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Suddenly I started to cry. This man I’d hated just an hour before was comforting me. He would have done anything for me. He’d done everything he could to protect me back in the house.
He would have taken a bullet for me. He would have died for me.
There was no question in my mind about that.
Suddenly all my anger and rage seemed so pointless. I could have lost him just now. That could have been him dead on the ground. It could have been me.
Why had I been trying so hard to push away the one good thing in my life?
The voices in my head started to argue.
He did something horrible.
Jack did something he shouldn’t have… but he didn’t cause Ali’s death. That was the only important thing.
He shouldn’t have lied to me.
That was true. But I’d done my fair share of lying to him.
If he hadn’t paid off the police, I would already know who killed Ali.
Wrong. If Jack hadn’t gone along with paying off the police, Lou would have done it all on his own. That’s all there was to it.
Had Jack taken anything from me? No. But I was at least partially responsible for him losing his house back there. None of this would be happening if I’d just told him the truth.
And yet, once he’d started to come around to forgiving me, I’d decided I was going to shut him out forever.
Maybe that was what felt the worst. I’d had something amazing: I’d fallen in love with an incredible man, who also fell in love with me. That’s something most people only get once, and that’s if they’re lucky.
And yet I’d been actively trying to throw it away. It took pulling a trigger and killing somebody to see that not only was life fleeting and fragile… but the things that make it worth living are fleeting and fragile, too.
I couldn’t stop crying. I just buried my head in his chest and sobbed.
Far away, I could hear the sirens of fire trucks. And probably police cars.
“Fiona,” Jack whispered. “Fiona, we have to go. Can you walk?”
I nodded.
“Here, give me your phone…”
He swiped up from the bottom of the screen and tapped an icon. White light spilled out on the ground in front of us. Then he helped me to my feet, put his arm around my waist, and led me into the darkness.
75
Jack
We walked for a couple of hours through scrub brush and wasteland. Neither of us said a word, although Fiona stopped crying, so that was something.
As the phone was starting to die – the picture of the battery in the top right of the screen had turned red, and was almost gone – I saw the highway at the bottom of the hills. It stretched across miles of sand, from one end of the horizon to the other. Everything else was a jumble of different shades of darkness; the road was the only thing that was both pitch black and a straight line.
There weren’t any cars or street lights. We were at the ass end of nowhere out here.
“Should we call Kade now?” Fiona asked.
“I don’t have it memorized. All I do is just punch the button on my phone.”
“I have his number. He texted me.”
