Playing God (Helford #2)

(11) Everything

After we had finished our beverages, we walked up and down La Rambla, laughing and talking and joking about things that didn’t matter, because not everything had to. Jonathon and I managed to allow our masks to drop if only for long enough to collect ourselves, but the sneak peak we got of each other, of the true ways we had changed, even though he didn’t know to be looking for idiosyncrasies, had revealed a lot about ourselves. We wandered and made jokes that made us both laugh, and we fell back into the familiar pattern of Caitie and Jonathon, back into the way it had once been, when it was easier than breathing and neither of us ever had to know my dirty little secrets.

It made me happy to see the sunshine of Jonathon’s smile again—and it had been a long time since it hurt my cheeks from smiling too much but I kept on smiling anyway. It was like Jonathon knew every time my mind wandered to dismal things, thinking back to my last mission with Helford or with Meade waiting back at the warehouse wondering why I had made this choice, because he would catch my attention again as soon as I started thinking about things that didn’t make me nearly as happy as I was in this moment, and he would make me laugh and wish I hadn’t left him so many years ago. He would crack a joke, or make a foolish move to get me to laugh, and I couldn’t possibly appreciate that more than I did right now.

I think both Jonathon and I were trying very hard to keep out minds off of the questions we knew would be asked eventually, both of us using the distraction we had at hand to make time go by before we had to level with each other. That was okay. For now.

Throughout the entire evening, I felt a million and one unanswerable questions twisting through my mind at once, all asking myself about what was happening right here and now with Jonathon. I wondered why we trusted each other so much, why we so easily opened up to one another. It was strange—unanswerable. I wondered if Jonathon considered this to be some sort of date, a night out with a new friend, exploring and showing a foreign business partner around the town of your headquarters. I couldn’t help but to wonder how we were both preparing to answer each others’ questions, ones we might have to answer even if we didn’t want to.

Already, it was like Jonathon and I understood each other. It terrified me.

I should have just turned around and ran away, or I should have just returned to the safety of the warehouse, the exact moment that we had finished our drinks. A dangerous man was missing, but I was out and having a good time in Barcelona with Jonathon while Krantz could be using this time to keep digging the hole even deeper for him to hide in.

That was the thing.

That night, I didn’t even care.

It was my night to be alive, a kind of alive that had been suffocating inside of me all of this time, and I wasn’t allowing anything to come between that. I just took the time to live, to breathe.

Nighttime was coming quickly, and that was when Jonathon and I simultaneously seemed to resign ourselves that this was the coming ending of a beautiful day. Jonathon brought up that we may want to get back to the warehouse, to start walking back to the car, and I responded by only nodding weakly. We still had a long way back.

I heard myself asking the question that had been pressing at me all evening: “What happened to your father in all of this? I’ve been led to believe that the two of you were rather close.”

Jonathon snorted inelegantly, like I had just told a preposterous joke. “I would love to know what your source is that is volunteering so much information about me so freely.”

I smiled. “A woman never tells, Mr. DuPont.”

He rolled his eyes, not replying immediately. And then he began, “My dad never liked how obsessed I was getting about the whole assassin deal after it happened. I kept trying to dig up dirt that probably didn’t want to be disturbed, trying to understand how and where it all began, because I couldn’t figure out where the order had come from and what the reason behind it was, after my family’s murder so many years ago. I couldn’t understand why they would strike again and again like that. I wanted to know the whole truth about what happened with Caitie. My father, though, he wanted me to let it die. And I couldn’t. I knew no other way of coping with the loss it felt like I was sustaining when I lost my entire world, the only life I knew, and I was obsessed with finding out. I couldn’t stop trying to mash puzzle pieces together that were never going to fit. And the harder I tried to understand, the angrier my father became.