Already Gone by Jaye Ford

Author:Jaye Ford
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-645-36790-4
Publisher: Jaye Ford

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Jax woke with a thought. A clear, concise phrase that disappeared in the first moment of consciousness. She kept still in the darkness of the bedroom as though it might creep back out if she didn’t make any sudden moves.

Nick. Not a just phrase but Nick’s phrase. Something he used to say. Or said once in a way that stuck. The way he could make a statement that summed up the thing that needed to be summed.

Exhaling the breath she’d been holding, she rolled over, stared at the space he used to occupy in the bed, the tone of his voice still in her head. Familiar, intimate, achingly sad.

Dominoes. A conversation about dominoes. Had they ever played dominoes? She closed her eyes, and he was there again. A fleeting image of Nick looking back at her.

Fate’s dominoes, Jax.

She held on to the memory for as long as she could, savouring the second or two of having him back before it was only the words that were left. She blinked at his space on the bed, sifting back through their life. She remembered the phrase, not the conversation. Not right away.

It was before Zoe was born, a long time before Jax was pregnant. His first death threat. Well, the first sent to their home. It’d been old-school intimidation, sent in the mail. Posted, not hand-delivered. That time, it’d been an investigation into the meat industry, and she’d imagined butcher’s knives and big hooks with dead animals.

It meant he was getting close, he’d told her. That he’d asked enough of the right questions to make the dominoes shaky. The energy was changing, and they were about to start falling. Fate’s dominoes, he’d called them.

He’d used the phrase at other times. Once there’d been a sudden flood of information, another time a whistleblower had turned up at their door. Last year, a government minister—Nick’s contact in a sensitive and long-running investigation—had very publicly lost his temper. It had nothing to do with Nick’s research, but he’d watched the media reports and said, Fate’s dominoes are starting to fall.

Was that what happened when he was run down? What questions had he been asking? What or who had been in Irene’s street?

Jax rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling as the nightly round of questions gathered in her head. What had Nick been working on? Why was he there? Had she upset Irene?

She turned her head, eyed Nick’s pillow again. It wasn’t Irene she’d upset. Her son wasn’t happy. Don Skelly had a problem with her. Dr Allenger had been furious.

The younger doctor knew something. He was worried she was writing a story, he hadn’t questioned the death at the hospital, he’d started shouting when Jax said his father was the anaesthetist. Leave my father out of that mess. It’s got nothing to do with you.

What mess? What had nothing to do with her? What was he worried would come out?

Three confrontations. Three men telling her to back off. Was it

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