Page 132 of Away We Go

I wince playfully. “No can do, bestie. I just spent an enormous chunk of my savings on that flight to Las Vegas.”

Her cute nose scrunches up in a way that is as familiar to me as my reflection. “Do you have just a little more room on that credit card of yours?”

I tilt my head in question.

“We’re going shopping. To buy an outfit that will have Nicky on his knees begging for you to come home.”

I smile and shake my head “Well, firstly what I know now is that I don’t need a fancy outfit to fit into Nicky’s world.”

Tanya pouts and I laugh. “But I’m happy to go shopping with you anyway.”

She links her arm through mine as we leave the café, stepping out into the bright mid-morning sunshine. “And what’s the second thing?”

I think back on the broken expression I’d left on his face back in Singapore and my heart hurts. “Secondly, that man doesn’t need to beg me for anything, remember? It’s up to me now to make this work. To make it right. To beg him to let me come home.”

Home. With Nicky. The only place I want to be.

RACE TWENTY

Las Vegas

Las Vegas Street Circuit

14–16 November

CHAPTER 26

Cherry

Twenty-two hours and thirty-four minutes after departing Melbourne, we land in Las Vegas.

At 7.00 p.m., yesterday.

The change in time zones can mess with a person’s head.

“We’re cutting it fine,” I tell Matt. We’re in the back of a taxi, crawling our way from the airport to the outskirts of the city. Once we get there, we have to manoeuvre our way to the track on foot as the entire city block is closed to traffic. Because, you know, there’s a street circuit race starting in two hours.

“I know.” He looks mildly concerned; a direct contrast to my visible panic. We can’t miss this race. It’s just too important. “We didn’t expect delays in both Melbourne and LAX.”

This is one of the many pitfalls of air travel these days. You now can never expect to land anywhere on time, and you just have to accept it as a part of life. For the price we paid for this Qantas fare, we should have been delivered to Las Vegas airport a few hours early.

But alas, this was not the case.

We inch along with the thousands of other cars making their way to the racetrack and my eyes stay glued to my Maps app. Which, at this rate, has us arriving just before lights out.

“How did you get tickets to the race without contacting Nicky?” I ask to distract myself from the fact that we’re travellingso slowly, we may as well be going backwards.

Matt’s cheeks heat and he gives me shifty eyes. “Um, I didn’t.”

I frown. “You didn’t, what?”

“Get tickets.”

For the first time in years, I’mthisclose to punching my brother in the face. Of all the stupid things…

“What do you mean, you didn’t get tickets? Being there at the track to support Nicky is the whole point of us being here.”

He shrugs and I wonder again how we are related. I’m an anxious person and Matt is so blasé, he barely has a pulse.

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