Out Loud

He has said it in Afrikaans, in the dark, with his hand over Theo's mouth. He has never once said it in English. Wessel Marais has a country again, and a seat in a boat, and a man who has waited three years for him to say one true thing out loud in a room where somebody could hear it. What he does not have is a father who will use his name. Theo Rooke came out on live television at twenty-one and has been the brave one ever since. He has one rule, made in a car park in Ely with his hands shaking - never a closeted man, never again - and he is about to discover that it was never about Wes, and never about the man he made it about either, and that he has spent three years quietly charging an innocent man interest on somebody else's debt. They are the fastest pair in the world and they are still lying to each other. One of them has a letter he will not open. One of them has a name he has not said out loud in seven years. And a journalist has a date - the twelfth of September - which only three people could have given him. It is going to turn out to be somebody they both love. Six minutes on a Sunday in August will decide what the last three years were for, and it will not go the way either of them has planned, and afterwards there will still be a kitchen to buy a pan for. Two men. One boat. Forty centimetres. And nowhere left to hide. Second-chance - coming out - found family - forced proximity - one couple across all three books - explicit The trilogy's hard-won, imperfect HEA lands here.