Page 20 of Last Breath

He wasn’t used to seeing her sharp mouth that vulnerable. ‘Not everything’s about you, Nella.’You told me to leave. At the funeral, and then after, when you weren’t around, you told me again.

‘So what is it? Why can’t you stay?’

‘I’ve stayed here longer than I’ve been at any other job. One year’s my normal rule. You were right, it’s time for me to move on.’

‘I thought we were friends.’

It would be impossible to be your friend, Nella.He doubted she even recalled that long ago conversation.

He met her gaze. ‘Hadn’t realised I’d passed.’

It was a shitty thing to say. But everything was shitty at the moment. Why hadn’t he just turned to Nella in the car – he’d had three hours to do it – and said,Oh hey, by the way, I’ve got a job offer that I’m probably gonna take.Now it was like he’d deliberately been keeping it from her.

Had he?

‘Don’t flatter yourself.’ She pushed herself up from the table, her shoulder-length hair bracketing the sharp shadows on her face.

He’d found out about the challenges Nella put every potential love interest and friend through to make sure they were, in the words of every reality TV show contestant,there for the right reasonsthe day after they met. It was the first driving job he’d done for the Barbaranis. Nella and a group of friends from high school had gone to the Bindi Bindi mall to try on dresses for their graduation dinner. Nella had phoned about half an hour into the trip requesting to be brought back home. She’d slipped into the front seat, face bright and happy, and when he’d asked her if she was okay, she’d said, ‘Oh yeah. I’ve been trying to break Natalie for months. She’d passed everything up until today – Challenge 16 (Never swim out of your depth: honesty is the foundation of friendship). I put on this.’ She showed Jett a blurry photo from her Blackberry of a ruffled dress the colour of an un-brushed tooth wrapped in chains and dappled with pink and green love hearts.

‘That’s ... uh ... hideous,’ he’d said without thinking.

Nella’s smile cracked even wider and she thumped her head back on the rest. ‘Thank you! That’s all she had to say. But instead she told me that it hugged my body perfectly and the style reminded her of something she saw inVogue.’

‘How do you know she wasn’t just being nice because she didn’t want to hurt your feelings?’

She’d arched an eyebrow. ‘Friends don’t do that. Real friends tell the truth.’ It was so innocent, so naïve, those words coming from the whip-smart mouth of this eighteen-year-old heiress.

‘Sometimes the truth is worse than the lie,’ he’d replied, thinking about his parents and the lies he’d been told about them. Lies he wished, now that he knew they had been heroin addicts who had brought him into this world high and as addicted to the stuff as them, had been the truth.

‘The truth always comes out though,’ Nella had said.

‘I haven’t officially taken the job,’ he said now, watching her carefully.

‘What are you waiting for?’

‘The trial.’ He swallowed. ‘I want to make sure you guys are okay.’ The half-truth tasted worse than an outright lie. His promise to Vittoria felt like a betrayal of Nella.

‘We can catch an Uber to the courthouse,’ she said. ‘I don’t want us to hold you back.’

‘Nella—’

She folded her arms. ‘You should have told me.’

‘I should have. I’m sorry.’

‘I didn’t realise you were so unhappy here.’

‘It’s not that, it’s ...’ How could he explain it to her? How could he explain that if he didn’t get out now, his attic was going to fall through the floor and all the debris of things he’d kept bottled up and hidden was going to crash and spill out? He would go up in flames. He had to keep moving. It was how he survived.

‘What thefuckare you doing back here?’ Tom’s yell from outside shattered the moment.

They rushed out the front of the winery, where Tom was standing like a bouncer, legs wide and arms tight across his chest. Luca was next to him, shuffling from side to side as he blew his cigarette smoke into the faces of the two police officers who’d left them to clean up their mess only a few hours ago.

‘You’re now trespassing on my property. Get out,’ Tom said, not moving. ‘You have no authority to take anything more from me. I’m calling my lawyer right now.’ He whipped his phone from his back pocket and stuck it to his ear.

‘No, you’re not.’ Avery’s voice didn’t have the same bravado as when he’d told Tom to go to hell earlier, and something cold and sharp wedged itself in Jett’s stomach. The woman cop, Gabby, had red circles around her eyes. ‘And we’re not here for the wine, we’re here for your sister.’

Everyone turned to Nella.