I stand up and walk towards her because my days of waiting for more are over. If I want more, I need to go and get it, demand it, take hold of it with all my might, and do the best I can with it. I put my arms around her and hold her tight and for once there is nothing between us. I’m holding one of only two people left in the world who share my blood: my father’s sister, who one night sat in the same spot for four hours just to protect her brother from a sight that would have killed his spirit.

“Is my mum here?” I ask quietly when she lets go.

“At the hospice. We can drive to Sydney tomorrow.”

I shake my head. “Hannah,” I say, “I think my father would want her to come home. To the house by the river.”

She nods. For once I get to make the decisions. “So where are our little tunnel rats?” she asks over my head, looking at Jude.

He takes her hand and draws her to his side. They don’t say anything as they walk with me, but I’ve been here before, so I know that words aren’t needed. I remember love. These two people taught it to me and when I see Hannah lean over and kiss Jessa’s sleeping head, I know that for the rest of my life, no matter what, Hannah and Jude are going to be there. Like they always have been. And tomorrow I’ll need them more than ever.

When my mother returns home for the last time to the Jellicoe Road.

Chapter 26

Aftermath. Everyone uses it all the time so I get very used to the word. In the aftermath we face the reality that the downstairs area of Lachlan is gutted. No photos, no posters, no fish, no clothing, no books, no diaries. Everything’s gone. In the aftermath, when the walls of my world are blackened and the taste in my mouth is of ash, my mother is due to re-enter my life for what will be the last couple of weeks of hers. In the aftermath Jonah Griggs prepares to leave and I have to take it on good faith and a great gut feeling that we will see each other, maybe for the rest of our lives. In the aftermath I finally accept that my father is dead and that the legacy left behind by the person who killed him is a thirteen-year-old kid who clutches my arm as we look at the space around us and whispers, “I knew you’d come and get me, Taylor. I told Chloe P., ‘Don’t worry, Taylor will find us.’”

I hear Mr. Palmer tell Hannah that it was an electrical fault. Five arsonists in one school and it ends up being something so technically boring. They promise us that the dorm and kitchen will be complete by the time we return from the Christmas holidays in a couple of months’ time and I miss the girls already. I miss everything in my world already.

We spend Griggs’s last day at Hannah’s house with Santangelo and Raffy. It’s the first time he meets Hannah, apart from when we were fourteen, and the mood is cool and almost hostile.

“You seem to have a problem with me,” he says in typical Griggs fashion.

I can tell he regrets saying it when he is treated to one of Hannah’s long cold gazes.

“I think it will be a while before I forgive the trip to Sydney,” she says flatly.

“Fair enough. I think it will be a while before I forgive you for what you put her through over the past six weeks.”

I watch them both and for the first time it occurs to me that I’m no longer flying solo and that I have no intention of pretending that I am. I have an aunt and I have a Griggs and this is what it’s like to have connections with people.

“Do you know what?” I ask both of them. “If you don’t build a bridge and get over it, I’ll never forgive either of you.”

From the verandah I watch Griggs inside, through the window, chatting to Raffy and Santangelo.

I can feel Hannah’s gaze on me and I ignore it for as long as I can.

“I know what you’re thinking,” I say.

She doesn’t speak.

“Say something,” I say, wanting to take every bad feeling I have out on Hannah because she’s so convenient.

“What do you want me to say?” she asks with that ever-patient voice of hers.

“What you’re thinking.”

“Okay. Why does it have to be so intense between you two?” she asks.

“Because I have an aunt named Narnie and a mother named Tate,” I snap, and I want to stop myself from being like this but I can’t. I’m too sad. I look at her and I can feel tears in my eyes. “Do you think I don’t want him to be gone more than you do? I do. Because I need to know that I can still breathe properly when he’s not around. If something happens to him, I have to know that I won’t fall apart like Tate did without Webb. Even you and Jude. It’s not just my father or Fitz or even Tate you’ve missed all this time. It’s Jude not being in your life.”

“Jude is in my life, Taylor.”

“Then why aren’t you together?”

“He’s a soldier, Taylor,” she says tiredly. “He goes where they send him. East Timor. Solomon Islands. Iraq. Wherever they need to keep the peace. Why is it that we always have to fight?”

“We’re not fighting, Hannah. I just don’t want to hold back anymore and I don’t want you to, either. I’m your only living relative and one day I’m going to have to visit you in a nursing home and spoon-feed you custard and jelly, so I think I’m entitled to know what makes you tick.”

She stares at me and I get this feeling of love because I know her history now and understand how it has made her the way she is at times.

“What makes me tick? Tate. Jessa. You. Jude.”

“When you look at him, he thinks you’re thinking that you’d rather he was Webb or Fitz or Tate. Did you know that?”

“He knows how much he means to me. He wouldn’t think that.”

“He told me. I asked him why you weren’t together and he said you’ll always be together but that’s bullshit. I’ve worked it out and I’m presuming that you were a couple until I was seven, but in the past ten years you’ve been apart and the only time you see each other is when it has to do with me. You wrote the book on all of this, Hannah. Did you never notice that he always felt left out? It’s like he wanted to be in that accident or he wanted to be crazy like Fitz. Like being Jude Scanlon wasn’t good enough for any of you.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Why won’t you marry him?”

“Because he hasn’t asked me. Maybe it was never meant to be that type of relationship. Maybe it was because we survived. The bond—”

“Hannah, Jude and you don’t have a bond because you’re the only survivors. Jude and you have a problem because you’re the survivors. It’s like you can’t forgive each other. How come you can forgive Tate for what she did and Webb for dying? And Fitz! How come you can forgive him? He killed your brother! He shot him out of a tree! You can forgive all of them but you can’t forgive you and Jude for living.”

Hannah looks stunned. “What do you want me to say? That if he asked me to marry him, I’d say yes? Okay. Yes. But grief makes a monster out of us sometimes, Taylor, and sometimes you say and do things to the people you love that you can’t forgive yourself for.”

But I won’t let it go. “I’d forgive myself. To be with Jonah I’d do anything.”

Jude pulls up at the same time that Griggs comes out of the house.

“I’ve got to go,” Griggs says from the door. Hannah turns and I notice that she’s more fragile than I’ve ever seen her. She’s nursed a drug addict for the past six weeks and I can tell by her gauntness that it hasn’t been good for her. What went down between her and Tate, I wonder? Was Tate forever envious of the bond between Webb and Narnie? Is that why she wouldn’t let Hannah mother me all those years?

“Have a safe trip, Jonah,” Hannah says quietly.

“Thank you.”

He waits for me. “I’ll catch up,” I tell him as Raffy and Santangelo walk towards Jude, shaking his hand goodbye.

The plan is that Jude drives down with the Cadets and returns tomorrow with my mother. It’s what he always seems to be doing—saving us from ourselves. I remember the saints from Raffy’s books in year seven. St. Jude was the patron saint of the impossible—lost and desperate causes. I think he hit the jackpot in that department when he met the Markhams and Schroeders.