Page 125 of Last Breath

‘Bugatti,’ he said. ‘Canary yellow. I don’t know who called the cops – the owner or the kids I was running with. I wouldn’t have put it past them to include a cop chase as a rite of passage for a new runner.’

‘You ran from the cops?’

He smiled, almost proudly. ‘Baby, Iflew.’

‘You could have died.’

‘I almost did.’ He touched his scar. ‘I went clean through the windscreen.’

She closed her eyes as though the glass from that windscreen was shattering through her organs.

‘My social worker, Kevin – he made sure they went as light as possible with the charges. He must have spun my sob story so thick they couldn’t see through it. I think everyone agreed I’d been punished enough.’ He closed his eyes as she traced that punishment.

‘And now you feel like you owe Kevin? That’s why you’re going to work for him?’

Her thumb stopped tracing. ‘Not exactly. He’s the closest thing I’ve ever had to ... what you have. But it’s more than that. I have to do this, Nella. I don’t belong here – working for you, your family – not forever. I need something of my own. It’s hard to explain ... but I suppose I’ve always felt like an addendum to someone else’s family ...’

‘Jett, you’re not—’

‘I know you don’t see it that way, but I ...’

The cliff, his voice.I see it now.

‘I can’t keep living like this, Nella, I need to—’

‘Please stay, please be with me.’ She was begging, desperate, everything she’d fought so hard against. But with him, she didn’t need to pretend she wasn’t all those things.

‘The guy I am now is not the guy you deserve. I’m drifting – I have no career aspirations. I’m not what you need.’

‘You’re all I need, just you. I don’t care about your job, I don’t care if you clean toilets or if you invent a cure for cancer, as long as you drive home to me at the end of the day.’

‘This was the best job I’ve ever had,’ he said, kissing her stomach, ‘driving you home.’

She held her breath, wishing that was all he had to say.

‘It’s not just about how you see me, Nella.’ He stroked his thumb over her collarbone and she shivered all the way down to her toes. ‘If I stay, because of you, one day, maybe tomorrow, maybe in five years, you’ll wake up and wonder what I could have been if I’d actually tried at something on my own.’

Her tears weren’t enough. Her hands, tracing his edges, his scars, his lips. It wasn’t enough. ‘I won’t.’

‘You will. And the worst thing I could ever be, Nella, is mediocre in your eyes. It would kill me.’

‘You’re not mediocre, and if you go, it will killme.’

‘It won’t, my darling. You’re too strong for that.’

‘I don’t want to be strong.’ She let out a sob.

‘You need to be here,’ Jett said, ‘and I need to be there.’

He stared at her, waiting for her to see, like he was pointing out a constellation she couldn’t make out yet. ‘I know,’ she said as her heart cracked open.

EPILOGUE

Six months later

‘No way.’ Max gaped at the yellow carbon paper Nella tossed through Bessy’s window and shut her laptop – frozen on a still from CCTV footage of the bakery opposite Liquor Paradise, where Forrest had injected the Barbarani wine with poison.

‘I lost some points for stalling on a hill, and I was too far from the kerb on the parallel park, but otherwise, full marks.’