“And don’t just sayyeslike you’re this…” I didn’t have words. Oliver always had words and I never did, which was what made this so difficult. “Like you’re the one who gets to decide. You know what a rhetorical question is. You know the reason I said ‘Is it?’ isbecause I think ‘It’s not,’ and you can’t gaslight me into thinking you’ve got a monopoly on right answers here.”
My brilliant, beautiful, barrister boyfriend took so many things so seriously and held himself to such high standards. Accusing him of gaslighting me wasn’t just a jab; it was a knife in the ribs. “Lucien, I—”
And for once he had nothing. Which I thought meantmaybeI’d…I’d what. Won? This wasn’t a winners-and-losers thing. This was a shitty little argument about something shitty that our foster daughter had done to next door’s shitty child, probably because he’d done something shitty.
“I—” he repeated.
And before he could finish the sentence, or even make another attempt at starting it, Jaz appeared in the kitchen door holding a neatly folded piece of paper that she must have ripped out of one of her schoolbooks.
“Here,” she said. “Now can I have my phone? Please.”
Oliver rose and took the letter. Then, because he was no fool, he actually read it to make sure it didn’t say “Screw you, sucker,” and when he was satisfied that it actually was the thing he’d asked for, he drew Jaz’s phone from his breast pocket and handed it back to her. “There,” he said. “That wasn’t so difficult, was it?”
Jaz said nothing. She just turned and slipped away upstairs.
Oliver passed me the note, and I skimmed it out of curiosity. Jaz’s handwriting was…well, it was better than mine, but that wasn’t saying much. The letter itself said:
Dear neighbours. I am very sorry for my behaviour. I have emotional difficulties and do not alwayspracticepractise good coping strategies. I am trying to be better. Apologies. Jasmine.
Having been with her in her first school meeting, I read the whole thing in that flat, going-along-with-it monotone I’d heard when she was setting her goals for the coming term. I didn’t think she meant a word of it. At least not in a healthy way. I was beginning to suspect thatI don’t practise good coping strategieswas herI’m a fuckup who eats pizza in my pants.
Oliver, though, seemed pleased. Worse, he seemed vindicated.
“You see,” he told me. “All we needed to do was be firm and set clear boundaries.”
I should have been glad he was right. Because wewereboth on the same team. All three of us were on the same team—Team O’Donnell-Blackwood-Johnson—and if Oliver acting like the dad from a mid-century sitcom actually worked for us, then more power to him.
Then we heard a familiar paws-and-feet combo coming downstairs.
And a click and a vanishingruffand the bang of the door slamming as Jaz and Spud disappeared into the night.
Chapter 23
I was honestly a bit surprised that Oliver didn’t object to me going after Jaz. It was probably unfair, but I’d half expected him to be all,She’s just doing it for attentionorShe’ll be back in her own timeorSomething something or she’ll never learn. But as it turned out, he didn’t want our fourteen-year-old foster daughter wandering the streets of Havering after dark any more than I did and, since one of us had to stay home in case she came back, we sort of agreed without directly saying so that it was probably best if I was the one who went after her and Oliver was the one who… stayed out of her face.
I wasn’t quite sure where Jaz would go, but she’d taken Spud with her rather than, say, a backpack full of clothes and twenty quid in cash or two silver candlesticks, so it seemed like the park was a decent bet. It was closed at night, but the fence was low and Jaz didn’t strike me as the kind of person who’d worry a huge amount about official opening hours. Pinning, if I was honest, way too much hope on my ability to think myself into the mindset of an angry teenager, I dashed off in that direction.
A very, very short way into the dash I began wishing I’d stopped to grab my coat, because it was January and it was after sunset and I was fucking freezing.
I caught sight of a familiar figure with a familiar dog at its heels about half a street ahead of me, and I quickened my pace to try andcatch up. As I’d predicted—and I tried not to be too smug about predicting it—she scrambled over the gate into the park and waited a moment while Spud followed her through the railings.
Shit, this was going to be so bad for his training.
Since I was more than a foot taller than Jaz,, getting over the fence should have been way, way easier for me than it was for her. But she was young and agile, and I was maybe two-thirds of one of those things. Plus I was wearing impractically tight jeans. So while she and Spud were happily vanishing into the gloom of the park, I was getting my balls snagged on an iron spike and once again wishing I’d made different calls about several of my recent choices.
It was at times like these I was really glad I wasn’t Oliver, because he’d have known real statistics about how many different ways a young girl, or, for that matter, a skinny dude with the muscle tone of a house cat, could get totally murdered to pieces in a situation like this. Without those statistics, I just did my best to freak myself out with guesses.
About halfway across the park, my naturally longer stride started making a difference. Enough of a difference that I had to ask some difficult questions about whether Jaz actually wanted to be caught up with (probably not), if she realised I was me and not some random murderer (hopefully so), and what I was going to say when I finally got to her (no fucking clue).
I tried to solve all three problems by yelling,, “Jaz, it’s me, Luc,” but she either ignored me or didn’t hear.
At last, she came to the lake and sat down on a little bench looking over the water. Which solved the what-if-she-gets-away problem but didn’t do much for the how-do-I-deal-with-this problem. Then again Iwasin loco parentis, so it’s not like going up to her was actually inappropriate. It was just awkward. And they really should warn you about that more. You hear so much about how parenting is challenging and stressful and expensive. And very little about howyou spend most of it faintly embarrassed.
As I got closer to the bench, Spud looked around at me and started yapping in a way I thought coded asHello, Daddy Lucand notGet away from my human, you weird stranger. And that, finally, got Jaz’s attention. She pulled out an earphone and looked up at me. Even in the dark, I could see her doing the is-this-person-a-threat calculation and, to my relief, coming down on the side of “no.”
“You should probably come home,” I told her. But when I saw the look of revulsion that crossed her face at hearing home used to describe the place she was staying with me and Oliver, I corrected to, “Back to the house, I mean.”
“Or what?”
