Filed Under Never

"There are certain images a mother's brain should automatically redact. Mine, unfortunately, came without that feature."

I climbed the stairs with my mental checklist running: wake Kain, ask about Jamie, sort out his plans for the day, remind him about the Kingston site. Simple tasks, manageable objectives. The kind of structured thinking that had carried me through three decades of managing a household that refused to stay managed.

Kain's door was closed, which wasn't unusual. He'd always been a late sleeper, even as a child — the one I'd had to drag from bed for school whilst his sisters were already dressed and squabbling over the bathroom. At twenty-three, with a construction apprenticeship that started most days at seven, he'd learned to set alarms, but this was his day off and old habits reasserted themselves whenever the opportunity arose.

I knocked twice, perfunctory raps that were more announcement than request. "Kain. Time to get up."

No response.

I knocked again, harder. "Kain, I need to talk to you."

A muffled sound from within — not words, exactly, but the kind of noise that suggested consciousness, or at least the beginning of it. I waited another few seconds, then did what I'd done a thousand times before: pushed open the door and walked in.

The curtains were drawn, the room dim, but enough grey morning light leaked around the edges for me to see clearly. Too clearly.

Kain was not asleep.

Neither was Brianne.

The duvet had been pushed to the foot of the bed at some point, tangled around their legs in a way that concealed nothing of consequence. Brianne was on top of Kain, her back to the door, the curve of her spine and the movement of her hips unmistakable in their rhythm and intent. Her dark hair hung loose down her back, swaying slightly with each motion. Kain's hands gripped her thighs, his fingers pressing into her flesh, and the sound he made when I opened the door was not the sound of someone being woken from sleep.

For one terrible, frozen moment, none of us moved.

Then Brianne screamed — a sharp, startled sound that broke the paralysis — and twisted sideways, grabbing for the duvet whilst Kain sat up so fast he nearly knocked her off the bed entirely. There was a chaos of limbs and fabric and breathless swearing as they attempted to cover themselves, Brianne's pregnant belly emerging from the tangle like an accusation.

"Mum! Jesus Christ!" Kain's face had gone from flushed to scarlet, his chest heaving, one hand clutching a pillow to his lap as though that might somehow restore dignity to the situation.

"Oh god." The words came out of me strangled, my hand rising involuntarily to cover my eyes even though the image was already seared into my brain with the permanence of a brand. "Oh, for heaven's sake."

"Could you maybe knock?" Kain's voice cracked somewhere between outrage and mortification.

"I did knock." I was still standing in the doorway, hand over my eyes, acutely aware that I should leave but somehow unable to make my feet cooperate. "Twice. You didn't answer."

"We were busy!"

"Yes, I gathered that."

Brianne made a sound that might have been a laugh or might have been a sob — it was difficult to tell. I risked lowering my hand and found her wrapped in the duvet, her face buried against Kain's shoulder, her whole body shaking with what I now recognised as suppressed, horrified laughter.

"This isn't funny," Kain said, though his own mouth was twitching despite his best efforts.

"It's a little funny," Brianne managed, her voice muffled by his skin. "In a horrible, I-want-to-die kind of way."

I took a breath. Then another. The initial shock was receding, replaced by something more complicated — embarrassment, yes, but also a strange, unwelcome awareness of what I'd witnessed. Not the act itself, but the intimacy of it. The way Kain's hands had held Brianne's hips with such familiar confidence. The way their bodies had moved together with the ease of long practice, of genuine desire. The sounds they'd been making before they knew I was there.

When had Thomas last touched me like that? When had I last felt that kind of unselfconscious want?

I pushed the thought away, filed it in the drawer marked not now, not ever, don't examine this.

"I'll wait in the kitchen," I said, and my voice sounded almost normal, almost like this was a regular morning and I hadn't just walked in on my son engaged in an activity I preferred to believe he didn't engage in at all. "Come down when you're... finished. Or. Not finished. Dressed. When you're dressed."

"Mum—"

"Take your time. But not too much time. I need to talk to you about something."

I pulled the door closed behind me — firmly this time, as though that might somehow undo the last sixty seconds — and stood in the hallway with my hand still on the knob, breathing.

The manor's silence pressed in around me, and I could have sworn the house was laughing. Two hundred years of Jeffries family scandals, of births and deaths and secrets accumulated in every corner, and here I was, undone by something as ordinary as a son with a healthy sex life.

Get a grip, Louise. You're forty-seven years old. You've given birth four times. You know how bodies work.

But knowing how bodies worked in theory was rather different from watching your child's body work in practice. There were some things a mother simply should not see, regardless of how enlightened she considered herself about human sexuality. This was one of them.

I made my way back downstairs on legs that felt slightly unsteady, whether from shock or embarrassment or some combination of both. The kitchen was as I'd left it — toast cooling on the plate, phone silent on the counter, winter light filtering through the windows. I poured myself a fresh cup of tea with hands that trembled only slightly, then sat at the breakfast bar and waited.

They're adults, I reminded myself. Consenting adults in a committed relationship. They're engaged. She's carrying his child. They're entitled to... whatever they were doing.

But I could still see it when I closed my eyes. The arch of Brianne's back. The grip of Kain's hands. The expression on my son's face in that split second before he registered my presence — pleasure stripped bare, unguarded in a way I hadn't seen since he was small enough to experience joy without self-consciousness.

The tea did nothing to warm the strange hollow feeling in my chest.

It was nearly fifteen minutes before Kain appeared in the kitchen doorway, fully dressed in jeans and a faded t-shirt, his hair still damp from what I assumed was a very quick shower. He had the look of a man approaching a firing squad — resigned to his fate but hoping for a last-minute pardon.

"Brianne's having a lie-down," he said, not quite meeting my eyes. "She's tired."

"I imagine she is."

He winced. "Mum. Can we just... not?"

"Not what?"

"Not do the thing where you make comments and I have to stand here and take it because you're my mother and I live in your house."

I considered this. He had a point. We were both adults, and what I'd witnessed, however awkward, was not actually any of my business. But some perverse part of me — the part that had been changing his nappies and wiping his nose and bandaging his scraped knees for twenty-three years — wasn't quite ready to let it go.

"She's six months pregnant, Kain."

"I'm aware."

"Is that... safe? At this stage?"

The colour that flooded his face was almost worth the discomfort of asking. "It's fine. We asked the midwife. It's actually... it can be good for..." He stopped, apparently reaching the limit of what he was willing to discuss with his mother. "Can we please talk about literally anything else?"

I took a sip of my tea, letting him suffer for just a moment longer. Then I relented.

"There's toast if you want it. Probably cold by now."

He moved toward the breakfast bar with visible relief, grabbing a slice and biting into it with the enthusiasm of someone who'd recently expended significant energy. I watched him eat — my boy, my only son, standing in the kitchen where I'd fed him thousands of meals, and somehow now a man who did things with his fiancée that I was going to have to actively work to forget.

"I need you to do something for me," I said.

He looked up, wary. "Is this going to be punishment for what you just walked in on? Because I feel like I've suffered enough."

"It's not punishment." I turned my teacup in my hands, watching the liquid swirl. "I need you to go and check on Uncle Jamie."

Kain's chewing slowed. "Check on him how?"

"Just... go over there. Make sure he's all right." I heard the worry in my own voice, the edge I couldn't quite smooth away. "I haven't been able to reach him for a couple of days. He's not answering his phone, not responding to messages. It's not like him."

"Maybe he's just busy."

"Maybe." I set the cup down, met my son's eyes. "But I'd feel better if someone actually saw him. Talked to him face to face."

Kain took another bite of toast, considering. I could see him weighing the request — the drive to Berriedale, the awkwardness of showing up unannounced at his uncle's house, the vague sense that his mother was probably overreacting about nothing.

"It's probably fine," he said, but it was a statement with a question mark hovering at the end.

"Probably," I agreed. "But I'd like to know for certain."

He was quiet for a moment, finishing the toast, brushing crumbs from his fingers. When he looked at me again, there was something different in his expression — the faint recognition, perhaps, that my worry was real, that I wasn't simply manufacturing reasons to send him on errands.

"All right," he said. "I'll swing by on my way to Kingston. Check in, make sure he's not dead in a ditch somewhere." He paused, registered my expression, and added hastily: "That was a joke. Bad joke. Sorry."

"Thank you." The relief that washed through me was disproportionate to the situation — all he'd agreed to do was knock on a door — but I felt it nonetheless, a loosening of the knot that had been tightening in my chest since yesterday. "Just... let me know what you find. Even if it's nothing. Even if he's perfectly fine and I've been worrying for no reason."

"I will." He grabbed another slice of toast, shoved half of it into his mouth, and spoke around it in a way that would have earned him a sharp correction if I'd had the energy. "And Mum? Maybe next time, wait for an answer before you come in?"

"Maybe next time, lock your door."

He grinned at that — the same grin he'd had since he was a toddler, dimples creasing his cheeks, all the awkwardness of the morning temporarily forgotten. "Fair point."

He kissed my cheek as he passed, a brief, careless gesture of affection that he probably didn't even think about, and headed for the front door. I listened to his footsteps in the hallway, the jangle of keys being retrieved from the hook, the heavy thunk of the door closing behind him.

Then the house settled back into quiet, and I was alone with the cold toast and the silent phone and the images I was actively trying to scrub from my memory.

He'll be fine, I told myself, and I wasn't sure if I meant Kain or Jamie or both. Everything will be fine.

But the hollow feeling in my chest remained, and when I checked my phone again — still nothing, still that grey tick, still that silence where my brother's voice should be — the word fine seemed less like reassurance and more like a wish I was no longer certain would be granted.