, but he was quieter than usual. He would only answer the most basic questions. This was more like severe traumatic shock.

Someone from psychiatry was coming down to do an assessment in the morning but for now they were just going to keep a close eye on him. Tamara and Heath were out in the hallway, as were Kat and the detective, so he thought he’d better go and fill them in on how Kyle was doing. “I’ll go and let everyone know that you’re okay” said Nate, giving Kyle’s shoulder a little squeeze, “Then maybe Tamara can come in and sit with you?”  Kyle nodded slowly and stared out the window.

Tamara and Heath both raced towards Nate as soon as he set foot outside the room, both clamouring for answers, and he could see Kat and the detective sitting in the waiting area. Josh and Evie had arrived too. He held his hands up for them to quieten down and led them all back into the waiting area. “He’s okay” said Nate, giving Tamara as reassuring a smile as he could manage. “At least… physically he’s doing okay. He needed a few stitches for the laceration on his forehead but other than that, he’s okay. Mild concussion but nothing to be too worried about.”

“Can we see him?” asked Tamara, looking up at him with big worried eyes.

“Yes, but just you and Heath, for now, okay?” he said, motioning with his head for them to go on up the hallway. He gave Evie a smile and said, “You and Josh should go home. You can visit in the morning.” 

He looked at Kat a little suspiciously and said, “Given that he fainted, we’ll be keeping him in tonight and I’d ask that you give him some space.” Addressing the detective directly, he frowned at him and said “I can’t allow any more questioning tonight, we’ll see how he’s doing in the morning.”

He turned to Kat and said, “Can I have a word?”

Kat followed him into one of the family rooms and he closed the door behind them. He crossed his arms across his chest and rocked on the balls of his feet. “What happened really, Kat?” he asked, raising his eyebrows at her.

“What do you mean?” she answered defensively. “He fainted. That’s what happened… And I don’t appreciate the insinuation...”

“Well, something happened…” said Nate, interrupting her. “He’s not talking and he’s displaying all the classic signs of shock… so something happened to him while he was in your custody… and… Kat, I want to know what I’m dealing with!”

“It’s confidential Nate, I can’t tell you… You can understand that…” she said quietly. Her face softening a little, she said, “He’s just heard some very disturbing news and I guess he’s still reeling… I’d keep a close eye on him.”

He nodded at her in a slightly frustrated way, knowing that she wasn’t going to fill him in properly, and wondering what news Kyle could have received that would have him behaving this way. It was like someone had just died.

A terrible thought crossed his mind, that it might be to do with Brax or Ricky, but he knew that he couldn’t ask Kat about it, and risk blowing their cover. Ricky had hurt him terribly but that didn’t mean that he wanted to hurt her. He’d never understand why she chose to go on the run with Brax, and live that kind of life, but he wouldn’t betray her to the police either. If he was going to find out, it was going to have to be from Kyle. He just hoped that he was wrong.

“What is this about wanting a DNA test?” he asked, trying another angle. She hadn’t explained why Kyle had been taken in for questioning in the first place. Detective Wainwright had asked if the hospital could facilitate a DNA test, and work in collaboration with investigators in Melbourne, since Kyle was already here.

Kat grimaced a little. “There’s an investigation in Melbourne and Kyle might be involved. They’re asking for DNA samples… Nate, I really can’t tell you any more than that!”

Nate started to put two and two together. There had been endless news coverage in the last few weeks about the Hames case and multiple appeals for information. “Is it the Hames case?!” exclaimed Nate. “Is Kyle involved in that?!” His behaviour suddenly began to make a lot more sense.

She nodded, looking guilty for disclosing this to him. “Look, I can’t talk about it right now, but it looks like he might have been one of the victims… or… we don’t know yet.”

“Kat, I need to know what I’m dealing with here!  If Kyle suffered sexual abuse as a child, then I need to know! I’ve got a psych consultation scheduled tomorrow morning. We need to know the background…”

“I can’t, Nate…” she said, giving him an apologetic look and then heading for the door. “Just keep a close eye on him, okay?”

 

*****

 

Back at the station, Kat sat down heavily in the chair at her desk, and gave an exasperated sigh. “You didn’t have to be so hard on him, you know! Do you speak to all the victims like that?!”

Wainwright sat down on the corner of her desk and frowned at her. “How do you know that he’s really a victim?” he asked, picking up Kyle’s case file.

“I think I’ve seen enough over the last couple of days to know!” she said, glaring back at him. She was angry at how things had gone tonight and felt really guilty at how badly Kyle had been treated. “The way I see it, you just spent 20 minutes intimidating a scared and vulnerable victim… and… God only knows what he went through in that house! I kept quiet in there because you outrank me, but I can’t bite my tongue any longer… That was a terrible thing that we just did!”

“Have you finished?” said Wainwright, smirking at her a little. “Let me ask you this; Why would a thirteen-year-old boy go along with taking someone else’s identity? I mean, by thirteen you would know what your name is, who your parents are, where you come from… I find it hard to believe that he would just forget who he was.” He flicked open the DoCS file and lifted out the photo of young Kyle. “How do we know that he was ever even in that house? What do you really know about this man, this man walking around with a dead boy’s name?”

“So what? You think a thirteen-year-old boy orchestrated some sort of cover-up for a murder, and then stole the other kid’s identity? …What?”

“No, what I think, is that ‘Kyle’ here, maybe spent some time in prison with Danny Braxton and got mixed up with him. He seems to have done pretty well out of this whole Braxton connection… With Danny conveniently out of the picture, there was no-one to put them straight, so he just slotted himself in quite nicely to their little crime family.  They don’t seem to have questioned his connection at all… He just showed up and told them he was their brother… Now this ‘Kyle’ has managed to get his hands on a restaurant and a gym… Inherited from his ‘brother’ …Not bad at all!”

“You think he’s some sort of con man?!” said Kat, staring at him incredulously. Kyle certainly had a chequered past but he was hardly that much of a criminal mastermind. With Kyle, it had mostly been hot-headed, act first, think second, kind of crimes. This whole con man theory just didn’t seem to fit.

“It’s certainly a possibility.” said Wainwright. “A lot of things just don’t add up.”

“But why would he say that he’d been in that house in Melbourne? How would he even know that?!” asked Kat.

“That’s what I can’t figure out” said Wainwright, letting out a heavy sigh. “Unless Danny Braxton told him?”

“But what would he have to gain?” she reasoned, thinking that this man’s theory was becoming less and less convincing by the second.

He took his glasses off and pinched the bridge of his nose, suddenly looking quite old and tired. “I don’t know, Chapman” he said, wearily shaking his head, “Maybe I’m just getting paranoid… I think I might be letting this case get to me. I’ve worked these types of cases for so many years… but this one is just getting under my skin. The more this case unfolds... It’s just… astonishing the depths to which some people will sink… Human beings have a capacity for cruelty that’s just… soul destroying. Every time I think I’ve gotten to the bottom of it, I discover a new layer, more horrible than the last one… It feels like no-one can be trusted… Dodgy DoCS case workers, paedophile foster parents, bent cops… Just disgusting people every direction you turn…”

“I think you’re wrong about Kyle, you know” she said, shaking her head at him. Kyle’s vacant and broken expression passed through her mind and she couldn’t help feeling terribly guilty that they’d just dropped that bombshell on him the way that they had. No wonder he’d fainted! His whole life had just been torn to shreds and tatters before his very eyes.

“I really think that Kyle is telling the truth… I think that he genuinely thought he was Kyle Bennett… and I believe that he was one of those children in that house…” said Kat, holding up the photo of Kyle. “Look at this photo” she said, “Look at this little boy… Look into his eyes, and tell me that that child has known love.”

He snorted a little and nodded his head. “Maybe you’re right” he said, “Maybe I handled this the wrong way.”

“I think we both owe him an apology!” said Kat, looking at the photo on her desk again.

“Maybe so” said Wainwright, “but you might forgive me if I reserve judgement a little longer”

“If he’s not Kyle Bennett, is there any chance that he’s that woman’s child?” asked Kat, looking for the photo of the woman who’d escaped the house. “Could he be hers? I mean, they don’t look dissimilar”

He shook his head and said, “She had seven babies, the first one at twelve years old” He got up and went to the water cooler to get himself a cup of water. “If he lived, he’d be what? …24? …But Anna.. that’s the mother… She says that he was taken away when he was eight, and that they told her he’d been sold. God knows if that child is still alive or not…”

“Oh God! That’s so awful!” exclaimed Kat, covering her mouth to try to hide her shock. “…And the others?”

“One is still alive as it turns out. He’s three” he said, smiling a little sadly. “Billy... he’s a quiet little thing.” He brought her a cup of water, and then sat back down, staring at the folders on the table with a faraway look on his face. “The others were in that grave… some stillborn and the others murdered.”

She looked at him and thought he seemed a much kinder man than she’d have given him credit for just twenty minutes ago! He’d clearly been quite affected by the details of the case and she shuddered to think what he’d seen.

“I’m just wondering” she said, unsure of how to ask this. “I read that there was a mountain of ‘evidence’ recovered from the house… DVDs, photos, stuff like that… If Kyle was in that house, wouldn’t he be in those photos, on those DVDs?” The thought made her feel sick but it seemed like the logical way to prove or disprove Kyle’s claims.

He gave a very heavy sigh and continued to stare into the distance. “They tried to set fire to them when they realised we were coming… Someone must have tipped them off… There was a lot of damage, but we’ve recovered nearly 20,000 hours of video, and almost a million photos… We have teams of people going through them, documenting them… probably being mentally scarred by them... The problem with this stuff is that you can’t ‘unsee’ it. It stays with you…”

He took a sip of water and gave her a sad little half-smile. “We have facial recognition software trying to match faces… It’s a long and painstaking affair… and not for the faint of heart.” He rubbed his face in both hands and sat forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “I’ve given them Kyle’s photo and they’re doing a scan to try to find him… Looking through the older photos… We’ll see what they turn up.”

“But you still think he’s a con man?” she asked, tilting her head at him with a disbelieving look. She really couldn’t see it.

“I hope not!” said Wainwright, shaking his head and picking up the photo of Kyle to look at again. “I’m seriously losing my faith in mankind.”

 

*****

 

Tamara lay beside Kyle in the hospital bed, drawing patterns on his chest lightly with her fingers, and listening to him breathe in and out slowly. They’d given him some sedatives to help him sleep and they seemed to have knocked him out completely. She hadn’t slept all night, just watching him, and jumping any time that he made a little move. Heath had agreed to go home last night, and had offered to take Noah home with him, with a couple of bottles of expressed milk, but Tamara had insisted on staying. She hadn’t wanted to leave Kyle overnight when there was clearly something very wrong. It was like he was there, but he wasn’t really ‘there’. He’d been answering questions with one word answers, but she could tell that he wasn’t really listening to what they were saying. He’d agreed to the DNA test without really listening to the doctor and simply signed the form with the most vacant expression on his face. She’d watched as they’d swabbed his mouth. He’d simply submitted and stared out the window the whole time. The lights had been on but there was very definitely no-one home! She didn’t know what had happened in that interview room but she was going to have it out with Kat later. They couldn’t get away with treating him this way. She didn’t know what was going on, and as she looked at his sleeping face beside her, she couldn’t help feeling frightened. 

He began to stir, breathing faster now, and moving about in the bed. She could tell that he was having a nightmare and she started to shake him a little to wake him up. “Wake up, Kyle!” she said, shaking him by the shoulder gently.

“No!” he shouted suddenly, staring through her with wild vacant eyes, and falling out the other side of the bed and onto the floor. “Nooooo!” he screamed again, shielding himself with his hands as though someone was hitting him.

She scrambled down off the bed on his side and crouched down beside him, gently shaking him by the shoulder and saying, “Wake up, baby! Wake up!”

The vacant look in his eyes suddenly disappeared and he put his arms around her and started to cry.

“It’s okay.” she said, stroking his hair with one hand. “It’s okay, Kyle”

“Don’t call me that” he said, in a choked sort of way, his whole body shaking as he wept. “Don’t!” he said again in a small broken voice.

She pulled back from him and looked at him in confusion. “Don’t call you what?”

That name… It’s not my name… It never was” he said, staring at her with eyes full of pain and fear. “I don’t know who I am, but I’m not him… I’m someone else… I’m someone that no-one knows… I don’t even know me… I’m just some kid that nobody wanted… something that someone threw away… Nothing… nobody… completely worthless…”

“Kyle, you’re not making any sense!” she said, putting her hand up to stroke the side of his face. He was scaring her now, the way he was talking, and the way he was looking straight through her.

“I’m not Kyle!” he shouted, as he pushed her hand away roughly and staggered to his feet. “I’m not Kyle! Stop calling me that! …Just stop calling me that! …He’s dead, okay?! He’s dead!” he sobbed loudly. He pulled his arms around his own chest, and stood there shaking in front of her, looking lost and alone. “I don’t know who I am!” he shouted in a hoarse and broken voice. “I don’t know who I am!”

Tamara approached him slowly and tried to put her arms around him, but he pushed her away and made a strange howling noise. He started hitting himself in the head with his fists, smacking them hard against his own skull, as the veins in his neck looked like they might burst from the strain. Suddenly he walked over to the wall beside the door, and to Tamara’s shock and horror, he drew back and smacked his own head off it. “I’m nothing… I’m nothing… I’m nothing” he kept repeating to himself quietly, as he hit his head again and again.

“Help!” shouted Tamara, trying to pull him away from the wall. “Help!” she roared again, as Nate and one of the nurses ran in. “Help! There’s something wrong with Kyle!”

Nate and the nurse, followed by one of the orderlies, ran to him and took hold of his arms. They managed to drag him onto the bed but he was roaring and kicking and wriggling to get away. His head was bleeding badly as he’d reopened his stitches and the blood was streaming down his face. “Noooo!” he roared at them. Another nurse appeared with restraints and a tray with a syringe on it. They strapped him down, as he struggled and cried, and then Nate injected him with sedatives. His eyes went dull and he slowly stopped struggling. Tamara walked over slowly, a little frightened of him now, and looked down at his face as it became peaceful again. She looked up at Nate and said, “I don’t understand! What just happened?!”

“I don’t know… but I intend to find out” said Nate, as he signed forms ordering new scans. He wanted to check that Kyle hadn’t done serious damage to himself.

Kat was standing in the doorway with her mouth hanging open. She’d just witnessed Kyle’s outburst, and any doubt that she might have had regarding Kyle’s identity had just been wiped away. This was no con man. Kyle was clearly a deeply traumatized individual who they had managed to push to breaking point. She felt incredibly guilty and her face burned red with shame.  She could see that Nate had put his arm around Tamara and was trying to give her some reassurance. Kat took a deep breath and interrupted, “Em… I think I need to speak to both of you” she said, nodding for them to join her in the hallway.

Tamara leaned down and kissed Kyle’s newly bandaged head, “I love you” she said, with eyes filled with tears. She picked up his hand and kissed that too. She knew now that there was bad news on the horizon, and that Kat had come to break it to her. Whatever it was, it had reduced her husband to some sort of self-destructive wreck, so it had to be really bad. She wasn’t sure that she could face this on her own. She was frightened. She looked out towards the corridor and took a deep breath, trying to summon the courage to go out there. “I love you, and don’t you ever forget that” she whispered in his ear, before walking out through the door to the hallway.

“What’s going on Kat?” asked Tamara, looking up at her with both fear and anger. “Just tell me!”

 

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Thanks once again for all the support! :wub: I got this one finished sooner than i thought I would... so here it is! Hope you enjoy this chapter!

WARNING: ADULT THEMES

Chapter 15

 

The lift doors opened, and Heath ran out wide-eyed and panicked, looking for Tamara. He spotted her nearly immediately, standing with her back to him, and with her hand twisting and pulling at her own hair. He ran up to her and put his hand on her shoulder, “Tam, what’s going on?! Is he okay?!”

She turned around, with tears streaming down her face, and threw her arms around his waist. He looked down at her in shock as she put her head against his chest and sobbed. “Tam, what’s wrong?!” he asked, suddenly frightened to know the answer. He’d received her message half an hour ago, asking him to drop Noah with Evie, and come to the hospital as soon as he could. He’d been in such a panic, thinking that there must be some emergency, but he’d spent the whole drive over there telling himself to calm down, and to stop over-reacting. Now that he could see how upset Tamara was, his heart had started racing again, and he just wanted to know what had happened.

Tamara pulled away from him and looked up at him with big teary worried eyes and wiped at her tears with the back of her hand. “Kat’s waiting for us in the family room” she said, reaching for his hand and pulling him towards a door down the hallway.

He stopped outside the room and pulled Tamara back towards him. “What’s this about?” he asked, looking at the door with trepidation. “What’s wrong with Kyle?”

She shook her head and her mouth pulled into a strange sort of grimace as she tried not to cry. She’d done enough of that already! She wiped at her eyes again, and sighed, “I wanted her to explain it to you… because I don’t think I can.”

Tamara opened the door and led Heath into the room. There were sofas on one side of the room and a children’s play corner on the other, with a brightly coloured wooden educational type toy as its centrepiece. Kat was sitting on one of the couches waiting for them and looking very nervous. She had a brown folder resting on her knee. She nodded for them both to sit down and smiled at Heath as he took the spot closest to her on the couch.

Kat took a big breath and puffed it out slowly. Somehow she was even more nervous going over this a second time, and particularly because it meant explaining it to Heath. The fact that Kyle Bennett was actually dead would have even greater significance for Heath than it had had for Tamara, because she was essentially breaking the news to the boy’s last surviving relative. Even if Heath had never met the boy, he had still been a blood relation, and he had been murdered in the most awful of circumstances.  It would be understandable if Heath was upset.

“Heath…” said Kat, giving him a nervous little pat on the knee. “I have some things to tell you that you’re going to find shocking. I want you to be prepared for that.”

He glanced at Tamara, and she took hold of his hand and started stroking his thumb with her own. She turned away and stared into the distance, with tears rolling down her cheeks. He looked back at Kat and said, “Can you please just get on with it? You’re both really scaring me now!”

“Okay, Heath” said Kat, taking a deep breath, “I’m just going to come out and say it… Kyle Bennett, your half-brother, died when he was twelve years old in that house in Melbourne. The man you know as Kyle isn’t Kyle Bennett, or Braxton… He’s not your brother.”

He stared at her a little vacantly, trying to process what she’d just said, and felt Tamara give his hand a little squeeze in an attempt to be supportive. He swallowed hard, and opened his mouth to speak, but for a moment, the words just wouldn’t come. He coughed to try to clear his throat and stammered, “But… but… I… Who…”

Kat nodded at him, understanding what it was that he was trying to ask. Tamara had had more or less the same reaction. “At the moment, we don’t know who he is… and my best guess is that he doesn’t know either… It looks like he genuinely thought that he was Kyle, for whatever reason… He doesn’t seem to know who he really is… I can’t imagine how terrifying that must be.”

Heath stared at the floor, trying to understand this whole mess, and then turned to look at Tamara. She was still crying and holding onto his hand for dear life. She turned to look at him and wiped her eyes again with her sleeve. “He freaked out completely Heath!” she said, looking a little dazed. “He smashed his head against the wall, so many times! I was so scared! …You should see his poor head! There was so much blood... He just kept saying not to call him Kyle! And that he’s nothing, and that he’s worthless…” She started to sob again and he reached out and pulled her in beside him for a hug. “I didn’t know what to do, Heath! He wouldn’t stop hurting himself!”

“Where is he now?” asked Heath, looking pale with the shock of it all. “Is he okay?!”

“They’ve taken him for an MRI…” said Tamara, nodding her head and cuddling in close to Heath. “When he hit his head, Heath… I can’t get that sound out of my head! …What if…”

“He’ll be okay” said Heath, cutting her off before she could finish that thought. “He’s in good hands here, Tam. He’ll be okay!”

He looked back at Kat and blew out a big breath, still trying to get his head around things. “So you’re saying that my little kid brother… the real Kyle Bennett …he died?”

“Yes” said Kat, nodding at him sadly, “When he was only twelve.”

“And he was murdered by these Hames people?” he asked, his voice shaking with emotion. “Do they know how? …I mean… how… how they did it?” He couldn’t imagine someone murdering a child, and even though he’d never met this little boy, his little brother, he couldn’t help feeling like he’d just lost something. He’d never got the chance to meet him and now he never would. Some monster had just taken him from them. Now he had two murdered brothers.

“We don’t know how, no” said Kat, lying. She didn’t think that he needed to know that right here and now, not with everything else that he needed to get his head around. “He was buried with the other victims in the house… The coroner thinks he was killed around 2003.” She pulled out the death certificate and tentatively handed it to him.

He took it and looked at it with a blank expression, still unable to really take this in. “And… uh… our ‘Kyle’?” asked Heath, looking confused. “How did he get mixed up in this?”

“We haven’t really got an explanation” said Kat shaking her head. “He hasn’t been very forthcoming with information… but I think he was raised in that house, and… abused, and… he was probably very traumatised… Maybe brainwashed… I don’t know… I really don’t think he meant to mislead anyone… From what I saw, it came as a shock to him… I believe that he thought he was Kyle.”

“So… now what?” said Heath. “How do we find out who he is?”

“We’re working on it” said Kat, giving him a little half-smile in an attempt to be reassuring. “We’re waiting for the results of the DNA test… Maybe that’ll give us some sort of clue.”

He shook his head, and breathed out a heavy sigh. “So you think… you think he lived his whole childhood in that house?”

She shrugged and said, “We don’t know… but it maybe looks that way.”

“Locked in those little cells in that dungeon?!” he asked, shuddering at the thought of it. How could any child be treated that way?! He thought of Darcy and Harley and his blood ran cold at the thought of anyone hurting either of them. How Kyle had lived through something like that and come out the other side to be such a good person was beyond him. He felt a deep sadness for the other Kyle that hadn’t made it out.

“It looks like it, yes” said Kat, trying to push the image out of her own mind. Wainwright had been right, these things did stay with you.

“Jesus!” said Heath, rubbing his face with his free hand and sitting for a moment with his head tilted back and his hand covering his eyes. He needed time to think. He felt confused, and angry and sad all at the same time, and a lot of other emotions he didn’t even have words for. Finding out that his brother had been abused had been such a shock, and he’d still been reeling from that revelation. To find out now that he wasn’t really his brother, was somehow much more shocking.  He loved Kyle, or whatever his name was, and he couldn’t imagine just abandoning him now because they didn’t share a bloodline. He’d been a part of his life for too long, and they’d been through a lot together. They were brothers even if they weren’t really brothers. With Casey gone, and Brax on the run, Kyle was really the only family he had left. The more he thought about it, the less it really mattered to him. Kyle was still his brother. He couldn’t just shut his feelings off because of a lack of DNA.

He looked down at Tamara who was still softly sobbing and put his other arm around her to give her a proper hug. He kissed her on the top of the head and whispered, “He’ll be okay Tam… We’ll be okay… We’ll get through this.”

*****

"I don't want that name on my charts!" growled Kyle through gritted teeth, as he ripped up his patient notes and threw them, all scrunched up in little balls, across the room at Nate.

Nate gave him the kind of look that you'd give a small child that was being naughty and folded his arms across his chest. He could see that Kyle wasn't in any mood to be reasoned with.

"And I don't want it above my bed either!" he whined, pointing at the whiteboard where the patient's name normally went. "That's not me!" he said shaking his head in an exaggerated sort of way. The board had been wiped clean leaving his hands covered in black ink. He threw his patient wristband at Nate as well, and shouted, "I'm not him. I don't want anyone calling me that!" He started ripping up the T-shirt that he’d been wearing when he was brought in, pulling at it frantically, and tearing it into little strips.

Nate tilted his head at him, with his arms still folded, and spoke in as soothing a voice as possible. "Okay… well then..." said Nate, "What would you like to be called? Pick a name and we’ll call you that… We need to have a name for your notes, so we can keep track of your tests." Kyle seemed to have regressed and was behaving in a way that was very childlike. It wasn't unusual in trauma cases like this, and it wasn’t really a laughing matter, but it was hard not to find it a little amusing. Nate knew from experience that it was better to play along, and let him throw his tantrums, if that's what he needed. People dealt with things in different ways. This wasn't much different from a bereavement really. He was effectively mourning his own identity and going through the various stages of grief. “What would you like us to call you?” he asked kindly, giving him a little smile.

Kyle stopped what he was doing and looked up at Nate in shock, as though the concept was thoroughly new and unprecedented. "Ummmm..." said Kyle, looking blank and confused. "…I don't know."

Nate looked at him with pity, wondering what it would be like to lose all sense of your own identity. To have to build a new one from scratch would be terrifying. He couldn't imagine being in Kyle's shoes. "Why don't you and Tamara have a chat about it and maybe you can come up with a new name together?"

Kyle nodded his head, suddenly meek like a lamb, and curled up in the armchair next to his bed staring out the window. Nate picked up the scraps of T-shirt and balls of paper, and shook his head in wonderment at how different this Kyle was from the one that he'd always known. It was like the removal of the name ‘Braxton’ had wiped away any tiny bit of tough guy bravado Kyle had ever had. He seemed like a small child now, full of fear and vulnerability, and as far removed from a River Boy as it was possible to get.

Nate knew that Tamara would be there soon, blustering in with home-made food for Kyle, and pestering the medical team for answers. She was really worried about Kyle, and had become convinced that his strange behaviour was the result of a head injury. Kyle smacking his head off that wall had really frightened her. She'd been plaguing Nate every day to rerun the scans and make sure that Kyle didn't have a brain bleed. He didn't.

Heath had been coming in every day and sitting with Kyle for hours on end, playing board games and cards, and talking to him like you would a three-year-old. Bianca had come up from the city with the kids, to help Tamara out with baby Noah, so she’d been in every so often to see Kyle too. Nate was surprised at how much of a family man Heath had become since he’d been away, and how much he was stepping up for Kyle now. He’d never really thought much of him before, but he couldn’t help being impressed with the way that he was dealing with all of this.  Being there for Kyle, now that he knew that they weren’t really related, was something he wouldn’t have expected of a Braxton, especially with their whole ‘Blood and Sand’ thing. It was nice to see him doing the right thing.

The psychiatrist had asked that Kyle be kept in for at least the next few days. She was of the opinion that he was suffering a brief psychotic episode and that he'd snap out of it in a few days. Child-like behaviour was a known response to trauma and he was displaying a number of other indicators of post traumatic stress. He would come round, but it would just take a little time, and it was something that couldn't be rushed. 'Delayed traumatic shock' she'd called it. He'd basically taken a leave of absence.

“Tamara will be in soon” said Nate, as he patted Kyle on the shoulder and gave him a little smile. “I’ll see you later, okay?”

Kyle looked up at him with a slightly vacant expression. “Okay” he said nodding slowly, before looking out the window again.  

 

*****

“Snap!” said Heath, smacking his hand down on top of the stack of cards with a big grin on his face. “Mate! You need to be a bit faster than that!” he said, laughing a little. They’d been playing snap for the last half hour and Heath had been letting him win, just like he would with Harley. Kyle’s reactions were just very slow, as though everything was happening in slow motion. Heath thought that he’d try winning for once, just to shake things up, and see how Kyle reacted. He just stared down at Heath’s hand for what felt like an incredibly long time.

Heath leaned forward and tentatively put his hand on Kyle’s shoulder. “Mate, you still here?” he asked him, lowering his head to try to make eye contact.

“What are you still doing here?” asked Kyle. He’d said it in a voice so low and quiet that Heath couldn’t be sure if he’d heard him correctly.

“What?” said Heath, looking at him with concern. “Why wouldn’t I be here?”

Kyle looked up at him properly for the first time in days, and asked again. “Why are you still here?” He tilted his head at Heath and shook his head in a bewildered sort of way. “I’m not your brother, Heath… I’m no-one’s brother… I’m not anything to anyone…” He picked up the cards and started to tidy them away, carefully placing each card the right way round. “So… why are you still here?” He slid the cards back into the little box and slid the box across the table to Heath. “You don’t have to stay here with me. You don’t owe me anything…”

“Mate” said Heath, interrupting him. “This doesn’t have to change anything…” He gave Kyle a little smile, and squeezed his shoulder in an affectionate way. “You’re still my little brother… if… if you want to be.”

Kyle gave him a pained smile that was more like a grimace and said, in a flat voice that sounded distant, “It changes everything, Heath…”

“It doesn’t have to!” said Heath, shaking his head at him adamantly.

“How can it not?!” shouted Kyle, shoving the box of cards off the table angrily and looking out the window again. “I’m not someone that anyone would want to know.” he said, through gritted teeth.

“Mate, you’re all the family I have left!” said Heath, patting Kyle on the knee, “…and I love ya, you idiot!”

“You love Kyle… and that’s not me” said Kyle, continuing to stare out the window with his jaw clenched.

“Oh really? So you haven’t been living with us for like the last six years?  …That was someone else, was it?!” he said, giving him a light punch in the arm. “It’s not you who’s been here for all of us… through everything?  …That was some other guy, huh?!”

Kyle turned to look at him with eyes slowly filling up with tears. “But I’m not a Braxton, Heath! …I don’t know who I am… but I’m not one of you.” He looked down at his forearm with the “All Or Nothing” tattoo on it, and started to scratch at it with his other hand.

“Hey, hey, mate, stop that!” said Heath, reaching out, and pulling Kyle’s hand away, to stop him from hurting himself. “You’re still a Braxton in my eyes… If you want to be…”

Kyle stared at Heath for a moment, looking vacant and lost, and then started to shake his head as he started to cry. “That’s just it Heath. I don’t know what I want… I’m not Kyle… but I don’t know who to be… How do you just pick a new name for yourself… like naming a dog?!”

“I don’t know, mate… I don’t know…” said Heath as he put his arms out and pulled Kyle in for a hug. He didn’t really know what to say to him. He was relieved that Kyle was talking again, and that he seemed to be relatively back to normal, but this was going to be a new hurdle to clear. Kyle’s self-confidence lay there in tatters, and it was going to be very difficult for him to build himself back up again. How do you start again at the age of twenty-seven?!

Kyle pulled back from the hug and began wiping at his face with both hands. He let out a shuddering sigh and said, “I built myself a life that was completely based on lies… I ruined my relationship with my foster parents because I wanted to be a Braxton.” He sat back in the chair and gave a sad little laugh, shaking his head at himself angrily. “David and Jenny didn’t want me hanging around Danny Braxton… They knew that he’d get me in trouble… and he did… but I just wanted to impress him so badly!”

Heath looked at him in surprise. Kyle had never talked about his time in foster care, for reasons that were now obvious. He didn’t know anything about any of his foster parents. “David and Jenny?” asked Heath.

Kyle glanced at him and gave him a sad smile. “They were the good ones… after that house…” He pulled his feet up onto the armchair where he was sitting and wrapped his arms around his knees. “They brought me back” he said, nodding and rocking a little. “I didn’t talk for months when I first lived with them… but they loved me… and they… they were kind people… They took in a mute and seriously mixed up little kid… and they made him feel… like he might matter a little bit… and then he threw them away because he wanted Danny Braxton to think he was tough… and worthy of being his son…”

Heath nodded and looked at the floor. He didn’t know what to say that would help. This was the most that Kyle had talked about things since Heath had been home and he didn’t want to ask or say the wrong thing and have him clam up again. “Do you know where they are?” asked Heath.

Kyle nodded, and said, “If they haven’t moved… yeah.”

“Why don’t we go see them?” asked Heath. “They sound like they were nice people… Maybe they’d like to see you?”

Kyle shook his head and looked out the window again. “I don’t think so…”

“Knock knock” said Tamara, standing in the doorway, with a huge smile on her face. She’d been hiding outside and listening to the conversation, but she couldn’t hide the relief on her face to know that Kyle was talking again. “Hey baby!” she said, walking over to him and giving him a kiss on the cheek. She knew not to call him Kyle anymore but they still hadn’t chosen a name. For now, his notes said John Doe.

He looked up at her and smiled a little sadly, “I’m so sorry, Tam…”

She threw her arms around his neck and gave him a kiss, “You have nothing to apologise for!”  She nodded for him to put his feet down on the floor so she could sit in his lap. He put his arms around her waist when she sat down, and she took both his hands in hers, and leaned back into him so her head was on his shoulder. “I love you” she said, smiling up at him.

“Love you too” said Kyle, planting a kiss on her forehead.

“Looks like my cue to leave” said Heath, smiling from ear to ear and gathering his things. “I’ll see you tomorrow, mate!” he said, razzling Kyle’s hair, “and don’t worry, we’ll look after the little man till you get home.”

*****

“And you’re absolutely sure about that?!” asked Kat, sounding a little incredulous. “Can you email me the documents so I can show them?!” she said, scribbling on her pad. She could feel her heart racing. This was the most excited that she’d been for a while. “Okay, I’ll wait for final confirmation tomorrow then!” she said, smiling like an idiot. “Thank you, sir!” she said, as she put the phone down and sat back in her chair with a relieved sigh.

“You look happy?!” said Emerson, as he walked in through the door to start his shift. He hadn’t seen her smile like this in all the time he’d been working with her and it was making him more than a little nervous. “Why the face?” he asked, giving her a look of mock suspicion.

“I just got some good news… If it’s true…” She got up and picked up her things. “I’m waiting for confirmation so I’ll fill you in in the morning!”

He sat down on his chair and threw his feet up on his desk. “Okaaay…” he said, “I’ll be all ears then.” He watched her leave with a ridiculous grin on her face and hoped that the big news wasn’t that she was pregnant. She was a good cop, and he enjoyed working with her, but more than anything he really just didn’t want the hassle of having to deal with someone new right now.

Kat stood outside the station, putting her hands on her hips, and took in a deep breath of fresh air. She felt like a weight had been lifted off her shoulders and like she could breathe again for the first time in weeks. She couldn’t help smiling. She really wanted to go and have a drink at the bar and blow off a bit of steam, but she worried that she wouldn’t be able to keep her mouth shut, so she decided that she’d just go home and have a drink there. A glass of wine and a chick flick sounded pretty good to her right now! Tomorrow was going to be a good day…

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Thanks again to everybody for the continued support! I really appreciate it. Hope you enjoy this chapter :P

 

WARNING: ADULT THEMES

 

Chapter 16

 

Kat rolled over in the bed feeling like death warmed up, and promised herself that if she managed to survive till lunchtime, she would never drink again. Why did she always have to overdo it?! Why could she not be one of those sensible people who only has a few glasses and then knew when to stop?! She groaned heavily, and threw an arm and a leg out from under the covers, feeling hot and sweaty. It was far too warm today! She suddenly became aware of the warm and breathing entity in the bed beside her. It was snoring and giving off an enormous amount of body heat! No wonder she felt so warm. She opened her eyes and stared in shock at the head of blonde hair lying on the pillow beside her. He had his back to her and still had his hair in that ridiculous man bun of his. 'Oh God, Ash!' she thought to herself, fully aware that this was going to cause war in the house when Phoebe inevitably found out. She peeked under the covers and realised that neither of them were wearing any clothes, so any doubts that she might have had were instantly wiped away. They had definitely slept together. Memories of last night were beginning to come back, crashing over her like a wave, and she cringed just thinking about it. It had all been so clumsy, and fumbled, and drunken, and he hadn’t exactly rocked her world… She'd always wanted Ash, and she couldn't really deny that, but this just wasn't the way that she would have wanted it to happen! Phoebe was going to kill them both! Besides that, she was going to be really hurt, and the fact that they had both been so drunk wasn't really that much of an excuse. Kat lay back in the bed, and gave a heavy sigh as she covered her face, feeling an intense pang of guilt. She wondered how she was going to sneak him out without Phoebe knowing.

Ash gave a sort of groan and rolled over to face her. He opened his eyes and a look of shock and horror passed over his face. He shot into a sitting position and pulled the covers up around himself, suddenly feeling exposed and a bit self-conscious. "Kat!" exclaimed Ash in a hushed whisper, trying to keep his voice low so Phoebe wouldn't hear. "What? ...did we...?!" he asked, already pretty sure of the answer.

"Yep" said Kat, shrugging at him and looking decidedly embarrassed.

He covered his face with both hands and said, "oh God!"

"Yep" said Kat, nodding her head slowly in agreement. This was going to be such a mess.

"Pheebs is going to kill me!" he said, shaking his head at himself. He turned to Kat and said, "So we... definitely…?”

"Yep" she said again, smirking at him. "Glad it was so memorable!” she chuckled a little nervously, raising one eyebrow at him.

He gave her an embarrassed smile and said, “Sorry… I think I was pretty out of it… I’m surprised I even…”

“Well, you did…” she said, pulling the covers up around herself. “Just… not for very long.” she said, biting her lip and snorting a little.

Ash’s face flushed bright red with shame, and he turned away, frantically scanning the room to see where he’d left his clothes. He tried to reach his shorts that were lying on the floor but they were just slightly too far away. “Uh…I think I might…” said Ash, giving up and getting up out of the bed. She watched as he awkwardly stumbled around the room to pick up his scattered clothes, finding it hard not to be amused at Ash’s obvious embarrassment. He pulled on his clothes and picked up his shoes, and then turned to look at her very sheepishly. “Kat… Can we… I mean, can you…” he stammered.

“I won’t tell her” said Kat, giving him a little wink and pointing towards the window for him to climb out. “This isn’t going to happen again, Ash… So, she doesn’t need to know.”

 

*****

 

Ash sat at the breakfast table with his head down, lethargically stirring at a bowl of coco pops, and feeling his stomach churn with anxiety. He didn’t know what to do. He was already on thin ice with Phoebe and he knew that if she ever found out about him and Kat then it would be over. No doubt about it. No further questions asked. He just hoped that Kat could be trusted to keep her mouth shut. He was dreading the moment that he had to look Phoebe in the eye for the first time. She’d just had her shower and he knew that she was back in their room getting ready for work, and that meant that she would be walking through that kitchen door at any moment. He was going to have to face her, and hope that his stupid face didn’t give him away, like it always did.  He was going to have to put on his best ‘poker face’ and hope for the best.

He heard the bedroom door open and Phoebe’s soft footsteps approaching along the hallway. Taking a deep breath, he turned to face her and gave her the biggest smile that he could manage. “Hey, babe!” said Ash, sounding a little over eager. He’d been sleeping on the couch for more than a week so it wasn’t like she’d be that thrilled to see him. “Morning” he said, trying to make his voice sound a bit more normal.

She snorted at him in derision and walked straight over to the fridge, taking the orange juice out of the door, and pouring herself a large glass. She got a bowl and sat down at the table opposite him and started to pour herself a bowl of cereal.

“You okay?” he asked, looking decidedly nervous, and reaching his hand across the table to try to touch her arm.

She pulled away from him, and gave him a dirty look, narrowing her eyes at him. “Where did you sleep last night?” she asked. “I came out here to get a glass of water and you weren’t on the couch.”

He felt like she’d just kicked him in the stomach and it took everything he had not to gasp out loud. “I stayed at Andy’s” he lied, recovering himself quickly. “We just had a few beers, that’s all” he said, giving her a little smile, and then quickly turning his attention back to his uneaten bowl of soggy cereal so that he didn’t have to maintain eye contact. This wasn’t going to be easy.

“Pfff” exclaimed Phoebe, shaking her head at him in what he took to be disapproval. She turned to look when Kat walked in and said, “Hey Kat! Off to work?”

Kat spun around, looking a little startled, and glanced at Ash in a worried sort of way. Phoebe seemed to be looking at her a little strangely but she assumed that since there’d been so screaming or death threats that he mustn’t told her. In any case, she had more important things to be worried about right now. “Um… yeah… and I’m running late…” she said, turning away again as she started to walk all around the coffee table in the living-room looking perplexed. They watched as she dropped to her knees and swiped her hand about under the couch as though she’d lost something. Looking back over her shoulder at Phoebe and Ash, her face took on a look of panic. “Have either of you seen my laptop?!” she asked, “I left it here last night!”

 

*****

“I need to show you this!” exclaimed Kyle, looking up at Tamara as she walked in, and beckoning for her to come over. He was sitting in the hospital bed, with the pages of a newspaper spread out on the wheeled table in front of him, and he had a sort of wild-eyed and excited expression on his face. It was the first time that she’d seen him really smiling since Noah had been born, but there was something about this smile that was a little unnerving. He just looked a little manic. “I think I’ve found my mum!” he said, beaming at her.

Tamara frowned a little and sat down on the side of the bed beside him. She looked at the tabloid newspaper in front of Kyle and saw the photo of a brown haired woman on the front page. It was under a headline that read “House of Horrors Mum of SEVEN!”

The news had just broken and all the major newspapers and tabloids were carrying stories about Anna Lewis. Some of them had treated the story with a little more sensitivity, but the tabloids had been typically sensationalist, and had revelled in the gruesome details of the unassisted births of her babies. The heart-breaking fact that five, or possibly six, of her children had not survived, some of them murdered, had merely been treated as fodder to sell newspapers.

Tamara looked at Kyle with concern as he stared down at the page with a huge grin on his face. “Baby… I don’t know…” she stammered, “I mean… We need to ask Kat…”  She was worried that he was wrong, and that he wouldn’t be strong enough to cope with the disappointment when he eventually realised that. She glanced at him and then back at the woman in the picture. She had to admit it, they did look alike. They had the same colour of hair and very similar skin tone. There was something about the shape of her eyes too. She could see why Kyle was so convinced.

“It’s her… I know it is!” said Kyle, holding the picture up beside his own face. “Tell me she doesn’t look like me!” he exclaimed, mimicking her facial expression. He looked at the picture again and ran his fingers lightly over her face in an affectionate way. “I’ve got a mum, Tam! ...I’ve actually got a mum!”

Tamara took the page out of Kyle’s hands and began to read the story. Her heart started to thump as soon as she got to the second paragraph, realising that there was a problem with Kyle’s theory, and wondering how she was going to break it to him.  He just looked so excited. It seemed terribly cruel to take this away from him and leave him with nothing again. But at the same time, she knew that filling his head with more lies would not be the way to go. They needed to find his real family… Sadly, this wasn’t it. The article said that the woman was 36 years old. It would mean that she’d only been nine years old when she had Kyle, and that just seemed highly unlikely.

Tamara reached for Kyle’s hand and tilted her head at him with concern. “Baby… did you read the whole article?” she asked.

“Yeah… Of course I did!” he said, sounding a little defensive and taking the page back from her. “She’s my mum, Tam! I know it… in here!” he said, tapping his chest to indicate his heart.

“I don’t… I don’t think she is” said Tamara, shaking her head at him and looking up at him with big worried eyes. “Baby, I really wish that she was… but it says that she’s 36,” she said, pointing at the second paragraph in the article, and trying to reason with him. “She can’t be your mum… Honey, I’m really sorry.”

He looked at her with a blank and slightly dazed expression, and said, “But… look at how much we look alike…”

She squeezed his hand again and shook her head at him sadly. “Babe, you’re 27... She’s too young to be your mum… she would have been 9 when she had you…”

He shook his head at her, refusing to accept it. “There’s been some mistake… The newspaper must have got it wrong!” he said, smiling down at the photo of the woman again. He looked back up at Tamara and nodded at her decisively. “This is my mum, Tam… I can feel it… and… that means I have a little baby brother!”

The article said that one of Anna’s sons was still alive and that he had been found in the house when the police had carried out the raid. His name was Billy and he was only three years old. It also stated that the whereabouts of another son, who would be in his twenties, was currently unknown and that police were still hoping that he would come forward. Kyle had become convinced that he must be the man that they were looking for. It was all so clear to him now. He had been born in that house and this woman Anna was his mother. That’s why he couldn’t remember a time before that house. For him, there hadn’t been anything before it. That basement had been all that he’d ever known. He was so excited at the prospect of having a mum, and a new little brother to boot, and he just couldn’t wait to meet them!

She looked at him with pity in her eyes and thought that maybe she should just play along for the time being. Kyle didn’t seem to want to listen to reason right now, but she knew that Kat was coming in later, so she hoped that she might be able to put him straight. She just wasn’t looking forward to having to pick up the pieces. She wasn’t sure how much more stress and shock he’d be able to take. “Okay, we can ask Kat about it later then” said Tamara cuddling in close to him with her head on his shoulder.

She took out her phone and texted Heath that he needed to come in this afternoon to hear whatever Kat had to say to them. She didn’t want to have to deal with one of Kyle’s meltdowns on her own ever again.

 

*****

“Yes, sir… I’m sorry” said Kat, standing in front of Emerson looking incredibly shamefaced. “I just don’t know how it happened.”

“No… I don’t really understand that either” said Emerson, giving her a very disapproving look. “…but from the looks of you, I can see that there was a bit of drink involved?”

“Yes, sir” mumbled Kat, hanging her head a little. “I left it on the coffee table when I went to bed and when I woke up this morning it was gone… I can’t see any signs of forced entry so… unless someone left the door unlocked…”

“You should know better than to leave a work laptop out in plain view in your living-room!” said Emerson, crossing his arms across his chest and looking at her in a disappointed sort of way, “I would have expected better from you, Chapman.”

“I know, sir” said Kat, “I’m disappointed in myself, sir.”

“Well, I suppose these things do happen” he said, shaking his head at her again. “You’ll have to fill in a loss of assets report, and a report of theft, and I’m going to have to let Internal Affairs know that there might be a breach of security. They’ll decide if there’s to be any disciplinary action.”

“Yes sir… thank you, sir… I’ll make those reports right away” said Kat, heading over to her desk to fill in the paperwork. She had no idea how this could have happened and she’d never been more embarrassed in her life. She just hoped that whoever stole her laptop wouldn’t be able to get in and look at the confidential files on there. Some of that stuff was of a very sensitive nature and could be very damaging if it got into the wrong hands. What a mess! She really had to stop drinking like this!

“By the way, Chapman?” said Emerson, “I see that someone has leaked details of the Hames case to the press… That woman’s been named now…”

“I know” said Kat, nodding at him, “Wainwright won’t be too happy about that… He did say that they had some dodgy cops involved in all of this.”

“Mmmm” murmured Emerson, turning his attention back to his own paperwork. He looked up again a moment later, watching Kat scroll through her emails on the spare station laptop. She was smiling again, and looked pretty pleased with herself, and he watched as she got up to print something out on the printer.  He was curious now. He tilted his head at her and asked “Did you get that confirmation you were waiting for? The good news?”

 

 *****

 

Heath met Kat out in the hallway with a very worried expression on his face. He and Tamara always looked worried these days, understandably. “Have you seen those newspaper headlines?” asked Heath sounding very panicked and speaking quickly.

“I saw” said Kat, nodding in a sombre kind of way. It was the last thing that Wainwright or any of them needed right now. That poor woman was dealing with enough stress and trauma without the press hounding her too!

“Kat, he’s got it into his head that he’s that woman’s son…the one who’s missing” whispered Heath, trying to keep his voice down so that Kyle wouldn’t hear him. “I mean, he’s not, is he? He can’t be…? …Can he?!”

“Oh God!” groaned Kat, almost under her breath. This was the last thing that Kyle needed and she really didn’t want to have to break the news to him. “No, he’s not” she said, shaking her head at Heath and letting out a sigh of frustration. “The DNA doesn’t match.” she said.

He let out a big sigh and looked down at the floor for a moment, nodding his head sadly. Looking up at her again with worried eyes, he said, “Can you be nice… I mean… try to be gentle when you tell him that…?” said Heath, looking decidedly disappointed now that Kat had confirmed it. On some level he’d been hoping that the newspapers might be wrong about the woman’s age. It would have been so much easier if Kyle had been right. At least they would have had their answer and Kyle could have begun to rebuild some sort of life for himself. “He’s just so…” he said, his voice breaking a little with emotion. “I just don’t know how he’s going to take it.”

“I’ll do my best” said Kat, nodding and looking towards the door of the room. She was nervous about this conversation. It obviously wasn’t the news that Kyle had been hoping for, but she thought it was about as good as it was going to get for a while.

“But you said that you have some good news?” said Heath, brightening up a little. “Please tell me that you know who he is!?” He really wanted Kyle to have some sense of identity back. Not having a name to call him by was very strange. There were only so many times that you could call someone ‘mate’ before it got on your nerves, and he’d had to fight the urge to call him Kyle on so many occasions. Being nameless also seemed to be reinforcing his feelings of worthlessness, and Heath just wanted him to have a name so he could make some sort of peace with himself.

She fiddled with the envelope in her hand, folding it and unfolding it, as she ran what she was going to say to Kyle over and over in her head.  She gave him a little half-smile and said, “C’mon, Heath, let’s go and talk to Kyle.”

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Again, thank you so much to Suzza101, Red Ranger 1, Kristen, JarlieFanEver, and KittCatt for the lovely comments!  :P I'm really glad that you're enjoying the story. Hope you like this chapter! xxx

WARNING: ADULT THEMES

 

Chapter 17

 

Kyle held the envelope in his hand and stared down at it as though it might contain a bomb or something equally dangerous. He was scared to open it. Kat had gone now and he could hear that Tamara and Heath were talking to him but somehow their voices had just become a blur of noises that he couldn’t decipher. All that he knew was that he had a letter in his hand and that he was too frightened to read it.

“Baby?” said Tamara, taking hold of his free hand and sliding onto the bed beside him. “Baby… are you okay?”

He turned to look at her with a dazed expression and tried to understand what she was asking him. He could see that she was worried, and that Heath was standing not too far away with his arms hugged across his chest, looking at him in concern. He opened his mouth to speak but the words just wouldn’t come out. He opened and closed his mouth like a fish, and then stared back down at the envelope in his hand.

He wanted to open it. He wanted to know what was inside it so badly, but he was just too scared.  The world had reverted so suddenly to a terrifying place full of pain and sadness again. He hadn’t felt this lost since he’d been a little boy. He felt like he was back there. Every time he thought that he had a hold on things, and that he was starting to make sense of the world around him, something would happen and everything would come tumbling down again. He wanted to close himself away somewhere dark and never come out again.

Kat had broken the news that he wasn’t Anna Lewis’ son and that so far they didn’t have a DNA match for him. There had been some developments in the case though.  Kat had been pleased to know that Kyle was now a high priority for the investigation in Melbourne and his case had even been assigned to a specialised investigative team who dealt with the most serious cases of child sexual abuse. There was no doubt now that Kyle had been one of the children kept in that house and they had conclusive evidence to prove it. The facial recognition software had locked onto Kyle’s face in some of the photos and videos found on the property, and they’d managed to retrieve his little fingerprints from inside the cell he’d been kept in. There was no question now that he had been one of the child victims. They just didn’t know who he was.

Wainwright was sending the team down to meet with him in the next few days but in the meantime they were pulling out all the stops to try to find his birth family. It wasn’t easy because of his age and the limited tracking of child abduction cases in the 1990s. The fact that he didn’t know his name, or have any recollection of his life before, meant that they were starting from scratch, with no clues or indicators to go on. They didn’t know what age he had been when he was taken, assuming that he had been taken from a family, and that he hadn’t been born in the house. They couldn’t rule anything out. There was even the possibility that he might not be from Australia. Searching international databases would take even longer. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack but they were going to do their best to help.

Kat had expected him to be happy about it, knowing now that he had a whole team of people to help, but he couldn’t hide his devastation at the thought that Anna wasn’t his mum. He’d wanted her to be his mum for so many reasons.  On some level, the thought that they might find his birth family terrified him, because then he’d have to sit down and talk to them about the things that had happened to him. They’d make him talk about his life in that basement. They’d make him talk about the things that were done to him. He didn’t want to see the looks of pity and disgust in their eyes. He didn’t want to be the child that they lost, but who returned as ‘damaged goods’. If Anna had been his mum, then no explanation would have been needed. She would have understood what he’d been through and maybe she would have understood his need to not talk about it. Another part of him was frightened that they wouldn’t be able to find his birth family. That maybe he’d just been an orphan, or a child that nobody wanted. Maybe his parents had given him away, or worse still, maybe they’d sold him to the Hames. Maybe they’d died in the meantime and maybe there simply wasn’t a family out there. Any number of things could have happened to place him in that house and he wasn’t sure that he really wanted to know the sordid details. He wasn’t sure what he wanted anymore. He wasn’t sure about anything.

He looked down at the letter in his hands and began to tear at it a little to open it. He looked at Tamara and his eyes began to fill with tears. “I can’t” he said, handing it to her with shaking hands.

She took it from him and caressed the side of his face gently before lightly kissing him. “Do you want me to open it?” she asked, holding it up in front of him.

He nodded and looked out the window, gazing into the distance, with tears rolling down his cheeks. “Read it for me” he said quietly.

“Uh… do you want me to go?” asked Heath, unsure if Kyle would want an audience for this and feeling a little uncomfortable.

Kyle shook his head, glancing at Heath with a sad little smile, and said, “Stay”. He turned again to look out the window and took a big breath when he heard Tamara unfold the paper from inside the envelope.

Tamara looked at the pages in front of her. They were a PDF version of a handwritten letter from the Summers, scanned in and sent to Kat by the police in Melbourne. She looked up at Heath giving him a nervous smile as though to say ‘here goes’, and then she took a big breath and started to read.

 

“To our beautiful boy,

We’ve finally found you! We’re so sad that it had to be in these circumstances but we’re so glad to have found you nonetheless. We have been looking for you for years now, and we were beginning to give up hope of finding you again. When Detective Wainwright called us to ask about your time in foster care, we were very shocked to know that you were connected to the Hames case, but we couldn’t have been happier to have the opportunity to get in touch again. We want you to know that we have always loved you. You hold a very special place in our hearts and that will never change. Since you left, something has been missing in our lives, and we would very much like you to be a part of our family again if you will have us. More than anything, we would like to see you again and to know the man that you have become.

I think I owe you an apology. I know that things didn’t end well when you decided to move out and go your own way, and I know that it’s my fault. I shouldn’t have tried to make you choose between your birth family and us. That wasn’t fair. I understand now that you needed to feel that connection with your real family and that forcing you to give that up was wrong of me. Just please understand that I was scared. I was worried about you getting mixed up in criminal activity and that Danny would lead you down the wrong path. I thought he would be a bad influence on you. But the truth is, that I was jealous, and I was scared of losing you. The sad thing is, the more I tried to hold you back, the further I pushed you away. I’m so sorry. I wish that things could have been different.

Knowing now a little more about your background, so many things have fallen into place, and suddenly make a lot more sense. I can still see that little boy who came to us all those years ago, so closed and frightened of everything. You melted our hearts. I wish that you could have talked to us about the things that happened to you in that place, but I can understand why that was so difficult. If you ever want to talk about anything, or you need anything at all, please know that Jenny and I would like to be there to support you, in any way that we can. Our door is always open. We never stopped loving you.

We were told that you no longer use the name that we called you by, and that there is a huge question mark hanging over your identity now. I don’t know what to say about that. I’m so sorry. To us, it doesn’t matter what your name is, you will always be our beautiful son.

Jenny and I would very much like to come to Summer Bay and see where you live now. Detective Wainwright said that you have a wife and a new little baby boy! We would desperately like to meet her, and our ‘grandson’, if that would be okay with you?

If this isn’t something that you want, or it’s not something you can deal with right now, then we’ll understand. I just hope that you know how much we both love you.

Your parents,

David and Jenny xxx”

 

Tamara set the letter down in Kyle’s lap and reached for his hand. He continued to stare out the window so she reached up and turned his face gently towards her. “Baby… that was the most beautiful letter I’ve ever read…” she said, with tears streaming down her face. “They sound like the kindest people!”

He nodded and opened his mouth as though he was going to say something, but before the words could leave his mouth, his chin started to tremble and he began to sob. She pulled him to her and he buried his face in her neck, his whole body shuddering as he cried. She looked at Heath and gave him a nervous little smile.

“Mate…” said Heath, smiling with relief, “They sound like good people… Why don’t we get them to come visit?”

“No” mumbled Kyle, pulling away from Tamara. “Can you both just leave me alone for a while?” he said, getting out of the bed and climbing into the armchair by the window. “I just really need to be alone right now.”

They both looked at him in surprise, not really sure what to do. “Baby… I don’t… Why…” stammered Tamara, walking over and placing her hand gently on his shoulder.

He pulled away and put his arms around his knees, “Get out!” he yelled at them, “Just get out!” He wiped angrily with his sleeve at the tears running down his face and stared out the window again.

“But…” said Tamara, looking confused and dithering by the side of his chair. She didn’t understand this reaction and she didn’t want to leave him when he was clearly upset.

“C’mon Tam” said Heath, taking her by the shoulders and guiding her towards the door, “I think he just needs a bit of space.”

Kyle listened to Heath and Tamara leave and then unfolded the letter again to look at it. He recognised David’s carefully printed handwriting, always so neat and precise, and he could see that Jenny had signed her name at the bottom in that swirly handwriting style of hers. She’d clearly added the kisses too. He read through the letter again and he felt a pain in his heart when he thought how badly he’d treated them. It actually hurt to look at it. The guilt he felt was overwhelming. That David could sit down and write a letter like this made him feel like he was the worst person in the world. He’d thrown all their care and kindness back in their faces, disappearing and never contacting them again, and forgetting the love that they’d shown him through some of the most difficult years of his life. He’d been an ungrateful little sod. What he’d done had been unforgiveable. Yet, here they were begging for his forgiveness. He didn’t think that he deserved a second chance, and he definitely didn’t deserve this much compassion. How could they be so nice to him?! He wanted to see them more than anything, but he felt truly terrible about what he’d done, and he didn’t know how he would be able to face them again. He was so confused…

 

*****

 

“Hey babe” said Heath, as he and Tamara walked through the front door. ”Everything okay here?” he asked, giving her a tired smile.

Bianca looked up from the couch with Noah in her arms and gave them a worried look. “Yeah… Everything’s fine here…” she said.  She could see that Tamara had been crying and Heath had his arm around her shoulder as she leaned in against him for support. “What’s wrong?” she asked, glancing back and forth between them.

Tamara came over and sat beside Bianca, sighing and reaching her arms out for her baby. Bianca handed him over and said again, “What’s wrong… guys?!”

Heath leaned down, putting his arms around her neck, and kissed her on the cheek. “I don’t know, B… He’s just so confused about things… He kicked us out.”

“He kicked you out?!” she exclaimed, glancing round at Tamara who was holding Noah close and kissing him on the top of the head repeatedly. She just looked so upset. “Why’d he kick you out?!”

“He’s upset… I think he just needed some space.” said Heath, sitting down on the arm of the couch beside Bianca and taking her hand. “He got it in his head that he’s that woman Anna’s son… Kat told him that he isn’t.”

She looked up at him and covered her mouth in shock. “Oh God! He must be so disappointed!” she said, thinking how difficult this whole thing must be for him.

“He got a letter from his foster parents… The Summers… The nice ones he told me about… They want to come see him” said Heath, giving Tamara a little smile across the room. “They wrote him the nicest letter… they said they love him and they want to see him.”

“Well…? That’s great! …Isn’t it?!” said Bianca, looking a little confused.

“Yeah it is” said Heath, giving a heavy sigh and rubbing his tired eyes. “I think it’s just too much for him to deal with right now…”

Tamara started to cry again and Bianca turned to give her a little hug. “He’s just so messed up!” she said, sobbing and hugging Noah close to her. “I don’t know what to do to help him!”

“Hey, you’re already doing it!” said Bianca, leaning her head against Tamara’s. “All you can do is be there for him!”

“What’s going on?” asked Josh, standing in the doorway and looking concerned. He’d overheard most of the conversation but he was more than a little confused. “Tamara… are you okay?” he asked, scanning the room as he listened to her crying. “What’s going on with Kyle? Is there something wrong?!”

Heath glanced at Tamara and she gave him a little nod. They’d talked about telling Josh and Evie on the way home. It was getting harder and harder to hide what was going on and it didn’t seem fair to exclude him when he was almost family.  The hospital was planning to send Kyle home tomorrow, so they needed to prepare Josh and Evie for him coming back, and to make sure that neither of them would call him ‘Kyle’. Heath got up and went to the door to meet him. “Hey Josh” he said, putting his hand on Josh’s shoulder, “It’s Heath”. 

“Oh… hey” said Josh, furrowing his brow. “I’m getting worried now… Is Kyle okay?”

“I think you need to come in…” said Heath, starting to lead him towards the chair in the living-room. “I think we need to tell you something…”

 

*****

 

Kat sat at the kitchen table with her head in her hands. She was tired after a really long day and feeling pretty sick. The hangover was really hitting her now and she had nerves in her stomach just thinking about having to talk to Phoebe and pretend that nothing had happened. She also felt bad about today. The meeting with Kyle hadn’t exactly gone as she’d hoped. He’d just seemed so sad and broken, and she’d hated being the one to have to tell him. Sometimes she really hated her job.

Wainwright had been in touch to say that the investigation team were coming down the day after tomorrow to interview Kyle. She really wasn’t sure that Kyle was ready for it. He seemed to be swinging between manic over-excitement and sullen silence from moment to moment, and he clearly wasn’t comfortable talking about things yet. She’d tried to point that out to Wainwright but he’d said that they had to try. She just hoped that he wouldn’t freak out again.

She looked up when she heard the door bang shut and footsteps approaching out in the hallway. “Hey Phoebe” she said, as Phoebe walked in, doing her best to look relaxed. “How was work?”

Phoebe walked to the fridge and took out two bottles of beer, before sitting down at the table with Kat. “Yeah, fine” she said, sounding tired. She looked at Kat and gave her a smile. “How bout you? How’d you get on at work without your laptop? Did they freak out?”

Kat looked at Phoebe thinking that her smile looked a little strange. There was something a little cold about it. She told herself that she was just being paranoid, and that she was seeing things that weren’t there, her guilt just getting the better of her. “Yeah, it’s a bit of a mess… My boss has had to report me to Internal Affairs… I might get suspended.” She pulled out the elastic that was holding her hair back, and dragged her fingers through her hair, massaging her scalp. “It’s been a hard day.”

“I bet it has” said Phoebe, raising an eyebrow at her and taking a gulp of her beer. “Any idea who took it?” she asked.

Kat shook her head, looking a little depressed. “I don’t know… I shouldn’t have left it on the coffee table… I guess maybe someone left the door unlocked… and someone came in and took it.” She took a swig from the bottle and said “I really shouldn’t be drinking! This is what got me in trouble in the first place!”

“Ah come on! Everyone’s entitled to blow off some steam every now and then!” said Phoebe, giving her a toothy grin. “Who were you drinking with last night?” she asked, glancing at Kat out of the corner of her eye as she took another drink.

“Oh um… I… uh… just had a few too many by myself” said Kat, sounding pretty unconvincing. She blushed bright red and started staring at the label on her bottle, hoping that Phoebe wouldn’t notice. She was getting very nervous now.

Kat glanced up at her, and as she caught the strange smile on Pheobe’s lips, she began to wonder if she knew. There was something odd about her smile and the way that Phoebe was looking at her.

“Pheebs… uh… I…” stammered Kat, wondering whether it would be better to come clean. Just then her phone began to ring and she reached in her pocket to pull it out.

She saw that it was Emerson and she glanced at the time in the corner of the screen. 23:42! She wondered why on earth he would be calling so late. She turned away from Phoebe and answered the phone, “Sir?” Her eyes widened as she listened to her boss shouting at her down the line.

“But… how?” she started to say, before Emerson interrupted her. Her face blanched white as she listened to what Emerson had to say and she got up and walked away from the table towards the living-room. “Oh my god… I’m so sorry, sir! I don’t know what to say!” said Kat, putting her hand on her forehead. “What… Is there nothing we can do?!”

She turned back to face Phoebe with a look of horror on her face. “Okay, sir, yes… first thing in the morning… yes… I’m so sorr…” She looked at the phone and realised that Emerson had hung up. She turned again and went to sit down on the couch, putting her head in her hands.

Phoebe gave her a curious look and got up from the table. “Kat? What’s going on?!” she asked, suddenly looking a little worried. “Is it about the laptop?”

Kat looked up with tears in her eyes and nodded her head. “It’s about Kyle!” she said, with her chin trembling as she cried. “Someone got my laptop and they managed to hack it… All the investigation stuff… Some newspaper in the city has got hold of it… The story is going to go nationwide in the morning!”

All the colour drained from Phoebe’s face and she sat down next to Kat on the couch. “You… you… you had stuff about Kyle on that laptop?!” she stammered. “Oh God!” she said, covering her mouth with her hand. “What was on there?!”

Kat looked at her and began to shake her head. “Everything!” she said, pulling at her own hair in frustration. “That poor guy! I don’t know how I’m ever going to make this up to him!”

Phoebe got up and started to pace the room. “This is my fault” said Phoebe, shaking her head at herself.

“It’s my fault, Phoebe!” said Kat, leaning back with her hand on her forehead. “You just told your boyfriend… I’m the one that left that laptop lying about while I was too busy getting drunk…. I’m going to lose my job… and you know what?! …I deserve to!”

“That… That’s not what I mea…” stammered Phoebe but she was interrupted by the door banging shut.

Ash walked in with a startled expression on his face and glanced back and forth between the two girls. “Um… I… What’s going on?!” he asked, looking at Kat’s puffy eyes and the look of pure shock on Phoebe’s face. “What’s happened?!”

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Thanks again everyone for the lovely comments! :P Might not get a chance to update this again for a few days because I think I'm going to be a bit busy. Sorry!

Hope you enjoy this chapter! x

 

WARNING: ADULT THEMES

 

Chapter 18

 

“Oh my godfather!” exclaimed Irene, holding a tabloid newspaper up to show Chris. “Have you seen this story about Kyle Braxton?!”

“No, what’s he done now?” replied Chris, glancing round from cleaning the coffee machine and shaking his head knowingly. “Those Braxtons are always mixed up in something dodgy.”

She set the paper down on the counter and pointed at it. “It says here that he’s not a Braxton… that he’s one of those kids from that house in Melbourne! …God, the poor love…”

He turned to look at it, and they stood side by side reading the contents of the paper with troubled looks on their faces. There was a photo of Kyle at thirteen years old, the one from his case file, but there was also one from much earlier. It was a freeze frame of his face, a little blurry and obviously taken from a video, which must have been taken when he was only about six. There was something terribly sad about both photos. It was easy to see that both photos were of the man that they knew as Kyle Braxton, but his eyes had a vacant and faraway look, and he was scruffy and pitifully thin. The story went into detail about the conditions that he’d been kept in and even outlined the nature of some of the videos and photos that had been found on the property. They had included a photo of Kyle’s dark and dingy cell, and the yellow plastic bucket that the police had been able to retrieve his fingerprints from. The article was spread out across three pages and very little had been left to the imagination.

“This is… this is…” stammered Irene, looking at Chris in horror, “just shocking!” Irene’s mind was racing. She couldn’t help feeling incredibly sorry for him, but it was stirring up old memories for her, and she wondered why he would have allowed those details to be put out there for mass consumption. Something like this was so deeply personal and such a painful subject. She couldn’t imagine having the whole world know about what had happened to her, so she assumed the same would be true for him. It seemed more likely that the newspapers had just run the story without the slightest consideration for the victim. If that was true, and he hadn’t given permission, then this was the most shameful breach of trust imaginable, and she felt guilty for even reading it. The whole thing was such a terrible violation.

Chris nodded at Irene, and then looked up in surprise to see both Alf and Roo staring down at the paper too. “Oh!” he exclaimed, “Didn’t know you were there!”

“That poor boy!” said Roo, staring down at the pages and shaking her head sadly. They’d already read the paper over breakfast but Roo couldn’t get Kyle out of her head. Those photos of Kyle as a little boy had stirred up all of her motherly instincts and all she wanted to do was throw her arms around him. “What must be going through his head right now?!”

“What I want to know is how these newspapers get hold of this stuff?!” said Alf, shaking his head in disapproval. “These newspaper blokes… they have no shame! I don’t know how they sleep at night!”

Irene nodded at him, feeling a little dazed.  “I wonder where he is now?” she said, looking back down at the sorrowful little boy in the photo, “I haven’t seen him for a while…”

“I wouldn’t want to be walking around with everyone talking about me… talking about… that” said Chris, shaking his head sadly. “He doesn’t even know who he is!”

Leah and Zac walked in and noticed the gathering up by the counter. They’d read the story too and they could see the paper spread out on the counter so they were in no doubt about what was being discussed. Leah walked over and put her hand on Irene’s arm. “It’s really sad, isn’t it?” she said, looking at Irene with concern. Some part of her knew that Irene would be internalising this and linking it back to her own history of abuse. “You okay? she asked, tilting her head at her.

Irene pulled her in for a hug and gave her a little squeeze. “Honestly, girly! Trust you to be worried about me, when it’s that poor boy we should all be looking out for!”

Leah gave her a worried little smile and glanced down at the photo of Kyle in the paper. “I just don’t know how someone could do that to a little child… Look at his little face… He was only a baby!” she said, with her eyes welling up a little. Zac reached for her hand and gave her a sympathetic smile. Leah was three months pregnant but they hadn’t told anyone yet. She was getting a bit over-emotional about a lot of things.

By the time Heath and Tamara walked in, a large crowd had gathered, and they were all talking in hushed tones. It was clear immediately that they were all talking about Kyle, and Tamara looked up at Heath with big worried eyes, unsure of whether to turn around and leave again. She wasn’t sure that she could face this. He gave her a little smile, taking her hand in his, and they walked over to the crowd gathered around the counter.

“Two flat whites” said Heath, catching Chris’ eye. “And I’d appreciate it if you could all stop gossiping about my brother…” he said, glancing around the array of embarrassed faces, “…at least while we’re here.”

Tamara looked down at the ground and her eyes began to well up with tears. Irene came around the counter and put her arms around her, pulling her into a hug, and squeezing her tight. “Oh love!” she exclaimed, “We’re all just worried about you and… that poor husband of yours…” She pulled back to look at her and said, “If you two need anything, you know that there are a lot of people in this town that’ll be happy to help. You’re not on your own, okay?”

“That’s right, love” said Alf, giving her a little pat on the shoulder, “We’re all here to help if you need us.”

Tamara gave an embarrassed sort of smile and said, “Thanks Irene… Mr Stewart…” She glanced around the other faces and they all seemed to be looking at her with a mixture of sympathy and pity. There was a lot of head tilting and sympathetic smiles. It was all a little overwhelming. As well-meaning as people obviously were, there was something incredibly patronising about the way everyone was acting. She hated to think how Kyle was going to feel when he finally came home and people started looking at him and talking to him like this. If they were going to behave like this, then she could see that Kyle would find it very hard to ever leave the house again. This was quickly becoming a nightmare that she couldn’t wake up from.

 

 

*****

 

 

“All we can do is offer our sincere apologies” said Emerson, standing in Kyle’s hospital room with his cap in his hand, and looking at Kyle with pity. “This shouldn’t have happened!” he said, glancing at Kat as she stood beside him looking decidedly shamefaced. “And you can rest assured that we’ll be carrying out a full investigation and disciplinary action will be taken.”

“I’m so sorry!” said Kat, glancing up at Kyle with a face flushed bright red with shame. “I didn’t mean for this to happen! The last thing I would want to do is hurt you… I hope you can forgive me some day.”

“Can you just go?” growled Kyle, through gritted teeth. He had a selection of newspapers stacked on the table in front of him, all carrying his story as front page news. He stared out the window, trying to calm his breathing, and trying to reason with himself that getting angry wasn’t going to help anyone.

Emerson nodded and said, “If you need to speak to me again, you have my number”. He placed his card on the table and turned to leave, glaring at Kat as he went. She approached Kyle and tentatively put her hand on his arm, “I really am sorry” she said, with tears rolling down her cheeks, “I know there’s nothing I can do to fix this…”

Kyle turned to look at her with anger boiling up inside his chest and said, “I didn’t ask you to get involved… I didn’t come to you about any of this… and now… look where we are…” He got out of the bed and turned away from her, standing looking out the window. He was clearly breathing heavily and the veins were standing out in his neck, and his attempts to calm himself down clearly weren’t working. He suddenly turned around with his fists clenched and his face bright red and full of fury. “You’ve ruined my life!” he roared at her, in a voice so loud it sounded like he might tear his vocal chords, “I hate you!” He hugged his arms around himself and closed his eyes, shaking his head and breathing heavily. “Everybody knows now! The whole world knows what they did to me… They know every little detail!” he said, with his voice breaking a little. He slumped into the armchair with an air of defeat, and covered his face with his hand. “How am I supposed to live with this?” he sighed.

 “I… I’m… I’m… so sorry” said Kat, shaking as she stood there in front of him. She didn’t know what else to say. There wasn’t really anything else she could say. “I’m sorry.”

“Can you please just go?” he asked again, still covering his face. “Just go” he pleaded, in a small broken voice, “please?”

She gave a heavy sigh and walked out to the hallway where Emerson was waiting for her. He gave her a very unsympathetic look and said, “You deserved that… and more.” He put his cap back on and started to walk ahead of her down the corridor. “Internal Affairs want to see you in half an hour” he said, speaking to her over his shoulder as she scurried along behind him. “And I’d stop that crying if I were you!”

 

 

*****

 

 

“Home, sweet home, eh?” said Heath, carrying Kyle’s bag into the living-room for him. “Want me to get us some beers? I can go get us some pizza too if you like?”

“Heath!” said Kyle, collapsing into one of the armchairs and letting out a big sigh. “You don’t have to try so hard! Just let me sit here for a while, will you?!”

Tamara walked into the living-room with Noah in her arms and gave Heath a nervous smile. Heath had agreed to go and pick Kyle up while Tamara got the house ready for him coming home. She’d gone and got some nice pastries from the Diner so they could have tea when he got home, and she’d put Noah in a particularly cute little outfit. It read “If you think I’m cute, you should see my daddy”.

She walked over to Kyle and sat down on the arm of the chair, smiling down at him. He looked up at her and gave her an incredibly tired smile. He looked exhausted.

“Noah wants a cuddle from his daddy” said Tamara, handing him over to Kyle. “He’s missed you!” she said, leaning over and giving him a kiss on the cheek.

“Hey, little man!” said Kyle, taking his little baby boy in his arms and planting a gentle kiss on the top of his head. Feeling the extra weight, he marvelled at how much bigger and chunkier he seemed now. Kyle had only been gone a week but it felt like a lifetime had passed since he’d been sitting here. He looked down at the gurgling face of his little baby, and much to his own surprise, he began to cry. A wave of emotion just crashed over him, as he held the warm little body of his baby in his arms, and his own body began to shake violently. He looked up at Heath and Tamara who were both looking at him with shock and concern. “Sorry… I don’t know why I’m like this!” he said, wiping roughly at his tears with the heel of his hand. “I haven’t cried so much in my life… I just can’t seem to keep it together…” He looked at Heath and felt a deep sense of shame that Heath was witnessing all of this. He’d always felt that the Braxton boys thought he was some kind of cry baby weakling, and now he was showing them all how much of a cry baby he could really be. He wiped at his face again, furious with himself for making such a show of himself. “This is so embarrassing” he said, with forced laughter.

“It’s okay, mate” said Heath, tilting his head sympathetically. “You don’t have anything to be embarrassed about… What?! …You think I don’t cry?!” He kneeled down in front of Kyle and said, “I cry… I cry when I think of Rocco… That still hurts more than I can even put into words.” He gave him a sad little smile and patted him on the knee. “I cry, mate… We all do… It’s what makes us human.”

Tamara looked down at Heath and thought how much she’d misjudged him in the past. She’d always thought that he was some sort of meat-head, who hardly had two brain cells to rub together, and she’d always wondered what Bianca saw in him. She’d wondered if their whole relationship was just based on a strong physical attraction. He was pretty easy on the eye, she’d give him that, but she wouldn’t have put Bianca down as the shallow type. It just hadn’t made much sense to her before all of this. Now she could see that Heath had hidden depths and he’d really surprised her over the last week. He could be kind and gentle, and he was clearly incredibly loyal. Heath certainly wasn’t a bad guy to have fighting your corner!

“Thanks” said Kyle, wiping his eyes again and still looking pretty embarrassed. “Thanks for being here… for me and Tam” he said, giving them both a little smile.

He repositioned Noah, and set him so he was sitting upright and facing him, and smiled at his chubby little face. Noah gazed at him with big brown eyes, just like his mother’s, and Kyle’s heart just melted. “I’ve missed you” he said, before pulling him in so he was lying on his chest. “I love you so much” he said to him, kissing his soft little cheek.

 

 

*****

Phoebe sat on one of the benches along the seafront staring out at the gentle waves lapping onto the beach. She had a newspaper sitting on the bench beside her, and she glanced at it every now and then, feeling an intense nausea in her stomach at the thought of what she’d done. She was waiting for Ash to come and meet her. She wondered how he was going to react, and if she would really have the guts to go through with it.

Ash rushed towards her in his black work uniform, wiping his hands on his trousers, and looking very nervous. He sat down on the bench beside her and said “Sorry, Pheebs, but I don’t have long! Angelo’s is totally jammed today!” He could see that she didn’t look happy, and her text message hadn’t exactly been friendly, so he figured this was probably the break up conversation. “Can you just get it over with? …I take it this is the break up chat?”

She narrowed her eyes at him and shook her head a little incredulously. “So this is how things end with us, is it?!” she said, in a bitter sounding voice. “On your ten-minute break from work?! A quick ‘It’s not working out’ and that’s it?!”

“I don’t know what you want from me Phoebe!” said Ash, sounding a little exasperated. “You’ve hardly spoken to me for the last week… and now you say you have to talk to me and it can’t wait… and I have to drop everything and come out here…” He looked at the anger so evident on her face and he said “Then I get here and you have a face like thunder!  …So what am I supposed to think?!”

“I know that you slept with Kat” she said, staring out at the beach and keeping her voice monotone. “I know that the two of you hopped into bed together while I was in our room just down the hall”

“Uh” stammered Ash, feeling like she’d just reached in and tied his stomach in one big knot. “Uh… so…”

“Uh, uh…” mimicked Phoebe, looking at him with tears in her eyes. “So, yeah… I know.” she said, nodding sadly.

“Um… I’m really sorry, Pheebs… There’s probably not much I can say…” said Ash, flushing red with shame. He looked at her apologetically and said, “We were really really drunk and it just sort of… happened… I was so drunk! …I mean, it was over in like less than a minute… which is… embarrassing…”

She stared at him with a look of pure disgust. “Because of you I may have just ruined Kyle’s life!” she spat at him angrily. “Because of you!”

Ash looked thoroughly confused, and said, “Hold on… Back up! …What do you mean?! …How has this got anything to do with Kyle?!”

Phoebe took a deep breath and looked back out towards the shoreline. “I’m the one who took Kat’s laptop…” she said through gritted teeth. “I saw you two! …I saw the pair of you in bed together… I just saw red!”

The colour had drained from Ash’s face and he looked at Phoebe with disdain. “So instead of shouting at us, or kicking my drunken ass, you thought you’d just take Kat’s laptop?! …What is wrong with you?!”

“I didn’t think it through” she said, breathing heavily through her nose and glaring at him with pure hatred. “I didn’t know there was stuff about Kyle on there!”

“What did you do with it?!” he asked, suddenly wondering who this woman was. Who had he been living with, and sleeping with, all this time? She was more devious and lot more twisted than he would ever have imagined possible. Why be so underhanded?

“I know a guy from a newspaper in the city… from my old days in the music industry… I gave him a call and I gave him her laptop… I just wanted her to get in trouble with her superiors… I didn’t think how it would affect other people.”

He shook his head at her and stood up, trying to put some distance between himself and this crazy woman. He put his hands on his head and looked at her in disappointed shock. “So you’re the one that leaked the story about Kyle?!” he asked, just trying to get his head around it. “How could you do that Pheebs?! I mean, who are you?!”

“I’m the girlfriend that you cheated on!” she shouted at him angrily. “What was I supposed to do?! Just let you jump into bed with that skank?! Just let the two of you get away with it?!”

“You could have shouted at us! You could have yanked me out of there by my hair!... There are so many other things that you could have done, Pheebs! Like a normal person… But… You stole a police laptop and you gave it to the press!? Do you realise what you’ve done?! Kat is probably going to lose her job! And Kyle…” He rubbed his face in frustration and gave a loud groan, “Kyle is going to fall to pieces over this!”

“You think I don’t know that?!” she shouted at him. “But this is your fault… both of you…”

“So Kyle is what?! Collateral damage?!” he asked, astounded at the cheek of this woman. She wasn’t showing even the slightest remorse for what she’d done. “So you got your revenge on Kat… What had you planned for me?!” he asked, his eyes widening with fear.

She looked away again, staring out at the water with her jaw clenched. “I hadn’t figured that out yet” she said bitterly.

He let out an exasperated sigh and said, “Well, what is it you want from me, then?! …What?! …Forgiveness?!”

“No” she said, turning to face him. “I said that I hadn’t figured it out yet… but now I have.” She got up and walked over to him, putting her arms around his waist and looking up at him with a sickly sweet smile. “I want you to take the blame for it.”

“What?!” he stammered, pulling her arms from around his waist. “What are you on Phoebe?!” he yelled at her.

She smiled again and nodded her head at him decisively. “You’re going to tell Kat that it was you who took the laptop.”

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Thank you to everyone for the lovely comments :wub: You guys are great! Finally got some time to write this next chapter. Hope you like it! 

WARNING: ADULT THEMES

 

Chapter 19

 

"I'd remember, wouldn't I?" murmured Kyle, suddenly piping up and breaking the silence. "I mean... If I’d had a family... and people who loved me… I'd remember them, wouldn't I?!" 

Tamara looked up at him in surprise, and wondered if he was talking to her, or to himself. They'd been sitting outside in the sunshine for about the last two hours and Kyle hadn't said more than a few words since they'd been out there. It was the first time that he'd been outside in the fresh air for over a week and she’d thought that a bit of sunshine would do him some good. He seemed to need a little peace and quiet, so they'd just been sitting together, side by side in comfortable silence, and enjoying the sunshine.

Baby Noah was sleeping in the shade, snoozing softly, and making the occasional little grunty noise. He’d make these funny little snuffly sounds, and Kyle would look over at him, and smile every time he did it. Tamara loved to watch him with Noah. She couldn’t have asked for a better father for her baby.

Josh and Evie were at Uni, and Heath and Bianca had taken the kids out for the rest of the afternoon to give him and Tamara some much needed space. The house was actually quiet for once, but out of nowhere, he suddenly seemed to want to talk.

"Don't you think I'd remember?" he asked again, in a quiet and distant voice. It sounded more like he was talking to himself and like he wasn’t really expecting her to answer. "I think I'd remember..." he said, nodding his head slowly for his own benefit.

"It depends how old you were..." offered Tamara, still not sure if he really wanted her input, and giving him a little shrug of the shoulders. "If you were really little…. like Noah..."

"Don't!" he said, giving her a startled look and then turning to look at his tiny sleeping baby. There was a look of horror on his face, at the thought that someone could just come and take him. "I don't even want to think about that!"

"But that’s just it… Maybe you were just too small to remember them" insisted Tamara. "Even if they loved you, like we love Noah… If you were too little… you just wouldn't remember…”

“Yeah… I know” he said, as he rubbed his face and nodded sadly at her. She was right, of course, but it was something that just kept whirring around his head. He couldn’t quite fathom the idea that he could have wiped away all memory, if they really had been kind and loving parents. Surely some vestige of a memory would have remained?

He leaned back and looked up at the bright blue sky. It was a beautiful day with hardly a cloud above and there were birds flying and swooping overhead. He thought how sad it was that so much of his life had been spent locked away indoors. At one stage in his life, sitting here like this in the sunshine would have seemed unthinkable. His world had been a dark and dank and gloomy place.

The day that he’d been dragged out of that house, kicking and screaming under the social worker’s arm, he’d looked up at the sky for what had felt like the first time. It was like his whole world had been ripped apart and everything that he’d ever known had been demolished in an instant. The vast openness of the world outside that house, with endless blue skies, had seemed like the most terrifying thing in the world to him, when all he’d ever known before had been cramped walled spaces. To have no ceiling above him had been overwhelmingly frightening. It had made him dizzy and nauseous, and all he’d wanted was to go back to the basement, and to what he knew to be ‘safe’.

He watched now, as a bird swooped down low over the garden, almost as though it was showing off, and he began to think back to the first time he remembered ever seeing a bird. It had landed on the windowsill outside the basement, and had stood there, high above them, peering in through the bars, as raggedy unkempt children crawled about on the floor in a desperate scramble for food. He’d looked up for a moment, distracted by the small bird standing there on stick legs and watching them with beady little eyes. He’d been almost sure that it had regarded him with pity. It had been the first time that he’d really been aware of a world outside that house, and realised that he wasn’t a part of it. That bird had been free to fly away, while he had gone back to counting bricks in the wall with his fingers, and seeing how long he could stay in a crouched position so he didn’t have to lie on the damp floor. He still felt an irrational anger towards birds sometimes when he saw them flying, as ridiculous as that was.

He blew out a big breath and turned back to Tamara. “Do you think we need to see a lawyer?” he asked, rubbing the sweaty palms of his hands on his jeans.

“What?!” she said, sounding a little shocked by the fact that the question seemed to have come out of nowhere. “Why would we need a lawyer?!”

He stared down at the wooden boards in the decking he was sitting on, and answered her in a voice that seemed a little detached and distant. “Because I’ve been walking around with a dead kid’s name for the last fourteen years… and I don’t know where we go from here.” He traced his fingers over a knot in the wood beside him, and shook his head. “I mean… I don’t know where I stand… where we stand…I don’t know if we’re even still married… or what the legalities are… and I don’t know what we do about my name… or Noah’s for that matter.” He threw her a brief half-smile, glancing at her quickly, before looking down again. “You could just go back to Kingsley, I suppose…”

She hadn’t really thought about the implications of Kyle’s loss of identity, and what that meant for them from a legal perspective, but she could see that he was right. If they weren’t Braxtons, they’d have to figure out who they were going to be, even if that meant just picking out a name at random.

She got onto her knees and leaned her forehead against Kyle’s, putting her arms around his neck, and said, “I don’t want to be a Kingsley… I want to be whatever you are.”

He gave her a sad grimace and said, “I don’t know what I am, Tam! …I might never know!”

“Are you sure you don’t just want to keep your name? I mean… It’s been your name longer than it was his…” she said in a cautious way, not wanting to set him off or upset him. “I mean, Heath and Brax are still your brothers in every way that matters. You could just stay a Braxton”

“I can’t” he said, shaking his head and glancing up at her with tear-filled eyes. “I can’t be him anymore… I’d rather have no name than steal his name from him… It’s just not right.”

“Well, then… we’ll be nameless together!” she said, leaning in to kiss him on the forehead. “As long as we’re together… we’ll be okay!”

He laughed suddenly, a little incredulous, and he wondered how he’d managed to find a woman so willing to stand by him through everything. Part of him couldn’t understand what she saw in him. Why would she want to saddle herself with someone so messed up and carrying so much baggage?! He couldn’t even give her his surname!  “Maybe we’ll just have to pick out a name and get our names changed legally?”

“That’ll be so weird!” she said, laughing a little. “Although it could be fun, if you think about it! We can call ourselves anything we want to!”

“I guess so” he said, snorting at her ‘glass-half-full’ mentality. He was always amazed at her ability to see a positive in pretty much anything. “It’s just weird not having a name… Mr and Mrs Someone… and Noah Someone…”

“I’ll have a look for a lawyer” said Tamara, giving him a little smile. “Maybe we should talk to the cops as well?” she said. “That team that’s coming tomorrow might know how to help.”

“Maybe…” he said, nodding at her and giving a tired sigh. In truth, he was dreading having to meet with the Cops tomorrow. He really wasn’t sure that he would be able to hold it together and answer their questions. He’d been talking about things a little more over the last few days, learning how to put his trauma into words, and he had to admit that it was beginning to get a little easier.  But talking to Tamara and Heath, and even the psychiatrist, was very different to being interrogated by the police.  Having people that he didn’t know come and ask him the most intimate questions imaginable was going to be very hard. They’d told him that they were bringing a video camera in order to record his interview. They wanted him to make a video statement so that it could be used in the Hames’ trial, and so that he wouldn’t have to testify in open court when the time came.  His stomach was churning over and over just thinking about it.

She turned around with her back to him, and leaned into his chest, pulling his arms around her and interlacing her fingers with his. She placed her head against his shoulder and looked up at him.  “I love you, Mr Someone” she said, with a little giggle.

“Love you too, Mrs Someone!” he said, snorting a little. She never failed to make him laugh.

They sat there on the deck, enjoying the gentle warmth of the sunshine on their skin, and feeling a closeness that they hadn’t had in a while. Kyle kissed her on the top of the head and thought how incredibly lucky he was to have her. He didn’t think that he would ever have been able to get through any of this without her. She and Noah were the only things that he had in his life that were really worth living for.

“You know… I do have some memories…” he said, staring into the distance as though he was watching them pass before his eyes. “I remember… ‘things’… like objects… and smells… and I don’t know… sounds?”

“You think? …You mean? …From before?!” she asked, sitting up and turning to look at him excitedly. “What do you remember?!”

“Nothing very useful… probably… and I don’t even know what’s real anymore… I mean, maybe I’ve created, like… false memories?” he said, shaking his head. “Maybe none of it’s real”

“Baby… You might think it’s not important but maybe some tiny little detail…”

“I remember the smell of lavender” interrupted Kyle, glancing at her and raising one eyebrow sarcastically, “…somehow I don’t think that’s gonna help much!”

“You don’t know that!” she said, starting to get a little excited. “Maybe we just have to find some way of unlocking your memories.” she said, leaning over and tapping the side of his temple, “Maybe there’s more in there than you think!” she laughed, giving him a big toothy grin.

“Oh haha, very funny!” he said, smirking at her, and choosing to take it as a light-hearted joke. He was glad of something to distract him from his thoughts of tomorrow’s interview, and he loved Tamara for her ability to make him laugh, even when all he wanted to do was cry.

“I remember snatches of things… Nothing’s very clear” he said, shaking his head and looking back up at the sky. “I don’t know if I really remember this stuff or… I don’t know… If I just think I do…” He turned to look at Tamara again and shrugged, “I thought I was someone else… Someone who’s dead… So, who knows what’s real and what’s not?!”

“Okay… but… lavender?!… That would be pretty weird to just make up.” said Tamara. “I mean… It’s pretty specific if it’s not true” she said, frowning at him slightly as she thought about it. It just didn’t seem like something that you’d invent.

Tamara’s face suddenly lit up and she jumped to her feet. “Wait there!” she exclaimed, running towards the house, “I have an idea!” she shouted back at him in a slightly sing-songy voice. He watched her go with a surprised look on his face, wondering what she was up to, and he watched the door with growing curiosity, waiting for her to come back.

She returned a moment later with a tube of handcream. “Put out your hands!” she said, smiling from ear to ear. He looked at the tube with suspicion and knitted his brows at her. “Why are you making me put on some flowery woman’s handcream?!” he asked, shaking his head at her and laughing a little.

“Just trust me!” she said, nodding at his hands with a big excited smile on her face. “It’s just an experiment! C’mon, it’s not going to hurt you!” He put his hands out palm side up and turned to look at Noah as she squirted the cream out. “Not a word to uncle Heath, okay Noah?!” he said, jokingly.

“Okay, rub that in… and then smell!” she said, smiling at him and looking all shiny eyed with anticipation.

He did as he was told, shaking his head at her in mock disapproval, and rolling his eyes in an exaggerated way. He held his hands over his nose and breathed in.  As he took in the heady scent of the lavender on his own skin, a memory came flooding back to him, transporting him in an instant to another time and another place. Somewhere else. There was a woman with long dark hair, wearing an orange silk scarf and a pair of earrings shaped like little elephants. She was holding him in her arms, cradling his body, high above the ground, and he was reaching for the elephants, wanting desperately to touch the silver metallic shapes dangling above him. The woman said something, laughing a little, and then pulled his hand away and kissed it. Then, just like that, the vision was gone and he was back in his own garden. He tried breathing in the lavender scent again, but no matter how much he tried to make the vision come back, it just wouldn’t. It was gone. She was gone!

He looked at Tamara open mouthed with shock and his eyes began to shine a little with tears. “I… I… That…” stammered Kyle, unsure of how to put it into words. “I think I just… I think I remember my mum?” he said, smiling through his tears. He’d seen that woman before sometimes, in small flashes of something half-remembered, and not quite fully formed, but he’d never had a vision so vivid. He’d begun to wonder if he’d simply invented this woman, and created a false memory from things he had seen on TV, combined with the photo of Sarah Bennett, and things that Danny Braxton had told him. But this, today, had been so real. He could see the little elephants as clear as day. Silver metallic elephants that were hollow inside. He’d felt her arms cradling him so high above the ground, that it had seemed as though she was a giant, and he’d felt the softness of her lips as they touched his hand. He knew that she was real. This was real… Maybe he did have a mother… Maybe he did have a family somewhere out there!?

 

*****

 

"You'd actually do that?!  You'd tell the cops about Brax?!" stammered Ash in a voice that sounded a little dazed, as he stared out past her to the water’s edge. If Phoebe went ahead with this, the ramifications would be truly terrible. His mind was racing as he began to piece together the chain of events that would inevitably follow. The police would know that Brax was still alive, and that Ricky had gone on the run with him, and a nationwide manhunt would probably be launched. The people he was working for now, wherever he was, would see his face on the news and suddenly everyone around him would be scrambling to hand him in. Brax would go back to prison, and they'd add God knows how many years for faking his own death like that, and running away. Ricky would probably go to prison too, for aiding and abetting, and poor little Casey would end up in foster care. It was all so clear for him to see.

He could feel Phoebe watching him as he mulled it over. He glanced at her as she sat there beside him on the bench, and he wondered when she'd become so cold and calculating, and how he’d never seen this aspect of her personality before. That she would threaten this was just unthinkable. How could she do this to him?! How could she do this to Ricky, who was supposed to be her best friend?! Even worse, how could she do this to Kyle if she was meant to care so much about him?! Especially with everything that he was going through right now?

"Don't think I won't!" said Phoebe narrowing her eyes at him. "I'm not bluffing!" she said, hoping that he wouldn't hear the panic and uncertainty in her voice. As soon as she'd uttered those words she knew that she'd gone too far. She couldn't really do this! She couldn't really do something this cruel! The last thing she wanted was to hurt Kyle, and handing his brother in to the police would be the worst thing that she could ever do to him. Much worse than the damage she’d already caused by giving his story to the newspapers. If she did this, then she’d have to give up on them ever being friends again, and she’d have lost one of the only people who really truly cared about her. And then there was Ricky who was probably the closest female friend she’d ever had. She couldn't really betray her to the police! It just wasn’t something she would ever do! What kind of person would that make her?! The only one that she really wanted to hurt was Ash, but the price that everyone else would have to pay was too high. She knew that she couldn't really go through with it. She just hoped that Ash didn't know that!

"How low are you actually prepared to sink, Pheebs?" he asked, turning to look at her with what looked like pity. "Are you really that much of a monster?!"

"You're the one that..." She began to say but he cut her off, putting his hand on her arm.

"Pheebs, I had a drunken fumble with my housemate when I was so out of it I could hardly see." he said looking hurt and disappointed in her. "It wasn't an affair... I'm surprised I even managed it... but apparently I did... More or less... Neither of us can even really remember it... And it's definitely not happening again..." He turned and looked back out at the water. "That's for sure!" he said, sounding embarrassed.

"You think that makes it any better?!" she asked, thinking to herself that it kind of did. From the sounds of things, Ash and Kat hadn’t exactly enjoyed their midnight fumble, and she had made a gigantic mess of everything over something and nothing. But she was in over her head now and she couldn't really see another way out.

"No, I suppose not" he mumbled, rubbing his face in his hands, before turning to look at her again, as though he was really only seeing her for the first time. He really didn't know who this person was. The fun and beautiful Phoebe that he had known was gone, and all he saw now was someone so twisted and bitter that she was unrecognisable. He was angry and sad, and he felt guilty about the part that he had played in all of this, but more than anything he just felt sorry for her. "I just want you to think about the fact that you're going to ruin a lot of lives if you do this... Something so stupid and… and you’re going to hurt all these other people… just to get back at us?!"

"No, Ash" she said patting him on the side of the face in a deliberately patronising sort of way. "The only life I'm gonna ruin is yours… If you don’t do what I’ve asked… then it’s on you… You’ll be the one taking all these other people down with you…"

She got up and started to walk away, shouting back over her shoulder as she went, "2 hours, Ash! You have 2 hours!"

She hugged her arms around herself as she walked away, and as soon as she was out of view, she began to cry. It had taken everything she had to hold it together. She was just so angry and hurt! She'd put on a good act but she knew that she wouldn't really be able to do it if push came to shove. She couldn't really hand Brax in. She hated herself in this moment and wondered how she could ever have done something so stupid! Taking that laptop had been the worst decision of her life and the guilt was eating her up inside. She didn’t really feel bad for sabotaging Kat, but the fact that Kyle’s life and the abuse that he had suffered was now public knowledge because of her, was something that she regretted terribly. She worried that Kyle would find out, and that knowing just how badly she had betrayed him, he would disown her forever.  She loved him and she didn’t want him to think that badly of her. She wasn’t proud of herself for blackmailing Ash either, but she was just so angry. She knew that it was an extremely underhanded and cruel thing to do, but it had seemed like a way to kill two birds with one stone. It would get her off the hook for stealing the laptop, and it would punish Ash for the hurt that he had caused her. This way, she might still manage to salvage her relationship with Kyle. As she walked back towards her house, she pulled her arms across her chest again, feeling a little lost and alone. None of this was making her feel very good about herself, but she was here now, at this point in the road, and there wasn’t really any turning back!  

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Thank you to everyone again for the kind comments. Hope you like this chapter! xxx

WARNING: ADULT THEMES

 

Chapter 20

 

“One… one more of those” slurred Kat, pointing at her whiskey glass and propping her head up on her hand at the bar. She knew that she’d already had too many but what was the point in staying sober on a day like today?

“That’s the last one” said Matt, giving her a disapproving look as he poured her a single measure. He was working as a part-time bartender in Angelo’s now, while doing a TAFE course to be an electrician. Kat had already been drinking when she’d come in, and she’d been noticeably tipsy, making Matt a little uneasy and unsure of whether to serve her or not. Normally he would have checked with Ash or Kyle but neither of them had been there to ask. He’d decided to let her have one or two drinks rather than have her kick off at him for refusing. Now he was regretting that decision. She’d been knocking them back at an alarming rate, one after the other. No ice, just neat. She was clearly well past the point at which he should have cut her off, and he really wasn’t sure how things were going to go now when he had to ask her to leave. He cleared away her empty glasses, and wiped the counter down, giving her one last look of concern before he turned to serve another customer.

She threw down her drink, and scowled at him, as he served a blond haired woman at the other end of the bar, who was clearly flirting with him. She couldn’t help feeling a little envious as he smiled and laughed and flirted with the tanned young woman buying drinks at the bar, thinking how young and carefree they both seemed. Her life was a complicated mess. Suddenly her gaze shifted to the bottle of whiskey that Matt had left sitting there and she had an idea. “I de-decide when I’ve ha-had enough!” she muttered to herself, pulling a wad of cash from her pocket and setting it on the counter. She checked to see that Matt wasn’t looking and then reached behind the bar for the two-thirds full bottle. With another glance to check that he wasn’t watching, she swiped the bottle back over to her side of the bar and stuffed it inside her hoodie. With that, she got up, and started to wobble her way towards the door.

“Hey!” shouted Matt, realising that the bottle was gone, and clearly able to see that Kat was hiding something under her clothes. “Hey! You can’t just take that!” he shouted again but she picked up the pace and started to rush out the door.

“Oi!” shouted Ash as she smashed right into him. He’d been halfway up the stairs and she’d made him lose his footing and stagger back two or three steps. “What are you doing?!” he asked her, sounding startled.

“I jus wanna go home!” said Kat, beginning to cry and clinging onto the handrail on the stairs, as she swayed and tried to focus her eyes to look at him. “They won’t lemme have another drink, Ash… It’s not fair!” she whinged in a voice so loud that everyone must have heard her. “Shhhh! Don’t tell anyone!” she whispered loudly, putting her finger to her lips in an exaggerated way, as she opened her hoodie and showed him the bottle that she’d just stolen. “Lez go home and have a drrrink!” she said, starting to walk down the stairs, but missing a couple of steps before righting herself again.

He was shocked to see how drunk she was, especially at this time of the day, and he knew that he needed to get her home before the entire town started talking about her. A cop couldn’t afford to be seen behaving like this in the middle of the afternoon! “C’mon, let’s get you home… and get you a nice cup of coffee, eh?” he said, as he took hold of her arm and began to guide her carefully down each step. He was worried that she might lose her footing again and end up in a heap at the bottom of the stairs.

“No coffee…” she said, frowning at him with a childish pout on her face. “I lost my job today… sssoooo I think I’m en-entitled to a drink if I want one!” She hugged the bottle under her arm and started to walk away from him as quickly as her wobbly legs would let her. 

He stood there for a moment with his mouth hanging open as he registered what she’d just said. He figured that he must have misunderstood. Surely they wouldn’t fire her for losing a laptop?! “Wait, Kat!” he called, as he jogged a little to catch up with her. He caught hold of her elbow and turned her to look at him. He was shocked to see the tears streaming down her face and realised that what he’d heard her say the first time must have been true. “Wait, you lost your job?!”

“As good as!” she said, slurring her words a little. “Suspended, p-pending further re-review, with a recommendation to dis-dismiss.”

“Oh my God, Kat!” he exclaimed, unsure of what else to say. “I’m so sorry” he said, shaking his head incredulously. He wondered how such a poorly-executed tumble between the sheets could have caused this whirlwind of chaos. How could Phoebe justify ruining both their lives over something so meaningless and stupid?!

He put his arms around her and pulled her in for a hug. “I’m so sorry!” he said again, as she collapsed sobbing in his arms. She pulled away from him a moment later and looked at him with eyes full of tears, “It was Phoebe wasn’t it? She’s the one that took my la-laptop?”

He was startled, and surprised that she had figured it out when he hadn’t, but he looked into her big sad eyes, so full of hurt, and nodded. He couldn’t lie to her about this. “Yeah… It was Pheebs” he said sadly, feeling his stomach give a terrible lurch at the thought of what he’d just done. If Brax went to prison because of this he’d never forgive himself, but he was going to have to take his chances with Phoebe and hope like hell that she didn’t go through with her threats. Surely she couldn’t really be that cruel?!

She nodded her head sadly and said, “I saw the w-way she was looking at me… and ad you… I just didn’t wannit to be true!”

“She saw us in bed together” said Ash, looking a little embarrassed. “This is her twisted way of getting revenge.” She just nodded at him in a defeated sort of way that didn’t seem like the feisty Kat that he knew. He tilted his head at her quizzically and asked, “But if you know… why haven’t you told your boss? Why hasn’t she been arrested?!”

“Whaztha point?!” she said, pulling the bottle out from inside her hoodie and taking a slug from it.

“Hey, Kat, gimme that!” said Ash trying to take the bottle from her. “You’ve had enough for one day” he said, as she fought to keep it.

“Get off me!” she shouted at him as she wrestled the bottle back out of his hands. “Just leave me alone, Ash!” she yelled, as she began to stagger her way towards the beach.

He followed her as she wobbled her way very unsteadily down onto the beach and collapsed onto her knees. He crouched down beside her and she looked up at him with an angry scowl on her face. “Why can’t you jus leave me alone?!” she roared at him, with tears rolling down her cheeks. “I jus wanna be on my own!”

“Kat, you need to tell your bosses that it was Phoebe… that it was your housemate that took it!” he said, fully aware of the fact that he was putting Brax at even greater risk. At least if Phoebe wasn’t charged with the theft then she might be less likely to speak up about Brax, but some part of him didn’t want to let her get away with this. It just seemed so wrong that Kat would lose her job over something that Phoebe did.

“Wouldn’t change anything” she sighed, shaking her head and taking another gulp of whiskey as Ash watched on in concern. “I was still on a caution over the whole… th-thing with the ha-handcuffs and gun” she said, wiping at her tears with the back of her hand. “All they see is a cop who leaves ev-ev-everything lying around so other people can take them!” She looked up at Ash again and started to laugh in a sad sort of way, “They’d be right!”

“Kat, that’s not fair” he said, shaking his head at her. “Neither of those things were your fault!”

“Not how they see it” she said, shaking her head at him, and staring out at the waves. “Can you jus go?” she said again. She held the bottle out to him and said, “Here, take it… I won’t drink any more… I jus wanna be alone for a while.”

He took the bottle from her and wondered whether it was a good idea to leave someone so drunk on the beach like this. To be fair, taking her home didn’t seem like that great an option either. Phoebe would be there and he didn’t know what he was going to say to her. Maybe some time on the beach wouldn’t be such a bad thing. He decided he’d leave her there for now and come back and check on her in a while. There was something he needed to do first…

 

*****

 

“Hey guys!” shouted Bianca, as she heard Kyle and Tamara’s bedroom door open. They’d come home while Kyle and Tamara had been otherwise engaged and she didn’t want to startle them with her presence. She was busy getting things ready for dinner, Harley was having a nap, and Heath was out in the garden with Darcy getting the barbecue sorted. They’d thought it would be nice to have a sit down dinner together, and the weather was so nice, it made sense to have a barbecue.

Kyle and Tamara walked out into the living-room looking a little shame-faced at the realisation that they may have had an audience for the last while. They might have tried to be a little quieter had they known. Tamara smirked at him a little, and then walked out to the kitchen, while Kyle threw himself on the couch.

“Hey” she said to Bianca, giving her a slightly embarrassed smile. “When did you guys get back?” she asked, trying to sound as casual as possible. The redness in her cheeks and her slightly dishevelled appearance gave her away.

Bianca smirked at her a little and said, “About half an hour ago…” She continued expertly chopping up the salad for later and glanced at her for a moment with a knowing smile.  “We didn’t want to… disturb you” she said, biting her bottom lip in an effort to stop herself from laughing. It wasn’t really working.

Tamara began to laugh too, smiling across the room at Kyle, and enjoying the joke as much as Bianca. She really didn’t care if the whole world had heard them. Today had been important for her and Kyle. He might not have a name to call himself by, but he was still the man that she loved, and she’d wanted to show him that.

Heath walked through the door, still laughing at something that Darcy had said, and looked back and forth between Tamara and Kyle with a big cheesy grin on his face. “Nice of you two to join us!” he said, “but then… I suppose you’ve been busy!”

“Dad!” whined Darcy, “You’re so embarrassing!”

He threw an arm around her neck, and pulled her in to give her a sort of noogie, in a joking way. “Isn’t that what all teenagers say?!” he giggled, taking great pleasure in messing up her hair, as she squealed in mock annoyance, and laughed at him.

“Stop it dad!” she laughed, pulling away from him and running her fingers through her hair to smooth it. “You’re particularly embarrassing! A whole other level! None of my friends’ dads embarrass them this much!”

“Slackers!” said Heath, giving her a wink and a toothy grin. “That’s what dads are for!”

“Uncle K…” said Darcy, wanting to bring him in on the joke but catching herself before she said ‘Kyle’. Suddenly looking a little perplexed, she walked over and perched on the arm of the chair beside Kyle, and gazed at him in a sympathetic sort of way with her head tilted. “What should I call you now?” she asked in an innocent sort of way.

Everyone flinched a little at the bluntness of the question, Kyle particularly. He looked up at her soft blue eyes in a startled sort of way and realised that he didn’t have the slightest clue how to answer her. “Uh… um…” he stammered, looking at Tamara for help. “I…?”

“He’s just figuring that out Darce” said Heath, putting his hand on his daughter’s shoulder and giving her an admonishing look. They’d already talked about this.

“But you have to have a name” she insisted, nodding her head at him adamantly. “Why not ‘John’, like John Doe? …They always do that in movies when they don’t know who someone is…”

“Darce!” said Bianca, standing with her hands on her hips and giving her step-daughter a scolding look. “Leave your uncle alone! We talked about this!” Darcy could be very wilful and quite insensitive at times and it was something that they always seemed to be apologising for. For a seventeen-year-old girl she was still very immature.

“It’s okay” said Kyle, staring down at the floor a little vacantly. “I guess John is as good as anything.” he said, sounding pretty flat. “John?” he said again, wondering if he’d ever find a name that really fit as much as ‘Kyle’ had. It was weird how much of his sense of identity was tied up in that name. Without it, he was just the ‘boy’ again. That child waiting in the dark to be used and abused.

Tamara walked over and sat down beside him, reaching for his hand, and giving him a little smile. “I don’t think you’re a ‘John’” she said, shaking her head. “I think we can do better than that.”

“For now John’ll do” he said, shaking his head in a tired sort of way. “Maybe if we find my family, I won’t have to choose a name at all.”

She nodded at him and kissed him on the cheek. “Okay, John…” she said, giving him a little smirk. “Does that mean I have to change my surname from ‘Someone’ to ‘Doe’?”

He rolled his eyes at her and shook his head in a joking sort of way, but he couldn’t help but smile. Mr and Mrs Someone had certainly enjoyed themselves in the bedroom earlier! It seemed a shame to give them up so soon. “John Someone has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?” he said, squeezing her hand and raising one eyebrow at her.

“I think Tamara Someone is enjoying having her husband back!” she said, smiling from ear to ear, and leaning in for a kiss.

Heath and Bianca glanced at each other, not sure what all this ‘someone’ talk was about, but pleased to see Kyle and Tamara in such a good place in their relationship despite everything that was going on. Heath threw Bianca a wink and guided Darcy away from the couch towards the kitchen. “C’mon Darce, let’s give Auntie Tam, and Uncle ‘John’ some space then!”

 

*****

 

Ash sat outside the house in his car, trying to pluck up the courage to go in there. This was going to be so hard. With everything that Kyle was going through right now, it seemed particularly cruel to tell him that one of his best friends, probably his oldest friend, was responsible for those news stories. He would be terribly hurt when he found out that it had been Phoebe, but Ash thought that he deserved to know. Not only that, but he needed to know about the threats she’d made towards Brax and Ricky. He couldn’t let him stay friends with a person so willing to rip his family apart, and hurt him like this, just for her own selfish reasons. If anyone had a chance of talking Phoebe out of it, it was Kyle.

He took a deep breath and got out of the car, clenching his fists as he walked up the drive, and trying to get his breathing under control. He didn’t remember the last time he’d been this nervous!

He knocked on the front door and waited, suddenly aware of how fast his heart was beating, but there was no answer, so he knocked again. As he stood there, he became aware of voices and laughter in the air, but the sounds didn’t seem to be coming from inside the house. The more he listened, it became clear that they were coming from the garden, and now that he thought about it, he could smell barbecue smoke on the breeze.

He opened the garden gate and walked in, shouting “Hello? Tamara? Heath? You guys out here?” He’d refrained from shouting ‘Kyle’ because Heath had been doing a lot of shifts in the restaurant over the last week and he’d made it clear to the staff that no-one was to use the name ‘Kyle’ with him anymore. That had been a tough one to explain without going into the gory details, but everyone knew everything anyway now, thanks to those news articles!

“Yeah?” shouted Tamara. “Oh, hey Ash!” she said, giving him a friendly smile as he walked towards them. “Want a burger… or a beer… or something?”

“No, thanks Tam” he said, looking very nervous and clearly sweating a little. He gave Kyle a very serious look and said, “I really need to speak to you… and Heath.”

“Oh-kay?” said Kyle, looking a little worried. Ash looked like he’d seen a ghost and it wasn’t like him to be so serious either. “Will I come into the house?” he said, getting to his feet. He glanced at Heath and raised his eyebrows at him, wondering what all this was about. He gestured with his head for Heath to come too, guessing that it must have something to do with Brax if he wanted to speak to both of them. He gave Tamara a nervous little smile, and began to follow Ash towards the house, feeling his heartrate pick up and feeling a little shaky already. He was so tightly wound up these days, that he was never far from a panic attack, and he really wasn’t sure that his nerves could take more bad news.

The three boys walked into the living-room, and Kyle stood there with his arms folded across his chest, trying his best to hide the growing sense of panic he was feeling. “What’s going on?” he asked, dreading what the answer was going to be.

Ash took a deep breath, and crossed his arms too, in an attempt to hide his nervousness. “I’m just… going to come out and say it” he stammered. “Phoebe took Kat’s laptop and gave it to some journalist guy… and now she’s blackmailing me to take the fall for it… She’s threatening to tell the cops about Brax if I don’t!”

 

*****

Phoebe sat in her kitchen absently tearing at the label on a bottle of beer. There was a graveyard of bottles arranged on the table in front of her at this stage, and she was certainly well past the point of being tipsy. She kept glancing at the clock on the wall, wondering what had happened, and whether Ash had gone through with it or not. It was well past the two hours’ time limit that she’d given him but she hadn’t really thought the whole thing through properly. She didn’t know how she was meant to find out if he’d handed himself in. It wasn’t like Kat was going to come straight home and tell her.

Suddenly the door swung open, sounding like it would come off its hinges, and Kyle appeared through the door of the kitchen looking wild-eyed and red in the face. She jumped to her feet, startled at the violence of his entrance, and more than a little surprised to see him out in public so soon. “Wuh? …What are you doing here?!” she stammered.

“I can’t believe you, Phoebe!” he shouted at her, with a look of hurt and disgust on his face. “I can’t believe you’d do something like this to me… I thought we were friends… I loved you Pheebs… I can’t believe you’d want to hurt me like this!... What kind of person are you?!”

“I… I… What?!” she stuttered again, “I don’t…” She wasn’t sure how much he knew and wondered if there was any way of salvaging things if she was economical with the truth in some way. She really didn’t know what to say.

“I know what you did Pheebs!” he said, as his eyes filled with tears. “I forgave you for telling Ash, I forgave you for that… but now you go and do something so terrible… so cruel… I don’t even know who you are anymore…”

He wrapped his arms around himself as his anger was slowly turning into despair. “You’re the person I’ve known longest in my life! …I actually thought I could trust you!”

She didn’t know what to say, looking at Kyle’s pained face, as he stood there quietly crying in front of her. She thought her heart would break. “I… I’m sorry” she said, flushing bright red with the shame of it all. “I didn’t mean any of it!”

“You never do” he said, shaking his head at her in disappointment. “It’s always about what you want… what you think you deserve… You’re the most self-centred, thoughtless person, Pheebs! You never give any thought to the people that you’re hurting” he said, sobbing and shaking as he stood there in front of her. He felt in this moment the most overwhelming sense of defeat, like there was no-one in this world that he could really trust, and the loneliness of that just crashed down on top of him. He reached out a shaking hand, pulling out one of the chairs, and collapsing into it with an exasperated sigh. He felt his whole body heavy with exhaustion and he would have liked nothing more than to crawl away and hide. “Why would you do this to me?” he asked, looking up at her with hurt-filled eyes. “…You sold my story, Pheebs! …Do you have any idea what it’s like for everyone to know that you were raped and abused as a child? People look at you differently… they talk differently… I’m not me anymore, I’m just a victim…”

She hung her head, feeling a deep sense of guilt, but fairly sure that there was nothing she could say that would make things better. “I’m so sorry” she said again, as tears streamed down her cheeks. “I didn’t know what was on that laptop.”

“So you say, Pheebs” said Kyle, with a tone of disbelief. “But everything you’ve done since makes me think that you knew exactly what you were doing.”

She looked up at him in shock, letting out a little gasp, and covering her mouth.  She was actually surprised that he would think that she’d sold his story deliberately. “I didn’t, Kyle! I promise you!”

He winced at the sound of his name on her lips. “Don’t call me that!” he said, grimacing a little. He shook his head at her, and looked her up and down with disdain. “Who are you?!”  he asked again, wondering how he could ever have thought that he was in love with her, or that he’d want to start a family with her. What a lucky escape he’d had!

He got to his feet again and leaned against the kitchen counter, looking at her with disgust. “You were actually going to use my brother to make Ash take the fall for you?! How low can you actually get Pheebs?! …I mean, isn’t Kat losing her job enough for you?! …How many people do you want to hurt along the way?!”

She looked at him with a mixture of shock and horror on her face. She hadn’t expected Kat to really lose her job over something like a laptop theft. She’d just wanted to get her in trouble. “I didn’t mean for that…” she blurted, but Kyle interrupted her.

“What if I’d done something like this when you and Ash got together?! What if I’d decided to try to ruin your lives?! Huh?! …Normal, decent people don’t do these sorts of things, Phoebe! …They just don’t …I get that you were angry …but you shout, you yell, you hit him if you have to… You don’t do this!”

“I know” she said, slumping into the chair that he’d been sitting in and hugging her arms around herself as she began to sob. “I know, alright!?” she shouted at him.

“I don’t think you do” said Kyle a little coldly. “You can’t do something this cruel… and underhanded… and then just say ‘my bad, I’m sorry!’ …It doesn’t work like that!”

She nodded but she didn’t really know what else to say. She looked up at him with big teary eyes and said, “I wasn’t really going to tell anyone about Brax.”

“That’s not the point, Pheebs!” he said, shaking his head at her again, although he was relieved if that really was the case. “You still wanted Ash to take the blame for something you did… something so terrible… I really don’t know how you sleep at night.”

“I’m sorry… I don’t know what else I can say…” she said, looking up at him with a plaintive expression. “I don’t want to lose our friendship!”

He looked at her in shock and said, “You think we’re still friends?! …After this?!” He couldn’t hide the disgust on his face and he wondered how she could be so completely clueless that she’d think he could ever trust her again. “If you’d come to me and told me about the laptop… then maybe…” he said, reasoning with himself more than her, “but to threaten my family like that?! To put them at risk?! I can’t have someone like you around me… or the people I care about!”

“But Brax isn’t even your brother!” she blurted out before she’d even thought about what she was saying. “Oh god!... I didn’t mean that!” she said, covering her mouth in shock at her own stupidity.

Kyle closed his eyes for a moment, pinching the skin at the bridge of his nose, and let out a heavy sigh. “Those boys have been the only real family I’ve ever had” he said, in a quiet sad voice. “We might not be blood, but they’ve stood by me through everything… even this.”

He pushed away from the kitchen counter and stood to look at her one last time. “I think we’re done, Phoebe… You’re not the person that I thought you were and I can’t tell you how sad I am that she’s gone… That person I used to know and love… I don’t know what happened to her but… you’re not her…” He ran his fingers through his hair and gave the saddest sigh possible. “I loved you once… I just hope you’ll remember that… and maybe you’ll think a bit harder about the way you treat the people around you… You get back what you put in.”

She got up and tried to put her arms around him to give him a hug but he pulled her arms away. “I hope you can find some happiness some day, Pheebs… This bitter and twisted thing… It’s not good! It’ll just eat you up from the inside…”

She watched him leave and sat back down at the table with her lukewarm, half-drunk, bottle of beer and began to sob. She’d never felt more lost and alone, and what was worse, was that she knew that Kyle was right. She had brought this all on herself! She picked up her phone and texted Ash, hardly able to see the screen through her tears, “I’m sorry. I won’t do it. Don’t say anything to Kat. I’ll come clean and hand myself in in the morning”. She set the phone down on the table and buried her face in her hands. She wondered how she could have made such a mess of things!

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