“Yeah.” He sounds mildly pissed off. I’ve never heard something so sweet in all my life.
“Oh, thank you, God,” I blurt out.
“Gonna need a little help,” he calls.
I start trying to pull him up, but he’s soheavy, and I’m starting to panic again, but then Matt throws himself down next to me and helps to pull. We inch it up, and it must only be a few seconds before I see Nick’s face looking up at me. He somehow managed to grab hold of the chain on the way down, and I can see his biceps straining as he fights to pull himself up. He gets a foothold and pushes up until I’m able to grab his wrists, his arms, and yank him back up over the edge.
The three of us roll onto our backs, panting.
“Someone will have heard that shot,” Nick says calmly, as though he didn’t justfall off a freaking cliff. “Harvard, you’re the most respectable of us. You need to deal with the law when they arrive.”
I swallow down my emotions and try to think. “Okay. I can do that. What about Dellacroce? Should we, I don’t know, call an ambulance?”
“No,” Matt says fiercely. I’d almost forgotten about him.
“Ambulance ain’t gonna help him,” Nick says.
“You’re just going to leave a corpse on the beach for some lucky dog walker to find tomorrow morning?” I’m not sure why I’m being so snappy; Nick is lucky to be alive and I feel like I’m going to throw up, I’m so fucking relieved. “Stop moving,” I snarl, as he tries to sit up.
“I’m okay, Harvard,” he says softly. “Worry about the kid instead, huh? I need a second to catch my breath, that’s all.” He gives me a serious look and nods at Matt, who’s still lying motionless like a statue, staring up at the sky.
I get up from the ground, dust off my knees and my ass, and go over to Matt on legs that still don’t seem to work the way they should. He stares straight past me so I stand over him, wave my hand in front of his face, and ask, “Are you okay? Matt?”
His eyes finally come back into focus and he looks at me. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m okay, are you okay? Is Mr. Fontana—”
Shit, now he’s beginning to panic. I help him up slowly, making sure he keeps his eyes on mine.
“Nick is fine. And so am I. But your dad—”
“I’m so sorry. He came back and saw me talking to you, and he followed you back here so he’d know where you were staying. Then he came back to the restaurant, dragged me home and beat the hell out of me…”
“It’s okay,” I say gently, although it’s really not. But what else can I say? The kid just saw his father fall to his death. Even if that fatherwasan abusive bastard, it’s going to stir up some feelings.
“He got his gun,” Matt says robotically. “And he made me come with him. He said he was gonna show me how a real man acts…”
“You’d better get out of here,” I say to him. “Take the car and go.”
He shakes his head slowly, a look of determination replacing the shock. “This is all my fault.”
“Yeah, it kind of is,” says a voice behind us, the same voice that can make me melt, and which now brings strange tears to my eyes at the thought that I might never have heard it again.
“I thought you were taking a second,” I say, turning on Nick ferociously. I’m not great with emotion. I get angry if I feel like I’m showing anything other than complete self-confidence.
“I did take a second, and now it’s time to deal with this. But first, why the fuck did you throw that wine bottle?”
“I washelping. I wasdistractinghim.”
“You don’t try to help me in a fight, Harvard,” he tells me tenderly. “You just get out of the fucking way.”
“I’ll tell everyone it was me,” Matt breaks in. “They don’t need to know you were involved at all, Mr. Fontana. I’ll tell him we came out here to walk along the bluffs and I—pushed him.”
Nick shakes his head, although part of me feels like it’s a fair fucking trade for Matt to take the blame. “No, that’s not how this is going to go down.”
We lock eyes as we both hear it at the same time: a car coming down the road.
“Could be the pizza guy,” I say.
“Could be the cops,” Nick replies.
