I sucked in a deep breath, felt my heart thudding inside my chest. Felt the strain of the muscle as it tried to keep up with the adrenaline coursing through the blood. Gone was my confidence. Gone was my shield. And we hadn't even made it to the Police bar yet. I leaned forward in my seat and attempted to get a handle on my emotions, vaguely aware I was squeezing both Kelly and Abi's hands a little too tightly.
The vehicle rolled to a stop on the side of the road, Eva still turned in her seat looking worried, but Nick hadn't yet spun back to watch me fall apart. He might have been seeing it all play out in the mirror, but I think he was offering what privacy he could given the closed quarters we were in.
I finally managed to catch my breath enough to talk, my voice a shadow of my usual self.
"How did you deal with it?" I asked the space in front of my feet, but everyone must have known the question was for Abi.
"I don't have an easy answer for you, Marie," she said slowly. "For me I took medication to help settle the anxiety, but it wasn't until I faced my fears that I really made any progress at all."
"But how did you face it?" I demanded.
I heard her suck in a deep breath, but for the life of me couldn't raise my eyes from the floor of the car.
"I accepted that I couldn't do it alone anymore," she said quietly. "That I didn't need to. You're not alone either. You know that, right? You and Daisy never have to face this alone ever again."
Oh, no. The first tear felt too big for my eye, I couldn't blink it back. It rolled over my lashes and splashed onto my wrist. Hot and wet and exposed. The second and third followed in quick succession and then, like floodgates opening, I lost count as they tumbled freely to the floor.
No one said anything, just a squeeze of my hand from Kelly and a soft rub of Abi's palm over my bent back. I heaved in sobbed breath after sobbed breath, until there were simply no more tears left to fall. God, I'd never felt so raw, so naked before in all my life. I'd never felt so unmasked.
I hated Rick for this. Yes, I stole the ledger, but damn it! I wouldn't have had to if he hadn't have gotten into bed with the head of a criminal ring.
Anger was a good shield I discovered. I sat up slowly, feeling the resentment for my dead husband stiffen my spine. I despised everything he became. Long before that fateful night. How does one throw away love like that so easily? I'd loved him once, but by the time we faced McLaren and his gun toting goons in the back field of his compound, that love had changed, warped into something else. A desperate attempt to save something of what we'd been.
Even if we'd escaped that night with our lives, Rick and I would never have been the same together again.
Daisy will never know. I can't let her. Even before I was aware that she was growing inside my belly, I'd lost my love for her father and had only been clinging on out of sheer stubbornness.
Tonight I was going to finish what I'd started all those fateful years ago. Tonight I was going to make sure Roan McLaren couldn't destroy another love like he did mine and Rick's.
Eva handed me a tissue between the front seats, I offered a wet smile and tidied myself up. My face was no doubt blotchy, my eyes would have been bloodshot, but my back was straight and I had a shield in place.
Tonight I would say goodbye to Richard Costello.
"Just say the word, Marie and we call this off," Nick said from the front seat.
I met his eyes in the rear view mirror, chin up, shoulders back.
"Let's do this," I said, heat coating my words. Surprisingly as effective as my once usual ice.
Nick nodded, and doors were opened as everyone climbed out of the SUV. I slipped out behind Abi, who was already within the arms of Ben. He must have escaped out of the rear door of the car to beat the rest of us. Both of their eyes were on Nick. Who had his hand up to his ear and a frown marring his forehead.
"OK, you're on," he said with a nod of his head to Ben and Abi. Seconds later we watched them saunter in the front doors of the Birdcage across the street. "Now we wait," Nick added, leaning his butt back against the car.
Eva stretched out over the hood, staring in the same direction as Nick, while Kelly adjusted her skimpy top and flattened her hands over her shapely arse. I was guessing Kelly wasn't a usual on these ASI type jobs, and the excitement of the 'mission' was competing with her excitement at being in a pub.
I flicked my glance over the orange two storey brick building of the Birdcage. It was a striking structure, clearly over a century old, with white masonry surrounding the windows and door, and in the detailed parapet along the roofline. It stood on its own, in the shadow of the Victoria Motorway Overpass, on the corner of busy Franklin and Victoria Streets. It shouted out its right to remain in a world that was constantly changing, upgrading, destroying icons of the past.