‘It’s not your fault,’ she said, her voice quiet. ‘I believed him too.’
‘I shouldn’t have let him take that red card from me.’ And that was the awful reality – they wouldn’t have come if I hadn’t slipped up that night in the parking lot.
‘Nic took it from you,’ said Millie.
‘And I let him.’ I thought of our kiss, the dark passion, the cloying sense of wrongness in it. ‘I’ve been an idiot. I feel like I’ve been waiting my whole life for something to happen to me, something to shock me into living. I couldn’t wait to fall for someone, to feel loved. But this is not what I expected. This is not what I wanted. Everything is so messed up.’
Millie was silent for a while, chewing over her words. She leant forward and knitted her hands together. ‘People rarely end up with their first love. It’s, like, this stupid fairy-tale myth that they peddle to you in Disney movies. Did you know Snow White is, like, fourteen? If I ended up marrying my fourteen-year-old crush, I’d be stuck with Tom Peterson and his stupid bobble head. You’re allowed to make mistakes.’
‘I got involved with an assassin. And I guess I never realized how messed up he was until he made me that promise and then killed Sara anyway. She was his cousin, Mil. I can’t get my head around it. How could I have been so blind?’
Millie shrugged, her eyes trained on a spot on the floor. ‘I went out with Dom. The warning signs were there for me too. But I don’t regret it, Soph. I learnt from it.’
I raised my eyebrows. ‘What did you learn?’
She huffed a sigh. ‘That I’m painfully shallow.’
Her candidness roused a small smile, a spark of amusement inside the darkness that surrounded us. ‘I wish I could tease you about that, kettle.’
‘Sorry, pot,’ she said, her smile as small as mine.
I flopped back into the couch and looked up at the flecked paint on the ceiling as I voiced the realization that had been unravelling in the pit of my stomach. ‘I don’t think I ever really knew Nic at all,’ I said quietly. ‘If I really understood him, I would never have walked out of that house and left Sara behind. I romanticized him,’ I admitted, the painful truth almost choking the words out of me. ‘And it killed her.’
Millie tugged my arm so that I looked at her. ‘They killed her. If we had tried to do more, there might have been three bodies in that lake and not one, and that’s the hard truth, Soph.’
‘Maybe.’
Millie’s tone turned low and dark. ‘And there’s something else, too.’
I could feel my face going pale, the faint prickles of nausea from earlier coming back in full force. ‘What?’
‘When I was at work earlier, I found the safe. After what you told me Jack said in Eden, I knew there had to be something to it. So I went looking for it.’
‘We’ve always had a safe.’
Millie shook her head. ‘Not that safe. A different one. A bigger one. It’s in those giant cabinets above the stove in the kitchen – you know, the ones that are really high up?’
I nodded. We never used them – they were too hard to reach.
‘I wouldn’t have noticed the actual safe except it’s hidden behind a sheet of lino inside the cupboard. It was peeling at the corners so I pulled it away. It’s massive, Soph, and old. It’s all fancy around the edges too, so you just know it’s chock full of stuff that shouldn’t be in there. I’m guessing you need a big fancy key to get in, from the look of the lock. We don’t have any like that at the diner.’
‘He probably carries it with him.’ My head felt very light all of a sudden, but I didn’t really feel surprised. Jack had said there was a safe – only a small, na?ve part of me had thought he meant the one we always used. Of course there was another one – a secret one, full of things only he knew about. ‘That’s what the Falcones are watching the diner for.’
Millie nodded. ‘I’d bet anything that whatever Jack needs is still in there. That’s what he wanted you to help him with. That’s what he’s bargained to Donata.’
‘I don’t have the key … or the desire to help him,’ I added. ‘He’s poison.’
‘Have you heard from him?’ Millie was looking at me with cautious interest now. She was a little paler than usual. Her hair was greasy. Millie’s hair was never usually greasy.
‘No.’
‘Do you think you will?’
We both knew the answer. I thought about that crimson card, about the stuff he’d yelled at me at Eden. He knew I was the one who gave their position away, but how could he have known it was an accident? ‘Yeah,’ I said, pushing my answer through a sigh. ‘He’ll be back.’
Millie’s eyes grew wide with fear. ‘What are you going to do?’