Chapter Text
Prologue: Jameson’s POV
The first thing people usually notice about our house is the photos.
They’re everywhere.
On the walls. On the bookshelf. On the fridge. Even taped to the inside of the kitchen cabinet where Nana Di kept the biscuits.
If you walked through the house you’d think the most important person in the world lived there.
And in a way he did.
Most of the pictures are of me.
Baby pictures. School pictures. Pictures of me sitting on Pops’ shoulders at the park, or standing in Nana Di’s garden with muddy knees and a grin like I’d personally invented dirt. There’s one of me missing my two front teeth and holding a fish I caught that’s so small it’s embarrassing.
Then there are the other photos.
The ones of my mum.
She looks really young in all of them. Because she was. Pops says she had the same laugh as me. Nana Di used to say I had her eyes.
I never knew her though.
She died not long after I was born.
When I was little, Nana Di kept it simple. She told me my mum got very sad after I came into the world. When I got older, she gave it a name—postpartum depression—and started speaking about it like it was something you could point to and understand.
One night, my mum took too much of her medication and never woke up again.
Whether it was an accident or not, nobody ever really seemed sure. Or maybe they were sure and they just didn’t want to put that kind of weight into my hands.
After that, my dad had me.
Not “technically had me.” Not “on paper had me.”
He had me.
Pops and Nana Di helped. My grandma Anne-Marie helped too—my dad’s mum. Everyone stepped in where they could. I’ve heard it described like a relay race before. Somebody was always handing me off so my dad could grab an hour of sleep, go to school, go to band practice, breathe for two seconds.
For a little while, that was just our life.
Then the band started getting attention.
At first it was just online. Views. Comments. People recognising my dad’s face in places he didn’t expect. And then Louis Tomlinson from One Direction shared one of their videos and suddenly it wasn’t just attention anymore.
It was momentum.
The kind that doesn’t wait for you to get your life sorted.
Suddenly there was a manager and the band got an offer to tour.
A real tour. Proper venues. Proper money. Proper chance at becoming something bigger than four teenagers with guitars and a dream.
Which is great.
Unless you’re also seventeen and also have a baby.
That was when my grandma Anne-Marie called a meeting. That’s how Nana Di described it.
Grandma didn’t do it dramatically. She didn’t make it some big confrontation. She just… gathered the people who mattered into one room: my dad, and Sophie’s parents.
Pops says the atmosphere was strange. Like everyone was trying to be calm while standing at the edge of something they couldn’t see the bottom of.
My dad wanted this offer. Of course he wanted it.
He and his bandmates wanted to build a career. They wanted to build a future. My dad wanted to be able to look at his kid one day and offer him everything that only seemed like a distant dream at that time.
That’s when Pops and Nana Di made the offer.
They said they would take me full time.
Not because they didn’t trust my dad. Not because they were trying to steal me. Rather, they wanted me to have the best life possible. They’d just lost their daughter and the idea of my dad dragging a baby on and off planes while trying to keep up with an exploding career… it wasn’t realistic.
So they offered a solution.
They told him to go. They told him to take the opportunity and said they would keep me safe until everything settled and my dad had something stable built for he and I.
It was supposed to be temporary.
Everybody agreed on that.
No one said the word years out loud and I think that’s the part people forget when they tell the story back. They act like it was decided and done and simple.
It wasn’t.
It was a plan.
A plan that made sense at the time.
And then life happened.
The band got bigger.
Tours got longer.
The distance became normal.
somewhere in the middle of all of it, my dad started making choices that had nothing to do with building a life for me and everything to do with what he wanted for himself.
Fame. The rush. The escape. And later, alcohol.
At first there were still visits— lots of them. There are photos of them, tucked among the ones of me with missing teeth and muddy knees.
My dad holding me when I was little. My dad sitting on the floor with me while Nana Di hovered in the doorway like she didn’t want to blink and miss it.
But as I got older, the visits got fewer.
Then they got awkward.
Then they started feeling like something people forced into the calendar because they were trying to prove a point.
Eventually he stopped feeling like a real person at all.
He became a name people reacted to. A face on screens. An occasional voice in songs I didn’t ask to hear.
Someone who seemed distant even while in the same room as me on what had become extremely rare occasions.
When I was eight, they told me he went to rehab.
That’s what everyone calls it, anyway, like it’s one clean word that fixes everything.
Apparently his bandmates staged some kind of intervention before he agreed to go. I remember Pops being tense for weeks. I remember Nana Di crying in the kitchen when she thought I wasn’t listening. I remember grandma constantly asking me how I was on my visit to spend time with her, my aunt and my uncle.
That year I didn’t see my dad at all. I got a birthday card in the mail. A gift card my Nana Di had clearly wrapped and labeled from ‘dad’ at Christmas.
Nothing else.
By the time he got out and started saying he was sober and trying to fix things, my opinion of him wasn’t soft enough to care.
Whenever he came over, I stayed in my room.
I didn’t scream. I didn’t throw things. I didn’t have some dramatic outburst that made everyone feel better about the situation because at least it was visible.
I just… withdrew.
Like if I stayed quiet enough, the whole idea of him would fade out.
Pops, Nana Di, grandma and even Aunt Lauren tried to encourage me to talk to him. They tried gently. Then they tried more firmly. Then they stopped.
For a while, life went back to what felt mostly normal.
School. Friends. My bedroom. Sunday mornings with pancakes. Nana Di in the kitchen, Pops reading the paper. The house feeling like home… except for the times Dad would show up hoping to see me.
And then Nana Di got cancer.
When she died a year later, the house changed in a way I can’t explain to anyone who hasn’t lived inside grief.
The photos didn’t move.
The furniture didn’t move.
Not even the calendar on the wall by the phone changed.
And yet everything felt like it had shifted an inch out of place.
A few months later Pops sat me down at the kitchen table, his hands wrapped tight around his mug like he needed the warmth to keep himself together.
And that’s when he told me.
It was time to go live with my dad.