Page 61 of Last Breath

‘They don’t make me weak, Nella,’ he said, ‘they make me stronger.’ His hand covered hers. She thought for one sparking moment he was going to hold it, but all he was doing was gently pushing it away. ‘They remind me to be humble.’

‘Humble? You’ve got a Neo-Nazi’s slogan permanently on your skin to remind yourself to, what, stay in your lane?’

Jett shook his head, looking at her, yet again, with thatpoor, naïve Rapunzelgaze. ‘He wasn’t a Neo-Nazi – he was trying to protect his daughter.’

‘Fromwhat?’

‘From an unknown. Nigel and Wendy had fostered a lot of kids in their time. Not all of them had had great experiences in the neighbourhood. The kids before me had set fire to a bunch of trees in the park down the road. Some before that beat up a kid at the corner deli and stole his bike. For all Emily’s dad knew, I was just like them.’

‘Are you defending him?’

‘No, I’m saying the situation was complex. And I didn’t get his words tattooed on me because I want to remember I’m less than everyone else. I got them to remember that I didn’t want to go back there – to that feeling – and I wouldn’t do it again.’

‘And what feeling was that? Happiness? Being in love?’

‘Being blind,’ he said. ‘And naïve.’

They’d reached Lieu & Lockridge; Nella had almost forgotten why they were on this street to begin with, time and place hadn’t existed while Jett had let her peek through the tiny window he’d wedged open into his past. ‘Did you ever see Emily again?’

‘I saw her waiting at a bus stop once.’ He dragged a hand down his face. ‘She waved like she wanted me to come over, but I was driving – I’d got my Ls the week before and Nigel was teaching me. I didn’t speak to her again, I’d learnt my lesson.’

Fuck your lesson, she wanted to say.

Hold your tongue, Rapunzel.

‘She was a coward.’

Jett shook his head. ‘You don’t understand.’

‘What I don’t understand is how that girl let you slip away because her arsehole of a dad told her she was better off without you. What I don’t understand is how you can possibly think that those people somehow represent how everyone in the entire world sees you.’

‘But it is, for the most part,’ he said, smiling sadly. ‘It is how people see me, as soon as they look at my face, as soon as they hear how I was born, how I grew up.’

Nella shook her head. ‘It’s not how I see you.’

Jett’s face was impossible to decipher. His eyes seemed to go darker, the longer they stood there, the tinkling of glasses and drunken laughter reverberating through the law firm’s windows. Finally, he smiled. ‘You sound like Nigel.’

‘Bet I look just like him too.’ She was glad he was smiling, but something small had shattered inside her. He was talking to her like she was a cute little sister who’d just painted his nails. Like she still couldn’t see him, couldn’t understand what the grown-ups were talking about.

‘Not quite,’ he said. ‘A few days after the night of the ball, when we were working on one of his old, decrepit cars, he said,Everything can be fixed. But not everyone can see that.’

‘And you think he was talking about you?’ She raised an eyebrow. There was only so long they could stay out here, in view of the whole party before someone dragged them inside. She wished they’d stopped a few buildings down.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But I think about those words a lot.’

Do you think about my words a lot, too?

‘What happened to Nigel?’

Jett sighed; his face glowed gold in the light from the law office party. ‘One of the kids stole our foster mum’s jewellery and sold it to a Cash Converters in Fremantle. Wendy and Nigel’s adult kids made them get rid of us.’

‘I’m sorry, Jett.’

‘Don’t be.’ He straightened his bow tie, and after hearing the story about how he’d bought his first tux, the movement forged a painful lump in Nella’s throat. ‘I wasn’t far off eighteen. And Nigel told me I could come back when I had my licence and enough money to buy one of his cars. He said he wouldn’t give it to me for free, because he believed a man needed to earn what was given to him, but he said he’d do me a good deal.’

‘And did you?’ Her heart sank as the shadow of a suited lawyer bounded towards them. ‘Did you go back?’

‘No.’ Jett looked up at the burgundy bricks of the heritage building. ‘I never did.’