Page 168 of Swallow Your Sorries

I’m fine on the train. A bus. An aeroplane. A trolley. That’s how I got to Beaulieu after all, but private cars I couldn’t get over even two years later. But I had to because I’d spent the week crafting a list of the three people who owned a nineteen-forty to nineteen-forty-four Rolls Royce in dark green. It had to be a Rolls Royce with the Spirit of Ecstasy ornament.

Tall, silver, billowing, just like Elle had described. I look down at the printed photo on my lap of the car now, so sure it had to be the right make and model. From behind, it looks nearly identical to what I can remember, but it’d been a flash. A moving whirr.

“Distract me,” I breathe. “What did she say?”

“The same things she told you, but she’s hiding something.”

I gaze at her.

“We went to a liquor store last week.”

Their little pit stop had taken me by surprise. Stassi nor Aria were big drinkers and from my cyberstalking, neither was Elle. “You never did tell me why.”

“Why do you think? You wanted us to have a little girls’ night. A good bonding session. What helps someone to blab more than some liquid courage?”

“Hmm.”

“Don’t worry, your little dove was safe drinking it in the dorm. We skipped sitting at the bar, but you know who does, or who did?”

I arch a brow.

“Jarett. She kept looking around and around the aisles and not for a drink. She looked almost scared. Then the cashier obviously knew her. He kept staring, she kept looking away.”

I grip the headrest tighter. “That seems too simple. It’s a local spot. My father would have staked it out already.”

“Maybe he already has, and it’s not new information to him, at least. But I did overhear something that could be useful. Her mum calls her a few times a week and each time Elle seems to get progressively upset.”

“About the scratchers?”

Her eyes grow wide. “I knew you bugged her phone.”

“Did you also know that if you win a scratch card worth ten grand or more, you get a feature in the local newspaper?”

“I did not.”

“Jaime, Elle’s mum, went all out for the photo op. Hair, nails, professional makeup, a new outfit. The whole bit.”

“Are you bitter that she spent your money sprucing herself up?” Aria asks.

She catches on fast. It’s what I like the most about her. It’s why we’re actual friends and not default acquaintances because of Étienne.

“I wouldn’t care if she spent it on tooth gems so long as she took care of Dove first. Elle won’t let me take care of her, but she’ll let Jaime, to some extent. Even then she feels guilty. She shouldn’t. She deserves basic shit like toiletries.”

“A true humanitarian,” Aria says, cocking her head and glancing at me with feigned admiration. “But next time leave me out of your shenanigans. I looked like an idiot explaining to Elle that I’d accidentally ordered five hundred tampons instead of fifty, so she could take half.”

“She won’t take anything if she knows it’s from me. Did she? Take them?”

“About a hundred. Again, the whole guilty thing. I swear it’s ingrained in her. She hesitates to even accept a stick of gum.”

“It’s how she was raised.”

“We’re from different classes, Gant. It’s easy for us to take and not think twice about it. To not think about what sacrifices people had to make to give it to us because we’re so used to there not being sacrifices. It’s called privilege.”

“Even when it comes to necessities? Her mother got ten grand and she still can’t send them to Elle.” I can hear the bitterness Aria spoke of creeping into my voice with every word. “Elle hates Jarett, but she makes a lot of excuses for Jaime.”

“Jaime must’ve seemed like a saviour in comparison.”

“She deprived her. She subjected Elle to her abusive husband.”

---