Ahead of him Rosie abruptly switched lanes into the fast lane, herbumper an inch from the car behind. She ignored the agitated blare of horns and let her speed drop as the car fell back. Cal held his place and kept an eye on her in the rearview mirror.
He was pretty confident she hadn’t recognized him. They’d met for a minute at the event, and he’d been in a suit instead of jeans, and bare-headed instead of hidden behind a matte-black visor. There was no wayshe could know who he was.
But somehow she did. She abruptly switched lanes again in a hard diagonal that ended with the car on the hard shoulder. It juddered past Cal at panel-rattling speed, and he saw that she was the only person visible in the car.
Cal hesitated as he weighed his options. He didn’t want anyone to get hurt, especially Rosie, since she might be the only one to know where Joewas, but he didn’t want her to get away either. Habit made the decision for him. It was easier, after all these years, to go fast than slow.
So he stuck to Rosie’s tail as they wove in and out of traffic. Three times she scraped him out with a desperate, ass-clenched move around one of the massive trucks that lumbered around the road. He caught up with her every time she sped out from behindthe truck or fell back to try and mingle with the other cars.
Sweat itched under Cal’s hairline, rubbed raw against the nape of his neck by the helmet, and he was ashamed to admit there was a little part of him that enjoyed the speed. A gray Porsche tried to keep up with them as he mistook the chase for a race, but it had to fall back with a squeal of brakes as a Sainsbury’s delivery truck hadto veer in front of him so it didn’t rear end Rosie.
Cal could have caught her. In the end he was the better driver, with a better vehicle for the chase. The problem was that she didn’t want to get away, she wanted to reach the right spot. Ten miles after Pond Farm—farther than his mum had thought—Rosie pulled the wheel to the right and bounced up onto the hard shoulder. Then she just went onover. Her bumper crumpled against the corrugated iron guard rail and the car took flight.
Only for a second. Then gravity caught it and smacked it back down into the ground. The windows popped and shattered by the pressure as the car scraped down the incline on its side and crashed into a fence post.
A handful of birds who’d been perched on the fence took off in a surprised flurry of wings,and Cal’s stomach dropped down to his feet with dread as he pulled up onto the hard shoulder. He let the bike fall onto its side as he scrambled down the torn-up hillock of grass.
He raced toward the car as small, frantic hands hammered out the flexible sheets of glass shards that used to be the windshield. For an odd, surreal moment, he heard his mum’s voice in the back of his head, her memoryof the accident overlaid over this new one.
Rosie crawled out over the steering wheel and the hood of the car. She collapsed into the mud as she slid down off the bumper, her legs as weak as his had felt earlier.
“Where is he?” Cal demanded as he grabbed her arm and dragged her back up onto her feet. He shook her to make her eyes focus on him. “Where’s Joe?”
She stared at him for a second.“He’s… he’s gone to be with Mum,” she said. Her voice got more certain as she talked. “We’ll be with her forever now. Like we were meant to be.”
Cal shook her again, hard enough make her head snap back and forth. “You crawled out. Again. Where’s Joe?”
Rosie stared at him for a second, and then her stubbornly prim expression gave way to wide-eyed horror. She opened her mouth and closed it again,her lips pressed together to stop the tremble that picked at the corners. Her only answer to Cal’s question was to shake her head and screw her eyes up tight.
“What’s wrong with you?” Cal yelled at her. He gave her a disgusted shove away from him, and she staggered back, tripped over a knot of grass, and fell down. She didn’t try to get back up. “Why did you do this?”
If Rosie had an answerto that, she didn’t want to share it with Cal. He left her in the mud and lumbered over the long, matted grass to the car. The particular smell of gas and brake fluid hung heavy in the air, a smell so thick it had a taste. Under the dented hood, the engine still rattled and spat.
Cal looked in the back seat of the car. No Joe. There was no sign of him in the car at all. For a second, Cal thoughthe had been wrong—not about the fact that Rosie had stopped being able to make good decisions a while ago, but that the bad decision she wanted to make was this.
If she wanted to relive that night, Joe would have to be here.
Something rattled in the boot. Cal froze, his hands pressed against hot metal. “Joe?”
Another kick, the double-punch of fists against metal, and the sound of a desperate,muffled voice from inside as Joe begged desperately to get out.
“Cal, please, get me out. Get me out! I can’t breathe. Cal… please!”
“Wait,” Cal yelled as he pressed his hands against the metal. “I’ll be back. Wait.”
He scrambled back up the bank on his hands and knees, fistfuls of grass used as handholds, to his bike. He’d promised El he’d behave himself when he got out of jail. But if heever had to break that promise, he’d wanted to be prepared. Cal grabbed the heavy screwdriver from where he’d stashed it under the seat. It was nearly as old as him—stolen from his grandad’s shed when Cal was ten for… something, probably mischief—but it was still good enough for the job.
Another car pulled over. The driver rolled her window down and peered out. Purple hair quiffed up over a pale,earnest face.
“Is everything okay?” she asked and pulled a face as the question left her lips. “Stupid question. I mean, is anyone hurt? What can I do?”
“Call the ambulance,” Cal said. He glanced over at Rosie, who’d hidden her face in her hands. “And the police.”
She nodded and grabbed her phone from the holder. Cal left her to it as he started back down the bank. Halfway there the fire cougheditself into life on the undercarriage of the engine. It bopped there for a second, blue and meditative, and then made hungry, yellow inroads on the rest of the car.
“Shit,” Cal muttered. He staggered back from the rush of heat, one hand up to protect his face, and then stumbled around the car. The metal had been warm before. It was hot now, and he could hear Joe cough inside the drunk.
He jammedthe screwdriver into the lock, gave the handle a whack with the heel of his hand, and then twisted it to core the locking mechanism out by force. The boot held for a second and then popped open. Cal blistered his fingers on it as he pulled it open and reached in to drag Joe out and away.
