Things were bad. He’d never seen Darren this…
This.
Darren had texted him at three-thirty on the dot, saying he would be in Costa rather than the theatre, and a niggling unease had started in Jayden’s stomach. And his face when Jayden had got there…he looked almost shell-shocked, all the feeling shaken out of him. Jayden hadn’t known whether to talk to him or fetch a blanket and hug him to death.
Jayden didn’t know what to do. Darren was barely talking—barely even seeming to hear him, most of the time—and when even raiding the biscuit tin and settling down in front of the TV to a show on BBC2 that Jayden knew Darren enjoyed did nothing to lift his mood, the unease ballooned into outright worry.
And a sense of…shame. Because this…this was real. This wasn’t the horror stories of uncontro
