What Jax wouldn’t repeat are all the things that came next, after he’d dragged Paul to shore and blown air into his lungs. After Micah had quit puking his guts into the bushes. After everybody had stopped flailing around and bawling. After all that, when the reality of what just happened set in and Micah said they didn’t have to go to jail. Sit tight. Act normal. Say nothing. For the rest of his miserable life, Jax would regret making that stupid pact.

Micah made them seal it with blood like they were twelve or something, slicing a gash into their palms with the sharpest rock he could find. He made them swear on the lives of everyone they ever loved and ever would love. And they were just drunk and desperate enough to agree.

Especially Jax. The driver who wasn’t.

Even after all of Micah’s revelations out there on the hill, Jax can still only call up fleeting snippets of that night with Bobby. The earthy scent of tobacco leaves. Empty bottles rolling around the floorboards. Vomit surging up his throat and nose. A baby’s cries piercing the nighttime quiet. The rest is just a big black hole in Jax’s head, an empty void of nothingness until then suddenly, everybody was screaming and there were only a few inches of air left in the car as it sank in the lake.

Micah’s dad, when they showed up dripping on his doorstep, threw one hell of a tantrum. Jax still shudders when he thinks about it, the way Chief’s cheeks turned purple as he screamed and cussed and kicked a hole in the foyer wall. The words he said, the awful names he called his own son. Worthless. Pathetic. A retard. Micah just stood there, shaking from anger or embarrassment, maybe both. But he knew better than to say the first word.

It was Chief who fetched Jax’s car from the trailer park and covered up the tire tracks leading into Pitts Cove. Who made arrangements, quick and dirty, so the case was closed before any witnesses could step forward to say the man who was about to become police chief had a murderer for a son. For twenty years Chief Hunt sat on the truth, not to protect his son but to cover his own ass.

Jax meant what he said. It was a relief to finally tell, to clear Bobby’s black stain from his conscience. Only his confession got a woman killed. Not by Jax’s hands, just like Jax isn’t technically the reason Bobby ended up at the bottom of Pitts Cove.