Page 59 of Last Breath

‘Here?’ Nella pointed at the bright purple windows of a twenty-four-hour chemist.

His lips twitched but he didn’t smile. His eyes were miles away. The barbecue smells were still following them, and Nella looked back at the unit. A baby wailed and a man screamed.

‘How old were you?’ Grey had told her Jett had lived in a million different homes, that he’d been taken from his parents because they were declared ‘unfit’ to fulfil the role nature had given them. Jett never told her anything about his past, really. They had a silent understanding between them that Nella knew some things but not everything.

Now he was leaving, and she’d never know the rest. The thought left her empty. She was an intensely nosy and curious person, making everything her business, but for some reason, even when they’d first met, she’d had the sense to not push Jett about this part of his life. Why was that?

‘Sixteen,’ he said, hands in his pockets, eyes down on the shoes he’d borrowed from Grey. ‘One of the last ones. About two streets over.’

Exactly how many foster homes had he been in?

He wasn’t going to say any more without her prompting. For the first time, she wasn’t worried he was going to snap or call her condescending names for being nosy. How much had her father known about Jett’s past?

‘Was it a bad one?’ she asked.

He laughed, hollow and dry. ‘Foster homes aren’t split into “bad” and “good”.’

Her stomach leaked acid at her naïve comment. Why did he always make her feel like this? Stupid, childish, like she was Rapunzel, locked away in her ivory tower her whole life while he and everyone else had been fighting a never-ending battle with the garden of thorns.

‘But this one was one I could sleep in.’

She waited, her held breath like a knife against her chest.

‘Sometimes, in some homes, I’d lie awake all night. Kids waited ’til you were asleep and they’d nick your stuff.’

A vision: Jett snatching his book from his bedside table, clutching it to his chest as she rolled over his mattress.

‘I slept with everything important under my blanket, in my jocks, wherever, it didn’t matter – if they could, they’d take it. This home was better. The couple was older, they had kids of their own but they’d moved out and lived over east. There were three of us foster kids. I was the oldest and I got my own room, for the first time in years, and my foster dad let me put a lock on it. He took me to Bunnings and taught me how to use basic tools. He was spending his retirement fixing up vintage cars. He said I was the first kid he’d let touch his tools, that I had steady hands.’

‘Is that where it started? Your love for cars?’

‘Oh no, that was when me and a bunch of kids from a group home stole a Lamborghini and went on a joy ride down the freeway.’

She laughed. His jaw didn’t move. ‘You’re serious?’

He raised an eyebrow, challenging her to break eye contact.

She didn’t. ‘So why the thousand-yard stare?’ she asked. ‘What happened here?’

Terrifying, dark possibilities swam in the murky depths of her mind. ‘Did he hurt you?’ She couldn’t help it; her eyes went to his scar.

His expression went cold. ‘That wasn’t him.’

So it was one of them.Her veins constricted.

‘Nothing bad happened in that home.’

‘But something bad happened somewhere else.’

‘It doesn’t matter, Nella, seriously. I just didn’t realise the law office was here. I haven’t been here in something like twenty years, and I wasn’t expecting it, that’s all.’

‘It does matter.’ She stopped walking, stepping in front of him so that he stumbled into her. He stepped back immediately. ‘You know everything about me,’ she said. ‘You’ve literally cleaned my vomit out of your car. You’ve seen me at my absolute worst, most humiliating moments, but I know almost nothing about you.’

‘So you’re saying it’s not fair?’ His lips twitched. ‘I’m in humiliation debt?’

‘Well, yes. Sort of.’

He breathed out. ‘You know more about me than a lot of people.’