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It would have killed me. It would have poisoned my soul.
For all the guilt and horror I feel at what happened to Mrs. Duncan, still one thing is certain: I need Zoe. I fucking need her. I’m no good without her.
Zoe brings out the best in me. She makes me smarter, stronger, more determined. And most of all, she holds back that dark and reckless part of me.
She’s my rudder, my guide.
I can’t fly without her, or I’ll crash and burn, I know it.
And I fucking love her. That’s the most important part of all. I like her, I love her, I admire her, I adore her. I’m not abandoning her to Rocco’s torment. She doesn’t deserve that. I don’t care what it costs to save her, or what I have to risk.
It wasn’t a mistake to oppose Rocco. My mistake was letting this go on too long.
I need to end it. Now.
So when Zoe leaves my room, I wait less than a minute before getting to work.
No more planning. It’s time to act.
The first thing I do is call Ozzy.
I don’t expect him to pick up first try, but to my surprise, he answers almost immediately.
“If it’s another apology, I don’t want to hear it,” he says. “I’m fucking drowning in guilt, I can’t handle you wallowing in it, too.”
“How are you?” I ask him. “How’s your dad?”
“He’s a fuckin’ mess. Wants to kill the Chancellor. My uncles had to tie him down. Literally.”
“He didn’t know . . .”
“No. My mom got the letter from the school. Hid it from him. He didn’t even know she had left Tasmania until . . . well. We don’t need to talk about that. Suffice it to say we’re in a fuckin’ state. But surviving.”
“I am so, so sorry, Ozzy.”
He takes a long breath with a catch in the middle.
“I know, mate. I know you are. I’m sorry, you’re sorry. We got ourselves in a mess together, but it was me that grabbed the knife. So just fuckin’ save it. I can’t think about should’ves and would’ves or I’m gonna drive myself insane. She didn’t want that.”
His voice is fully cracking now.
I never met Mrs. Duncan. Ozzy came to visit me in Chicago, and we’d planned that I’d come out to Tasmania this summer or next. But that won’t happen now.
I never even spoke to her. Yet I feel I knew her all the same, because Ozzy talked about his parents all the time.
I knew that Mr. Duncan ran an illegal mining operation, as well as trafficking black market metals and stones. He was from criminal stock tracing back to the days when Tasmania was Van Diemen’s Land, and before that, to the professional cracksmen of London.
Mrs. Duncan was the governor’s daughter. She sang in the church choir. She wasn’t supposed to walk down the same hallway as Mr. Duncan, when they were teenagers attending the same secondary school.
They fell in love anyway.
Ozzy was the result.
They married young and stayed together, happily by all Ozzy’s accounts.
He said his mom was funny and playful. That she dragged Ozzy and his dad along to church, but she also loved dice games and shooting. She was shit with technology but she bought Ozzy his first gaming rig.
I know all these things, so I know this was a good woman who died. I know what Ozzy and his father have lost.
