Chapter 29
Zoltán
No matter what I drank, I couldn’t shift the taste of chemicals.
The last few days had escaped me. I did as I was told, opened my mouth, swallowed, stepped in the machine, took a deep breath, looked left, looked right, stayed still.
My only focus was my phone.
I’d taken lemon juice to burn away the nasty tang on my tongue. It didn’t work.
My mouth was dry; no matter what I did, I wanted to tear it out. Slather it in bleach.
Whiskey might help.
The bar in my living room was enticing, but I knew the second I poured a drink and smelt those honey fumes, I’d chase one drink with another until there was nothing left.
And I had to be sober for when Fia called.
Mum thanked the nurse at my front door, waved her off, and shoved it closed with a roll of her hip. “At least it’s just the two of us now.”
A nurse. What had she been doing here? I pressed the crease of my elbow and felt a dull ache from the cannula I was all too familiar with.
I’d had my drip today?
I nodded, taking another sip of my fizzy drink. I’d had my drip today.
A silence fell that even the dogs respected.
Just the two of us.
Imre wasn’t coming.
She smiled weakly and came to me with open arms. They wrapped around my middle as I kept sipping, feeling my phone in the pocket of my shorts. Still there. Still on loud.
“Test results will be with us in three days,” she said. “I’ve expedited the blood tests and anything else money can buy. If there were any really concerning results, we’d already know.”
“So, I’m not dying,” I grumbled and placed my glass down on the kitchen side, wriggling out of her hold. I wasn’t truly seeing. My body — for all its flaws — knew my home so well it worked on autopilot.
“No, my darling, of course not!” Her voice rose three octaves, shrill with well-placed worry.
Because I didn’t exactly feel alive.
“I’d like to think he’d tell me if that were the case.”
“He would have,” Mum said, her sympathetic voice sharpening. It could be with anger at Benedek or me. I didn’t care.
“It’s just — something’s missing. I —he… there’s something we don’t understand.”
There she went again, being Mum.
The reality of the situation was all too clear. My brother wasn’t ready for us to lose our family name. So, instead, he risked it — as well as my life.
The dogs went on alert, ears perked, bodies tense, then Vincent let out a little puppy howl as Brodrick barked.
My phone chimed.
I scrambled to pull it out, only to see a notification from the doorbell.
The crack of a knock.
More doctors. Joy.
Another notification. Not Fia. Just a bird congratulating me on my hourly English lessons.
If Fia wouldn’t listen to my apology, maybe she would read it.
“Aw, bless her, she had so much to carry,” Mum sighed. “I did offer to help—”
She opened the door with a smile that froze when she saw who stood there.
“Hello,” a female voice said awkwardly. Tone and enunciation. “Zoltán?”
And, peeping round the door frame, was Everly Bacque.
I’d seen her on and off in the last seven years since I raced. I’d never paid any attention to her petite frame, her long, dark hair, or her judgmental brown eyes. I’d been afraid of her over the last few months — because she hated me — but right now, she was my lifeline.
A connection.
Hope.
I gripped my phone tighter, each step towards her landing quietly. “Fia? With you?”
She shook her head with a frown. “No. Course not.”
“She ok?”
Her syllable was full of poison. “No.”
She gestured at the threshold, and Mum stepped back. “Please, come in.”
Everly did. Fia and her weren’t related biologically, but they were similar in their demeanour at times. I’d never seen Everly so small — she was just over five feet — but her confidence in my house had diminished.
Her eyes looked around, the rest of her body still.
My home had looked better. Mum tried to keep on top of things, but she was often on the phone, trying to find me a new manager and lawyer. My publicist, Derek, was staying in one of the spare rooms, but he kept quiet, I assumed, doing his job.
“I’m here to collect Fia’s things,” she said, her pronunciation robotic.
Mum gave me a weak smile, closing the door.
“You speak Hungarian?”
She blinked at me. I repeated my question in English.
“No. Fia taught me some phrases. Including ‘hello’ and ‘fuck you.’” A smile flickered across her face, but it didn’t reach her eyes.
That sounded like my Fia.
The smile worried me, though. Everly was normally headstrong, dramatic, but mostly chipper. And she was protective as hell over her sister.
“As I said, hopefully correctly, I’m here to collect Fia’s things.”
The first time she’d said it, it hadn’t landed. I was too taken aback by the language.
“Why?”
Her eyes narrowed. “Because they’re hers?”
“She no—she—Fia—” Fuck sake! I swallowed the lump in my throat. I just wanted to get a message to her.
“She isn’t coming back,” Everly said firmly. “Not this time, Zoltán. Frankly, you’ve ruined her life.”
Frank? My head snapped. Frank—a man? Ruined her life? Or saved her from me ruining her life? The image appeared before I could shake it. A tall man for Fia to rest her shoulder on. A man to care for her when I couldn’t.
A man who wouldn’t have been capable of letting this happen to her.
I gripped the table hard.
We weren’t moving on from each other. We were going to move through this together.
“No,” I breathed and clutched the hallway table. “No.”
“Zoltán’s life ruined, too,” Mum snapped. “Not only hers.”
Everly raised her hands. “You don’t get to talk about ruined lives while you stood by and let it happen. You’re not sympathetic here. You’re complicit.”
I didn’t know what those words meant. I only knew her tone was angry, and her little fists might look fragile, but they were weapons.
The story of Everly punching a guy at MotoBike was legendary.
Do not mess with the Bacques. I’d been warned of that far too many times when people knew I was joining StormSprint. Imre had scoffed at it, telling me that they were too high on their horses.
“Maybe if you said sorry—”
“I try!” I shouted. “I try many times. Over and over.” I lifted my phone. “Silence.”
I was yet to cry, but my voice broke, and my eyes itched, the room blurring. But my feet were stable on the ground. The room wasn’t spinning.
“She doesn’t care what you have to say,” Everly sighed, inching towards the stairs. “You can’t change that.”
“Please,” I begged, following her.
“I’m here to collect Fia’s things,” she said, turning her back on me and walking up.
The words were in the same rehearsed, robotic tone. She didn’t need any other words. This was all she had in Hungarian — all she needed.
“Please no.” I took her hand to try and tug her back.
She span, snatching herself out of my grip.
“Do not touch me. Luca is in the car just outside. There would be hell to pay if he knew.” She came down a step so that she was face-to-face with me.
“You have done this. All my sister ever wanted, she had. And you snatched it away because you wanted… What did you want, Zoltán? How did you envision this going down? Horribly? Privately?” She stood straight, anger in the flare of her nostrils. “The only way I see is irreparably.”
Everly thought she knew Fia best. Once, she did.
Maybe I was delusional.
But this was reparable. It had to be.
“Everly—”
“I’m here to collect Fia’s things,” she snapped. “Now show me before I call Luca in.”
Luca and I raced together. He’d probably come in with a big grin, slap me on the back, call me a dickhead, and gather her things with or without my agreement.
I overtook her on the stairs and went straight into mine and Fia’s bedroom.
“Please — no tell her—”
But, with how small she was, she looked under my arm at the state I’d let it get in.
I knew what was behind me without turning. There was a sliver of space on Fia’s side of the bed where I would lie on my side to sleep. The rest was paper. On the side. The duvet. The rocking chair. The floor.
Shame crept into my shoulders, and they tightened. Fia would be ashamed.
She found my cleanliness attractive.
She would find the current me repulsive.
“Wow,” Everly breathed and straightened, raising her brows. “Looking for the truth amongst your lies?”
“Looking truth, yes.”
The words came out wrong — I always second-guessed myself — but they were all I had now. And she had to understand. She had to see. She had to.
English had too many words. And they were always the wrong ones.
Her expression stalled, her eye twitched, and she pulled down the handle of the suitcase.
I stepped back, sighed, and gestured to the room. “Fia’s drawer.”
She tiptoed over one of the notepads and opened the bedside drawer before opening the suitcase on the tiny space on the bed.
She emptied everything without paying much attention.
When she closed the drawer and looked around for anything else, I reached around her to the photo frame of Fia and me with Vincent after she’d taught him to roll over. We were grinning.
I’d spent the last four nights falling asleep staring at it, cursing myself for ruining everything.
I inched it towards the suitcase, but Everly stopped me with a hand that covered Fia’s beautiful face. “No, Zoltán.”
“Please.”
“She doesn’t want to see you. In person or in a photo.”
I sat beside the suitcase, clutching the frame tight, staring down at her smile. I didn’t have much left to give, but I would give her my all. Everything.
Everly moved around the room, her boots trying to avoid my mess. She emptied Fia’s side of the wardrobe, took the shampoo and toiletries from the bathroom, and then the silk dressing gown I’d cried into last night.
Would my tears still be there when she pulled it, crumpled, out of the suitcase?
What I wouldn’t give to see her smile like the photo again.
My finger stopped brushing across her cheeks when the violent sound of the zip sounded beside me. Everly tried to lift the suitcase to the ground, but I waved a hand and offered to do it for her.
She stood there, stared at the case, then up at me. “Are you…” She sighed. “Are you okay?”
Her eyes had softened from the blazing anger in them five minutes ago. Maybe she would listen.
“Is she?”
Everly avoided my gaze.
“Your health.” She spun one of the many rings around her fingers. “Are you okay?”
“Not dying,” I said with a shrug. Feels like it though.
“Fia?” I asked. “She okay?”
I lifted the sleeves of my jumper and gestured at my forearms, where the red marks had been on her.
Fia’s sister — Fia’s favourite person in the world — swallowed, nodded, and finally looked me in the eyes. “I’ve never seen her — I’ve never seen anyone…” Her breath stuttered, and her voice broke. “She’s heartbroken, Zoltán.”
It wasn’t a comfort. My lip trembled, eyes stinging. The pain flared in my chest, a burn that seemed endless.
“But she hasn’t done that again. I think it was the shock.”
I hugged her, hard and fast, squeezing her because that was the only good news I’d get. If I caused her that pain… if it was my fault…
She hugged me back, sniffing, and when she eventually pulled away, we were both fighting tears.
Everly laughed awkwardly once, a strangled sound from the sob she kept silent. “Look after yourself, Zoltán.”
I dragged the suitcase off the bed to carry for her, and a piece of paper came flying to cover her black cowgirl boots.
She picked it up with both hands, stopped, and then held it tight to read.
“Fuck,” she whispered, eyes flitting from the paper to me and back. Her hands shook. “You really didn’t know, did you?”
I peered over her shoulder at the lines.
It was from a moment of clarity yesterday when I tried to practice my English writing. If Fia wouldn’t pick up the phone, I was going to write to her.
Letter (English)
Learn sorry good
Doctor money
English learner
Ask doctor - how bad?
Make will - Fia, dogs, Mum
Worse - record for Fia
The paper swayed in the air back down to the floor, slowly, gently.
Everly was looking through the other papers. Medical records. Bills. Emails from my brother.
“You didn’t know. You didn’t—” She went to speak, stopped, and her eyes filled with tears. “I’ve thought… I thought you used her. I thought you didn’t care if you hurt Luca.”
I shook my head. “No. I wouldn’t.” I couldn’t have done that.
She tried to calm herself with a shaky breath through pursed lips. “Okay. Okay.”
“You… believe me?”
Her hands still trembled on my shoulder. “I’m so sorry. This is… wow. I can’t even imagine.” She blinked multiple times, staring down at the suitcase. “Give me your phone.”
I handed it to her unlocked, and she started talking as quickly as her sister did when she was hungry.
“This only changes certain things.” She steadied herself with a breath, eyes hardening again.
“Whether you knew this or not, you still risked her career and… I will tell her what I think if she asks. If she doesn’t, I don’t.
All I know is you didn’t know the extent of your injuries and I…
I can’t risk her heart, her hopes, telling her something I don’t know to be fact.
She’s broken.” She handed my phone back.
“So prove it’s a fact, Zoltán. Prove it. ”