“Well, that was fucking stupid.” Rebel slumps back next to me, lying on his back, too. Both our feet are hanging over the edge of the roof, our chests hitching up and down like crazy. “When I say I’m gonna lift you up, you’re supposed to fucking let me,” he pants.

“I’m sorry. I just…”

“Don’t trust me.”

I let my head loll to the side so I’m looking at his profile. His lips are parted. There’s an angry crease to his forehead, his eyes narrowed up at the sky. “I’m sorry,” I say. And I mean it. He wouldn’t have let me fall, and I was being my usual stubborn self. I could have fallen and died. Rebel sits up, the back of his suit jacket wrinkled now. He lets out a deep breath, shaking his head.

“This…this is all fucking ridiculous, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you. My uncle getting murdered. My entire club moments away from being fucking arrested for a crime they actually didn’t commit. Now that’s fucking irony, right there.” He gets to his feet, carefully standing on the slightly pitched roof, and then he turns to me and holds out his hand.

“I’m sorry, too, Soph. I should never have put you in this position.” I somehow don’t think he’s referring to the fact that we’re now trapped up on a rooftop and I have no clue how I’m going to get down. I take his hand, allowing him to help me to my feet. “My uncle would wanna kick my fucking ass right now,” he says. “This would not impress him at all.” He points between us, scowling. “Come on. Be careful where you’re putting your feet. I was eighteen the last time I came up here, and I weighed a hell of a lot less.”

I gingerly follow after him, watching where he steps so I can place my feet exactly where he places his. The roof is pitched on either side as we climb upward, but once we reach the ridge, the apex where the two sides meet, I see that there’s a flattened section to the right, a cutout of the roof panel. About twelve feet long and eight feet deep, the platform has been leveled for no apparent reason that I can tell. No air conditioning unit. No access back in through the roof. It’s just there. Rebel drops down onto the platform, reaching up and turning to face me. By the look on his face, it hits him at the same time as it hits me that what he’s doing—lifting me down beside him, like a lover would—is weird.

I tuck my hair behind my ears, clearing my throat. “What is this place? What is it for?”

Rebel places his hands on my shoulders and physically pivots me, pointing me in the direction of the sunset. I feel like I can’t breathe; the sight is the most formidable, beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. It looks like the sky is on fire. “I’m guessing it’s for this,” he says, removing his hands from my shoulders. He sinks down, sitting Indian style on the platform. I do the same, not daring to take my eyes off the horizon, not wanting to miss a single second of it.

“But how did people get out here? They can’t have been climbing out of windows. I think we’ve just proven that that’s not safe.”

Rebel snorts, clearly not over the fact that I didn’t just do as I was told and let him lift me. “There used to be a small doorway.” He jerks his head back, motioning behind him.

“But not anymore?” The wall behind us is smooth brick and render, no sign of a door in sight.

“Louis had it bricked up the day I was born. My mother apparently liked to come up here.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. Oh.”

We sit in silence for a while, until there’s nothing left of the sun, sunken beyond the distant fields, leaving behind nothing but the tiniest glimmer of light. “You can go. In the morning, I’ll drive you back to town,” Rebel says abruptly.

“What? You’re just gonna let me go?”

“Yeah. Why not? Everything else is fucked. Hector and Raphael would somehow find a way out of being arrested, anyway. They’d bribe the fucking judge. Or just kill him, too. Your testimony would be pointless. And after all those people in that grocery store…” Rebel leans back on his elbows, crossing his feet at his ankles. “After all of those random people being killed because of me, I don’t particularly want your family’s blood on my hands, too. You should just catch the Greyhound back to Seattle.”

I can’t believe what I’m hearing. Somehow, it feels like this might be a trick. But then again, Rebel looks absolutely devastated. Why would he bother putting on such a convincing act, if he’s only just going to tell me he was joking in the morning? That doesn’t strike me as his style. Doesn’t strike me as the sort of head game he would play. “Do you mean it?”

“Sure. At least I’ll have a vaguely clear conscience where you’re concerned, if the five-o do come calling.”

I hug my knees up to my chin, tears stinging at my eyes. I can’t look at him. If I do, I’m gonna start sobbing and I won’t be able to stop. He’s letting me go. Tomorrow, I get to go home to my family. “Thank you, Jamie.”

He bristles at that, doesn’t like it, I can tell, but I’m thinking of what he said in the hallway before. Jamie was an honorable man. And him dropping this whole thing, setting me free like he said he would, is an honorable thing to do. Far more Jamie than Rebel.

We sit in silence for a long time, until we start to see stars peeking through the deepening blue of the night sky. “I used to bring all of my dates up here to see the stars,” he eventually says, pointing up at them. “Never brought anyone to see the sunset, though. That was always something I did alone.”