“Also,” Jaz added, only slightly sarcastically, “I didn’t steal it. I took it reasonably, believing myself to have consent.”
“Oi,” I said, parentally. “Don’t…”
“Don’t what?” asked Jaz.
“I’m not sure. But don’t do it.”
It was dark and I was facing the wrong way, but I could feel Jaz rolling her eyes at me. “Oh, I feel so secure and reformed now you’ve set these firm boundaries for me.”
And Oliver, the fucking traitor, laughed.
“Look.” It was rare for me to be the adult in the room, even if the room was an average-size car, but here I was. “If you can both come down from the criminal high you’re on, isn’t this going to kind of fuck up the whole fostering situation? It can’t reflect well on us that we apparently encouraged our kid to drive off in our car in the middle of the night.”
“It’s certainly nonideal,” admitted Oliver.
My heart had taken something of a battering over the past couple of the days. So it tried to pound, failed, and just kind of flurped sadly. “How nonideal, nonideal? Like, ‘You’ve been bad parents, don’t do it again’ nonideal or ‘We no longer trust you with children or vehicles’ nonideal?”
“Honestly, it could be either.”
In the back seat, Jaz let out a single, explosive “Hah.” Then, when I pivoted to look at her, she said, “I fuckingknew it. This is just you trying to get rid of me.”
I saw Oliver’s hands tense on the steering wheel. “Jaz,” he said. “I am truly sorry for saying that we would send you away if your behaviour didn’t change. But”—I could hear him searching for a less Olivery way to express himself, but in the end, he must have decided that Olivery was best, as long as it was the rightsortof Olivery—“you’re an intelligent young woman, and you know the system better than Lucien or I do. Do you really think if I wanted to get rid of you, I’d need to be…economical with the truth to a police officer to do it?”
As unwilling as Jaz was to accept that either of us could be right about anything, she couldn’t quite pretend that Oliver was wrong on that one.
“I say this,” he went on, “purely for information, and without in any way prejudging how you choose to feel about it. You were at serious risk of being charged with a crime. A petty crime, but it would have given you a record, put your biometrics into the system, and—while community service was more likely—could even have landed you in a young offender institution. My first priority was to protect you from that. If, as a result, Lucien and I are deemed inadequate parents and you’re sent to another family, that is…” He was looking for words so, so carefully. “That isn’t what I want, but it’s better than the alternative.”
Jaz folded her arms and slumped back in the seat with intense sure-whatever energy. And I did my best not to flip the fuck out.
Because as much as I loved Oliver’s analytic streak, all my instincts said no, the version where we lost Jaz would be worse than any other version. Even if—and it was theeven ifthat put me and my instincts into a kind of uncomfortable conflict. Becauseeven if it wasworse for herwas clearly a selfish thing to think, but also I couldn’t stop thinking it and also it seemed selfish tonotthink it as well.
It occurred to me that this was a very tiny, very distant echo of what Jaz’s mum must have been feeling basically every day, for years. And it fucking sucked.If you love somebody, set them freewas incredibly easy to say, but as words to live by, they were horrible.
Except that was the thing about Oliver. He didn’t pick his values by what was easy, or by what sounded good on a motivational poster. He actually lived them. Whatever the consequences.
Oh shit. Consequences.
“Hang on,” I said to him. “Isn’t this going to be incredibly bad for you? You know, with your job and everything.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised that, while the thought had hit me like a custard pie in the face, Oliver had followed it through to its logical conclusion long before he’d opened his mouth at the police station. “Being officially branded a bad parent doesn’t matter to the bar one way or another. And, as for any…misstatements I may have made to the Dagenham Constabulary, that’s not wonderful, but”—he shot me a sideways keeping-his-eyes-on-the-road look—“you can’t really believe this is the worst thing anybody has ever done and still practised law?”
“So everything will be fine?” I asked, in my most hopeful voice.
“Almost certainly.”
Thealmostwas doing a lot of heavy lifting there. It might not have meant much to Jaz, but I knew what Oliver’s career meant to him, and beingalmostcertain he wouldn’t fuck it all up wasn’t a position he’d put himself in lightly. And on top of that, the one thing I knew he cared about more than his career—apart from, like, me—was his principles, and I was pretty sure they at least discouraged lying to law enforcement. But when it mattered, when the choice had been Jaz’s future or Oliver’s ethics, he’d chosen Jaz’s future.
It wasn’t what Atticus Finch would have done, and I was really, really glad about that.
I gave Oliver a long, slightly soppy look. And then I looked past him and out of the window and into the night, and I noticed we were taking kind of a funny route. The trip from Havering to Dagenham was less than twenty minutes, but Oliver seemed to be building in a whole lot of meandering time.
“Jaz,” he began, as we turned into an obvious-if-you-were-looking-for-it detour. “Where were you going tonight?”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t answer for a really long time. And Oliver just let her not answer until eventually it was like not answering got too much for her and she said, “Home.”
“To your mother’s?” Oliver clarified.
Jaz made a vaguely affirmative grunt.
