Time and time again, I’d asked myself why I bothered, but the answer was always the same. Lenny was family, or at least, the closest thing to family that I had.
I closed my eyes briefly at a red traffic light. Some days—okay, every day—I wished I had a normal life. But there I was, in a stolen car because I couldn’t afford to pay the train fare, and I didn’t even have a driver’s licence.
At least the blonde had picked all the options when she specced the car. Decent speakers, AC, pale grey leather seats so comfortable I longed to stop for a snooze. But I couldn’t stop. Not yet. Maybe not for years. See, I had this big idea. Lenny called it crazy, but I preferred to think of myself as ambitious.
I wanted a home.
That was it. Just a home. Nothing huge or flashy, but a place I could call mine. I’d lived in nineteen different places during my childhood, and since the start of the year, I’d already moved twice.
I was tired.
Tired of the constant upheaval, tired of having to babysit Lenny, tired of always working or studying or dealing with arseholes. Tired of the hustle. Tired of life.
I just wanted a tiny flat of my own so I didn’t have to carry my entire life around in my pockets in case someone decided to evict me. Which meant I socked away every spare penny I made as a shot girl in Harlequin’s nightclub, I never paid bus fares, and my current home was an empty pub shared with twenty others, most of whom spent their days stoned out of their tiny little minds.
The light changed, and I eased forward, heading west out of London. Who knew? One day, I might even take my driving test too.
CHAPTER 6 - BETHANY
WHERE THE HECK was my car? Okay, I was forgetful sometimes, but I’d parked it right next to the canary-yellow SUV with the surfboard sticker in the back window. I knew I had. Unless the driver of the SUV had moved their car. Or there were two colour-blind surfers in Kensington. Or…or… No way. Who would want to steal a Ford Fiesta? It was hardly a Ferrari, and the boot didn’t even hold that much shopping.
And how would they have stolen it? I mean, I had the… I patted my jacket pocket. The key was missing. Dread washed over me, and the coffee cup slipped out of my hand. Warm cappuccino splattered all over my shoes and the homeless person sitting next to me.
“Hey, lady. Watch it!”
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Hold on. Where had I heard those words before? The girl who slammed into me in the produce section had apologised profusely, and at the time, I’d thought nothing of it. People got clumsy. Had my key fallen out of my pocket in the store? Was it still lurking among the vegetables? Or worse, had somebody else picked it up?
The homeless man clambered to his feet, or rather, to his foot. Too late, I noticed the crutches next to him and realised he only had one leg, but he was still much taller than me and kind of intimidating. A grubby tartan blanket slipped off his shoulders and landed in a heap on the ground, and I took a step back. Usually, the store staff moved beggars on, but clearly they’d missed one. Slackers.
“These clothes were clean on today.”
I sincerely doubted that, judging by the state of him, but I forced myself to be polite. Politeness doesn’t cost anything, my mother always said, even if she didn’t often practise what she preached.
“I’ll pay for them to be dry-cleaned. Uh, I don’t suppose you recall somebody driving away in a small red car? A Ford Fiesta?”
“Aye, about ten minutes ago. A young blonde lass. Your daughter?”
Not likely. After years of trying, I’d come to the conclusion that a baby wasn’t on the cards for me. The doctor had referred us for tests, but Piers didn’t relish the idea of “jerking off into a cup,” as he put it, and he’d cancelled three appointments before telling me he’d changed his mind about having a child anyway. His mother blamed me for my failure to conceive—she didn’t say as much, but I knew she did—and every time we’d gone for dinner, his father muttered something about needing an heir. By that point, Piers had started spending more time away, and the rest… I didn’t want to think about it.
“No, not my daughter. Was she wearing ripped jeans and a hooded sweatshirt?”
“That’s her, aye.”
Chaucer’s treats slid out of my hands and landed in the puddle of coffee as my knees threatened to buckle. That rotten delinquent had stolen my car. And Hugo’s painting. A ten-thousand-dollar freaking painting. I clutched at a nearby signpost to stay upright, and only then did the small print on the sign itself register. Tesco Stores accepts no responsibility for valuables left in cars.
Shit, shit, shit.
The disclaimer wasn’t a surprise, but it hammered home the fact that I only had third-party insurance. A comprehensive policy had been too expensive after I had a tiny prang in my last Mercedes. Okay, it was a little more than a prang—I drove it into Piers’s Porsche after I caught him screwing Andromeda Bartrop in our marital bed—but the insurance company hadn’t looked too kindly on my claim of mitigating circumstances. And I was normally such a careful driver, or so I thought… Oh, what was the point? I couldn’t turn the clock back, which meant I’d lose my job for sure, and I wouldn’t be able to keep Chaucer without grovelling to my parents, and now I was bloody crying.
The homeless man handed me a surprisingly clean tissue.
“Are you okay, love?”
“Does it look like I’m okay?”
“Shouldn’t that girl have taken your car? She had a key.”
“She stole the key! And then she stole the car.”
“Reckon you should report that to the police. Give ’em summat to do besides botherin’ innocent citizens.”
The police. Of course, the police! I rummaged through my handbag in search of my phone, but I couldn’t find it. Had the blonde girl taken that too? I screwed my eyes shut, trying to remember if I’d picked it up. Or if I’d even had it in the store at all. The last time I’d seen it, it had been sitting in that little dip in the Fiesta’s centre console, readily to hand if I needed to check my messages at a traffic light.
And it was most likely still in the exact same spot.
“My phone’s in the car,” I said hollowly. “I’ll probably never see it again.”
On the bright side, that meant I could put off speaking to Hugo for a while longer. Confessing that I’d lost his friend’s birthday gift promised to be one of the most excruciating conversations of my life, second only to asking my father to bail me out of jail when I was eighteen. With hindsight, I should have stayed there. Daddy had agreed to fix the problem on one condition—that I split up with my then-boyfriend, and doing so had broken my heart. Rowan had been the sweetest man, an artist, but my parents said he had no class and no prospects. Faced with the threat of a prison sentence for breaking into an animal testing facility, I’d panicked and sent him a Dear John letter. He’d served three months for releasing a dozen rabbits and never spoken to me again.
I figured Piers was karma’s way of kicking me in the butt.
“Here.” The homeless man reached into the pocket of his tattered jacket and drew out an old-fashioned flip phone. “Borrow this. Sorry it’s not one of them fancy things.”