Chapter 86

Ethan wakes on the morning of his thirtieth birthday to the sound of his phone beeping and Harvey’s voice in his ear saying: Didn’t you think we would have achieved more by the time we turned thirty?

“I’m blocking you from my brain, Harvey,” he says out loud.

The text message is from an unknown number. It’s Harvey’s sister, Lila.

Thought about sending this from Harvey’s phone but didn’t want to freak you out. Happy 30th! (Saw it in Harvey’s calendar.) I think you were his best mate. He might not have been yours. I know he could be kind of…Harvey. Anyway, here’s a Harvey kind of pic I took for your pleasure.

It’s a meaningless blurry close-up picture of a fence post. It’s so Harvey that Ethan laughs out loud and then bursts into tears, and he keeps crying while he’s showering and shaving and he thinks: For fuck’s sake, when will this be DONE ?

By the time he’s ready for work, he is fine again. That’s it, Harvey. No more, mate. I’ve got stuff to do. A life to live.

It’s a good birthday. For a Monday. He suspects he gets more gifts and attention because people know his friend died, and also because some people genuinely think he hasn’t got long to live. All the women on his team give him gifts with which to protect himself in a fight: a self-defense keychain with a “super-loud” personal alarm, a pepper spray in its own leather pouch, and something called a “multifunction stealth knife.” They are clearly all designed for women as they are in pastel colors. The women present them as joke gifts, but then explain how they work. It is sweet and also terrifying.

When he gets home, the place smells of the chili Jasmine has been cooking for the nachos, and they eat crackers and black bean dip and drink strong margaritas in big glasses with salted rims. Jasmine has, of course, holidayed in Mexico.

Her birthday gift is a cushion featuring a pencil drawing of Jason Bourne. It’s a private joke present! He therefore loves it, although he has no idea what to do with it.

Ethan allows himself to pretend, just for a moment, that they are a couple, and they talk about music and movies and wonder if their expectations for The Sopranos are impossibly high, and then she says—and it takes him a moment to be sure he didn’t just daydream her words, because they couldn’t be more perfect—“Oh! I forgot to tell you! I’ve broken up with Carter.”

It’s the best birthday gift he’s received since he got the Masters of Magic kit with four hundred and fifty magic tricks when he turned nine.

“Your face!” Jasmine laughs. “You look so happy!”

“I’m sorry,” says Ethan. “I was actually starting to kind of like him.”

“No you weren’t, Jason Bourne,” says Jasmine. “Anyway, I’m sorry. I know he was staying over here too often and leaving his stuff everywhere. I just…I don’t know what I was thinking, everyone tells me I have the worst taste in men.”

“How did he take it?” Ethan feels like he might levitate he’s so happy.

“Not great,” says Jasmine. “He’s doing that ‘you owe me closure’ thing. He wants to come over and ‘talk it through.’ I mean, I don’t have anything more to say. I’m just…not feeling it. How many more ways can I say it?”

“He doesn’t want closure, he wants to change your mind,” says Ethan. He’d want to change her mind too.

“I’ve spoken to him five times today,” says Jasmine. “I’ve tried to explain—”

“You don’t owe him an explanation,” says Ethan. “You weren’t married.”

“Right, and also I don’t really have an explanation,” says Jasmine again. “I’m finding it a bit stressful. It feels like he’s got the potential to become a bit stalkerish. God, I hate the stalkers.” She sips her margarita and says, “So, what are your views on fish?”

Ethan tries to keep up. “Like your dad’s fish? Frozen fish? For…dinner?”

“No! Yuck! Disgusting. I’d never eat my dad’s fish, sorry not sorry, Dad. No, I’m talking about aquarium therapy.”

“Going to an aquarium?” He could take her to an aquarium. He likes aquariums. Not as a date, of course.

She runs her finger around the rim of her margarita glass and sucks off the salt. “No, I’m talking about getting a fish tank in the apartment. Apparently looking at tropical fish for just a few seconds lowers your heart rate.” She shows him her phone. “Look at this guy! Isn’t he adorable? It’s a guppy. Apparently they live-birth their young! We could wake up one day and find all these tiny guppy babies have been born in the night!”

Ethan is looking at the guppy fish, imagining him and Jasmine as new parents of tiny guppy fish (Well, it’s something. Harvey laughs so hard), when her phone begins to peal the chimes of Big Ben (her choice of ring tone this week) and Carter’s face appears on the screen.

Ethan recoils. “Oh,” he says. “It’s—”

She sighs. “See? Sixth call of the day.”

“Don’t answer,” says Ethan.

“He loses his mind if I don’t.” She answers, avoiding Ethan’s eyes. “Hey, Carter.”

She listens and says, “It’s okay. I know. Don’t be sorry.”

She twists her knuckle near her eye and sticks out her bottom lip to indicate Carter is crying. Ethan can feel Carter’s pain: the shock and disbelief when you’re in love and you think the other person feels exactly the same way.

Terrible. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bloke. He sips his margarita to prevent the Schadenfreude from spreading across his face.

“Why aren’t you at poker with your friends?” Jasmine asks. She murmurs and clucks, like a mother talking to a toddler, and then she becomes careful and conciliatory like a hostage negotiator talking to the man with the gun. Ethan searches his memory. Has any woman had to do this for him following a breakup? Surely not.

Then she says, “I’m at home. I told you. I have not met someone else. I’m just at home.”

Pause.

“Yes, he’s here, he lives here, you know that.” She looks at Ethan. “Well, yes, we are having dinner together because it’s his birthday, but as I told you a million times there is nothing going on between us, and, Carter, it is perfectly normal for a man and a woman to live together and just be friends and nothing else.”

Nothing else.

Pause.

“Yeah, okay, well, you can think that if you want to think that, but it’s not true. I’ve got to go. No. That’s not why! I’m hanging up, Carter.”

She puts the phone face down on the table and dips a cracker into the black bean dip. “Carter says happy fucking birthday.”

Ethan nods his thanks. “Sounds like he’s really applying the ancient philosophy of Stoicism.”

Jasmine splutters on her cracker, and then they are both laughing and it’s maybe the best moment of Ethan’s whole life, but that’s when the apartment buzzer starts going off, over and over, over and over, like an alarm warning of something cataclysmic.

He doesn’t need to say, Is that Carter? The fear on her face is his answer.

Here we go, thinks Ethan, and it feels just like after he kicked that soccer ball and watched it arc across the sky, heading inevitably, unavoidably, toward that Year 11 kid’s big boofhead, and there was literally nothing he could do to change his terrible future.

Ethan has never enjoyed movie prequels because the ending is predetermined. All the way through the movie you know the villain is going to end up the villain. Sure, you might know his backstory now, you might feel a bit sorry for him now, but no plot twist can change his ending.

If Jasmine is in actual danger from her ex-boyfriend, tonight or at some other time, Ethan will have to put her life first. That’s what Jason Bourne would do. That’s what Ethan Chang will do.

Of course he will.

He hopes he will, because right now that buzzer sounds like a chainsaw, and he’s honestly not feeling especially brave.

Guys like us aren’t action heroes.