“You mean, with you and Liam. Yeah, I guess. I didn’t know you and he were still an item.”

“We weren’t an item.” Jude thought of explaining, once again, the real situation but she couldn’t face it. It didn’t matter. “It’s made me think about things.”

“About Liam.”

“Yes.”

“He was a strange guy, that’s for sure. My mum used to say he had the devil in him. She thought he was a bad influence.”

“Was he?”

Benny laughed. “He was a bad influence on me, that’s for sure.”

“In what way?” Jude asked.

Benny shook his head. “It doesn’t matter now. I’m here. Things are all right.”

“He made me the executor of his will.”

“What does that mean?”

“I have to make sure that it’s carried out the way he wanted it.”

Benny smiled.

“The same old Jude,” he said. “Still running around trying to please Liam, even when he’s dead.”

Jude felt like she’d been punched. She suddenly felt the old agonies and humiliations of being a teenager. They were so vivid and pungent that she could almost smell them. She didn’t protest though. She just wanted to do what she had to do and leave.

“He left you a deck of cards.”

Benny snorted in disbelief. “That old thing. Why would he do that?”

“I’m just the messenger.”

Benny rubbed his cheek. “That makes me feel bad.”

“Why bad?”

“I lost touch with him. He tried to stay friends, he’d call me whenever he was back in the area. And he was loyal. He’d do anything for a mate.”

“But you didn’t want to see him?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“He could be scary. I can’t explain it better than that. I felt he was dangerous to be around, like literally anything could happen. He had no brakes.”

Jude made a small sound, waited.

“You do stupid stuff when you’re a kid and then you grow up and you want to put it behind you. But Liam wasn’t like that. You kind of felt that he wanted things to get out of control, life to blow up in his face. I don’t know. And then me and Yolanda got serious and I just thought, I’ve got to distance myself from all of that.”

“Did he mind?”

“I don’t know. He left me his deck of cards, didn’t he?”

“He did, yes.”

“That crash,” said Benny after a pause. “We could have all died that night.”

“I know.”

“I only remember bits of it.”

“You were pretty out of it.”

“We all were. That was it for you two, wasn’t it?”

“It would have ended anyway,” said Jude, and stood up. “I was going to university. It was always just a summer thing.”

Twenty-Six