Unstated Premise

Unstated Premise is Dr Laurence Haldrey's side of Proof by Contradiction: a forbidden age-gap MM romance at a Manchester university, told by Laurence himself, about falling for his eighteen-year-old student Ewan Carrick, and a full-length companion novel to Book 1 of The Carrick Brothers that can be read on its own. It is not a sequel.

The same year. The other side of the desk.

Laurence Haldrey has built a system, and the system holds. Five shirts ironed on Sunday evening. A moka pot that takes forty seconds from first hiss to done. A kitchen clock two minutes slow that he never corrects, because knowing the error is more reliable than trusting the instrument. One armchair, and a second chair at the kitchen table that only the delivery men have ever sat in.

It has held for four years, since Cambridge. Then a first-year from Lewisham gives his name in a corridor before anyone asks for it, turns up at office hours in the fourth week of term, leans across the desk and declines to look away.

Readers of Proof by Contradiction watched Ewan Carrick risk everything for Laurence. This is the same year in Laurence's own meticulous, self-incriminating hand: the script he pulled from a stack of two hundred so nobody else would mark it, the key cut at Timpson's for ninety pence and handed over with his eyes on the stairwell, four careful metres kept from Ewan at a coffee break in Vienna, and the one word he chose in his own kitchen knowing exactly what it would do.

The same forbidden year. The same ending. Every reason you never got.

Unstated Premise and Second Person are the Missing Terms: the two companion novels of The Carrick Brothers, each telling one of the main books again from the other side.

Good to know

• Reading order: not a sequel. It covers the same year as Book 1, Proof by Contradiction, from Laurence's side; it can be read alone and is much better after it.
• Point of view: Laurence only, first person, moving between present and past.
• Heat: open door and explicit, between consenting adults.
• Ending: happy ever after, the same ending as Book 1.
• Length: a full-length novel of about 59,000 words, twenty-five chapters and a bonus chapter, in British English.