Jaz said nothing.
“You can take it as read that you’realreadygrounded,” Oliver went on, “but if you continue with this attitude, things will only get worse for you.”
Jaz’s eyes flicked up from her screen. “How?”
“For a start, you can hand over your phone.”
Jaz didn’t hand over anything.
“I mean it.”
Somehow, the fact that Olivermeant itdidn’t make Jaz any more inclined to do what she was told.
Which was probably why Oliver reached over and plucked the phone out of her hand. Which was probably why she lost her shit so completely.
She sat bolt upright, her face even paler than usual. “That’s fucking mine.”
“Yes, and you’ll have it back when you’ve apologis—”
“That’s fucking stealing.”
“I assure you it’s no—”
“Give it back.”
“When you’ve—”
“What if my mum calls?”
“If your mother calls,” replied Oliver, “we will need to inform social services because she isn’t supposed to have unsupervised contact with you.”
“You fucking little—” She lunged for Oliver, and he stepped back sharply, tucking the phone into his pocket, well out of reach. Unless she wanted to try putting him in a wheelie bin, and I didn’t fancy her chances.
“Give it back,” she screamed. “It’smine. You’ve noright.”
Oliver was projecting icy calm. Except I knew he only projectedicy calm when he felt neither calm nor icy. “I have the right,” he said coldly, “and the responsibility. You know what you have to do, and I have faith that you know how to do it.”
Words had failed Jaz, and she was now glaring at Oliver like she believed she could give him brain cancer with her eyes and that he’d deserve it if she did.
Oliver had withdrawn tactically to the doorway. “Lucien and I will be downstairs once you’ve made your decision.”
I wasn’t keen on suddenly being included in theand I. Because this had very much been an Oliver moment. And while the Oliveryness of the moment had led to some good outcomes, like Next Door’s Kid’s Mum going away relatively quickly, it also seemed to have some…some…disadvantages. He was probably right that we couldn’t let our foster kid get away with throwing other kids in wheelie bins, but I couldn’t help wondering if there was some magical middle ground between “get away with” and “immediately write a formal apology about.”
Either way, we were kind of committed now. And, since he’d said we’d be downstairs, that put us back at the kitchen table, talking in low voices, trying not to admit that neither of us knew what we were doing. Something Oliver was a lot better at than I was.
Fucking miserabledidn’t even begin to describe it.
“You know,” I began, fully aware that this wasn’t really the time and wasn’t going to be helpful, but with a pressing need to be heard that had been building all evening without my quite noticing, “Next Door’s Kid actually is an absolute piece of shit.”
From his sharp intake of breath, I sensed Oliver didn’t like the direction I was going in but was doing his best to go with me anyway. “Suppose we stipulate for a moment that Colin is indeed an extremely unpleasant child,” he said in his best lawyerese. “Does that mean that Jasmine was correct to throw him into a wheelie bin?”
“Okay”—I put up one finger—“I know that the right answerhere is ‘No, it doesn’t,’ but I really think you might be underestimating quite how much of an absolute piece of shit that kid can be.”
“I might,” Oliver conceded. “But that’s rather the heart of the issue. Inrealitythere’s no level of piece-of-shit-ness that makes it acceptable to throw a child into a wheelie bin.”
Stressed-out-inadvisable-levity Luc took over my body for a few seconds. “I mean, it sets one hell of a clear boundary.”
“If an adult had done it”—Oliver’s eyes were their warmest kind of stern—“it would be clear child abuse.”
