Page 28 of Lawless (Dauntless Island #2)

There was a pinch in my gut—guilt and anger, twisted up as tight as knotted fishing lines and impossible to tease apart again.

I didn’t even know if I was more angry at Will for misunderstanding me or at me for fucking up what I was trying to say in the first place.

And it wasn’t my fault—not what happened with Mum, and not even my and Will’s inability to talk without it turning into a slanging match.

At least half of that was on him, too. But knowing that didn’t magically cure the guilt.

Because I should have been here. Even if I knew, realistically, I couldn’t watch Mum twenty-four hours a day, I should have been here.

If I’d been here, it wouldn’t have happened.

The pipes shuddered and squealed as I twisted the taps. I turned around and leaned on the edge of the tub, the ridge of it digging into my lower back, and a whole new wave of guilt rose up in me and completely obliterated the last one.

Dominic’s back bedroom window was open, the curtain blowing in the breeze. The curtain was ugly and flowery because he still hadn’t got new ones yet. There was a flicker of movement from inside as he passed the window.

I thought of him getting showered and dressed, all alone in his house with nobody to talk to except Princess Frank.

Was he okay? Was he upset? Was it stupid to think he might be, even though he’d been doing the job he’d been trained to do?

Or was it more stupid to think that just because he was a copper he was somehow immune to the same shakiness and bolts of anxiety that were shooting through me right now, even though I hadn’t even been there?

I wanted to see him. I needed to see him.

To see if he was okay, and to thank him.

I didn’t know how the fuck I was supposed to thank him for something as big as saving Mum from drowning, but even if I stumbled over every one of my words and made a total mess of it, then at least he’d know I tried.

And he deserved that. Aside from how I felt about him—and wasn’t that a whole other knotted mess I didn’t have a fucking prayer of untangling?

—he deserved to know how grateful I was.

Button John slipped out of the kitchen, his mug of Milo still in his hand. He leaned on the tub beside me. “Are we perving on the copper?”

I elbowed him. “Shut up!”

He grinned to show me he was just teasing. “I mean,” he said, and paused for a sip of Milo. “I’d do him.”

I ignored the jealousy—a new and exciting ingredient to add to the soup I was brewing in my gut—and elbowed him in the ribs. “What makes you think he’d do you?”

Button John preened. “Excuse you. I’m hot.”

“You reckon?”

“Well, I’m not too bad, and pickings are slim on Dauntless,” he said. His grin faded, and he nudged me with his shoulder. “You okay?”

I nodded and let out a long breath. “Yeah.”

I wasn’t, and by Button John’s wry look, he knew it.

But he didn’t call me out on it, which was why we were best mates.

That, and the pickings were also slim when it came to friends on Dauntless.

But even if there were a million people living on Dauntless, I knew Button John would still be my best mate.

Button John nodded his pointy chin in the direction of Dominic’s house. “You want to go over there, don’t you?”

“No!” I jolted. “Not when anyone could just look out the kitchen door and see me climbing the fence.” My thoughts swirled, and then settled on the surface of that weird feelings soup in my stomach. “I couldn’t anyway. I can’t .”

Button John shared an unhappy look with me.

“Even if it didn’t matter what the whole island thought?—”

“It doesn’t,” Button John said. “Fuck ’em.”

“You know it doesn’t work like that.”

“It doesn’t because we don’t let it,” Button John said. “You think Red Joe gave a shit what people thought when he shacked up with Eddie? If he’d cared about any of that, he’d still be grouchy and single.” He wrinkled his nose. “Though he is still pretty grouchy.”

“That’s different,” I said, leaving aside the fact that most people were grouchy with Button John because they’d learned through experience that when he turned up he brought disaster on his heels. “Red Joe is Red Joe Nesmith , and Eddie’s not a copper.”

“Yeah, it’s different,” Button John said. “But that doesn’t mean it’s right.”

“He’s a copper ,” I said. “I don’t even care what the island thinks about that. But if he found out about the other stuff...”

“Oh,” Button John said, like the penny had dropped at last. He gave a sympathetic twist of his mouth. “Oh, shit , yeah.”

We leaned there in silence for a while as the sunset painted the sky above the lean-to with streaks of vivid pink and purple.

The long shadows cast by the low sun crept slowly across the yard, merging in soft pools of shade that settled into a deeper darkness as the dusk drew on.

A light came on in Dominic’s kitchen, and I felt a tug in my chest when I thought of cooking mudcrabs with him.

I wondered if he was cooking one tonight, and then I almost laughed at the thought.

Of course he wasn’t. He’d be making a toasted sandwich or eating something out of a can.

Like, I wasn’t going to be auditioning for Masterchef any time soon, but at least I could scramble some eggs.

“Come on,” Button John said at last, nudging me with his elbow. “Your Milo’s getting cold.”

We went inside.

There was nobody in the kitchen. Nipper Will’s fishing gear was lying on the floor in damp folds of orange PVC, and the shower was running upstairs.

From the living room, I could hear Aunt Jane and Big Johnny talking.

I swallowed down my irritation and picked up Will’s gear, stepping outside briefly to dunk it in the tub before going inside again to wash my hands at the kitchen sink.

I headed into the living room. Aunt Jane and Big Johnny were on the couch, and Button John was wedged between them drinking the rest of my Milo.

His empty mug sat on the coffee table. I sat down on the little padded footstool that was probably almost as old as the house itself; it creaked under my weight, but it held.

I left the armchair for Nipper Will. It had been our dad’s once, and, though I only had the vaguest memory of it, our granddad’s before that.

Nothing on Dauntless got thrown away, not if there was still some life in it. We even held onto all our ghosts.

“Okay?” Big Johnny asked me gruffly.

I nodded and picked at a thread hanging from the hem of my shorts. “Is she getting worse?”

“It’s up and down, love,” Aunt Jane said, and I was suddenly and acutely aware that I’d missed most of this while I was at school.

I only saw the smooth surface of the ocean, not the highs and lows of every tide that crept up the harbour wall and then receded again.

When Dad died, everything had felt strange and off-kilter for so long.

I’d barely noticed how bad Mum was, because I hadn’t been much better, and because I’d been a kid, and because there had been adults looking after her.

So much of it had fallen on Will’s shoulders, then and when I left for school, and that was another thing I hadn’t noticed.

During school holidays I’d been so happy to be home that I’d only noticed Will was bad-tempered.

It had never occurred to me that he’d spent the last ten years trying to keep everything together.

I fought down that old, familiar spark of anger—I could lighten his load if he let me on the fucking boat, and we could pay someone to watch Mum while we were out there!

—and drew a deep breath and held it for a long time before releasing it.

“I don’t know what to do. I can’t be here every second of every day. I can’t?—”

“We know that,” Big Johnny said, and then looked to the doorway.

Nipper Will stepped inside, his hair still wet from the shower. He sat down in the armchair—slumped, more like—and stared at the floor. “I don’t fucking know. There’s this place, on the mainland?—”

“We can’t send Mum away from Dauntless!” I exclaimed. “We can pay someone to be here for when I can’t be.”

“And where the hell do we get the money for that?” Nipper Will dragged a hand through his hair, and his stare dared me not to say the obvious.

“We can manage for now,” Aunt Jane said. “Between me and Big Johnny, and Agnes, and the girls.”

“And me!” Button John said.

Aunt Jane patted him on the head. “We can manage for now,” she said again.

And what was there to say to that? Big Johnny and Aunt Jane had their own work to do, and so did Aunt Agnes.

Addy and Emily would help out, but they were looking for paid work the same as every other young person on Dauntless.

The same as me and Button John were. It wasn’t a long-term solution, because nothing on Dauntless was .

There were no hospitals here, no nursing homes or care centres.

There was just us, and today had proven that sometimes we weren’t enough—and that was something no Dauntless Islander liked to realise.

I could tell by Nipper Will’s expression that it was sitting as heavily in his gut as it was in mine, even if he’d been the one to bring up some place on the mainland.

Nipper Will met my gaze, and pressed his mouth into a thin line as though he was trying to hold back some words he knew would be better off unsaid.

Well, that made two of us, didn’t it?