Chapter 34
It arrived in the middle of June.
It was a Monday. Jayden had finished his final exams; Darren had reorganised his own, joining the resits at the end of the summer offered by the exam boards, and they had fallen into a pattern of Darren coming over to sit in the Phillips kitchen to study, and Jayden sitting with him and helping when he could, or working his hand and arm through the physiotherapy exercises when he couldn’t.
That Monday, he had been squeezing their interlaced fingers around the rubber ball that Tracy, the physiotherapist, had given Darren in his very first session. Darren’s grip was already miles better, but it wasn’t the recovery that made Jayden work their hands through the exercises with a smile. It was…it was the simplicity of it, sitting here with his boyf
