“Okay, I’ll stop it now.”
“Please do.” Oliver’s face had softened, and I privately gave myself exactly one relationship point for us navigating a potentially tense conversation with something almost approaching grace.“Are you going to be okay?” he continued. “We hadn’t planned on Jasmine being home all day.”
I nodded. “I’ll be fine. Work’s going pretty smoothly, so I’ll just be at home sending emails and having meetings.”
Oliver looked concerned. “You’re sure? Because I can probably arrange to work from home as well if it’s a problem.”
“I’m sure. I’ve double- and triple-checked my calendar. Unless something goes incredibly wrong, it’s plain sailing until the end of the week.”
Chapter 30
Something went incredibly wrong.
The morning was fine. I got up, saw Oliver off to work, and even managed to persuade Jaz that no, just because she was suspended didn’t mean she could lie in, because her teachers would be sending her work to do remotely. On the laptop that she now had.
Then around noon I heard an engine.
It wasn’t a familiar engine. I’d have recognised Saint’s bike anywhere, and this wasn’t Saint’s bike. But it was definitely Saint’s vehicle-of-some-sort. There was just something about the sound of a noisy penis extension of a car roaring to a stop outside a quiet private home on a residential street that had theauraof the new Earl of Spitalhamstead.
Since I hadn’t been expecting him, I was in my study. Since I was in my study, Jaz was nearer the door than me. And ordinarily that would have been fine because most days getting Jaz to answer the door would have been a mission all of its own. Buttoday, maybe because she was bored, maybe because some sixth sense had told her it would make things difficult for me, or maybe because the universe itself had decided it was a good day to piss on Luc O’Donnell, she jumped straight up and went to see who it was.
“Who the fuck are you?” she was asking as I came into the hall.
“Who the fuck areyou?” Saint asked back.
“Rescue dog,” Jaz told him, which led to a distantRufffrom Spud, who was still in the kitchen having lunch.
These two meeting was my worlds colliding in the worst possible way. Although right then I couldn’t tell if I was worried my foster kid would make me look bad to my boss or my boss would make me look bad to my foster kid. Honestly, it would probably be both. “Saint,” I said, “this is Jaz. She’s my and Oliver’s foster daughter. Jaz, this is Saint, he’s—”
“A friend of Luc’s,” Saint interrupted with a presumption so typical I couldn’t even be particularly bothered by it. And then, “Jazz. As in the music?”
“Saint,” she said. “As in the people who hang out with God?”
Saint nodded. “Like it.”
Okay, this had gone non-disastrously so far. And since I didn’t trust either of them to quit while they were ahead, I quit for them. “Great. We’ve established that both your names also have secondary meanings. Now can we get past the who everybody is question and get to what everybody is doing here? I’ll start. It’s where I live. Same for her.” I tried to make assertive eye contact with Saint, which was hampered by the fact he was wearing mirrored aviators. Because of course he was. “Your turn.”
Saint pulled the glasses down and looked at me over the top of them. “We’re getting the band back together.”
Fuck. I’d left the problem of pitching an ecological fundraiser headlined by a band named Rancid Sputum for future Luc to deal with and, as I’d predicted, future Luc was now incredibly pissed off at past Luc for getting him into this mess. Which meant future Luc—or I suppose present Luc—very nearly just came straight out withWe’re fucking not.
But by some random blessing of the coleoptera gods, Jaz stopped me blowing up my job, my coworkers’ jobs, and an environmentally vital beetle charity by asking, “What band?”
“Rancid Sputum,” Saint replied at once, as if he expected Jaz to have heard of them despite the fact that they’d broken up before she was born and had never actually put out any albums, had any fans, or played any gig bigger than a pub toilet.
Jaz never looked impressed. And to be honest, nobody ever looked impressed with Saint; he just filled their impressed-ness in with the power of his own privilege. But something about Jaz’s truly iconic inability to give anything even resembling a fuck seemed to get through to him. Just a little. “Rancid what?” she asked.
“Sputum.” For the first time, I heard an edge in Saint’s voice that suggested he might not be totally convinced it was a name destined for rock legendhood.
“Sputum?” Jaz repeated.
“The thing you’ve got to remember about Sputum…” began Saint. I suspected he’d started getting that thing where you said a word so much it either goes meaningless or becomes nothing but meaning, so he was essentially just saying the wordsputumover and over again to a disinterested teenager. “What you’ve got to remember about Sputum,” he repeated, “is that we were less about what we were called than what we were about?”
I didn’t wish Saint harm, but I was beginning to be oddly curious about whether Jaz could actually make him die of cringe. “You were about what you were about?”
He nodded, confidence flowing back as the part of him that had been flirting with self-awareness remembered that he was, like, really stupendously fucking rich. “That’s right. What’re you about, kid?”
Jaz gave no visible reaction. “Fourteen.”
