Dropping Like Spies - A Gallagher Girls Story

Chapter Twenty-One

I wish I had taken more time to notice Romania.

I wish I had noticed the garden of golden leaves climbing up the mountains.  I wish I would have paid closer attention to the castles in the distance, each one carved from the earth itself.  If I had been looking, I might have seen how the moon seemed so much bigger in this part of the world or how the grass rolled over the hills, toasted from the long, summer months and ready for winter to spare it from its agony.

All my life I had been told to notice things, but no one has ever told me which things I’m supposed to notice.  Maybe that’s one of those things that I’m supposed to figure out on my own.

The bridge was crowded, packed from end to end with diplomats in sparkling dresses, school groups in sweatpants, and everyone in between.  I realized straight away that Matt had picked the place.  It was perfect for blending in.

Matt.  Matt wasn’t at the bridge yet.  My heart drilled into my stomach.  “How’s it going, Camo?” I asked my comms.  He didn’t answer, which only made more nervous.  Silent comms were like silent phones.  There was no telling what state the person on the other side was in. 

When a pair of girls walked past me, holding their hoop skirts above stone, I found Collins, leaning up against the wrought iron railing that twisted and turned against the warmth of the streetlight.  The people around him were all bursting with life, buzzing and bustling over that bridge with the distinct gleam of romance and tourism in their eyes.  Some people held hands.  Others laughed into the night.  But Collins didn’t do any of that.

He was looking down, fiddling with a jagged pebble.  He turned it, top to bottom, bottom to top, sideways, under, upside-down, and in every other direction you can think of.  He wasn’t quite examining it, but rather, looking past it.  As if he just needed to feel something against his fingertips.  As if he just needed to feel something.

I didn’t know what Collins was thinking about, but I did know what he was feeling.  The absence.  The emptiness.  For a moment I had to wonder what he had lost, but then I remembered that I wasn’t supposed to care.

I took careful, quiet steps across the bridge sliding past determined dignitaries and tired teens until I was just behind my partner.  There was something immensely satisfying about the idea of pulling a fast one on Luke Collins, so I took a breath in, ready to watch him jump as I appeared out of nowhere, but I was disappointed.

“It happens all the time, doesn’t it?” he said before I could let out a sound.  He wasn’t even looking my way as he said it, still looking past that pebble in his fingertips.

“How did you know I was there?”

“Your freakouts,” he said, picking his head up to stare at the star-stained sky—that’s what they were here.  Stains.  Not just a few bright dots here and there, but rather a tie-dyed force of nature.  Greens and purples swirling across the sky and making magic.  Like looking up from the bottom of a witch’s cauldron.  “How many times has that happened to you?”

I shrugged, goose bumps pricking at my skin.  “That was the first time,” I told him, but I knew it wasn’t the truth.  The freakouts weren’t something that I could forget—stealing my breath away.  Stealing my entire being.  This wasn’t the first time, I knew.  The first time was when they told me my mother was dead.

Even in the dimness of the streets, I could still see that cocky half-smile.  “Podul Minciunilor.”

“Excuse me?”

“Podul Minciunilor,” he said again.  “That’s what they call the bridge we’re standing on right now.  It’s Romanian for Liars’ Bridge—longest standing bridge in the country.”  He let his hands glide across the cool railing, looking the way an archaeologist might after discovering a long lost jewel.  “Local legend says that merchants used to be thrown from this very spot if deemed immoral by the townsfolk.”