No Longer Deniable
I felt as though I were at my best friend’s funeral and that I was the one who had delivered the fatal blow.
I sat at the little table in a café overlooking the Dublin castle courtyard and waited for Charlie to bring a tray of food from the buffet line. I didn’t feel like eating, but he seemed ravenous. He’d insisted that he’d read wonderful reviews of this little café, but I didn’t recall ever hearing of it from him before this day. He set the tray in the center of our table, and then arranged the plates and espressos at each place setting.
Then he did it—that nervous snicker that told me he was being deceptive.
“If you’ll excuse me for a few minutes, Lilah, I need to check out the men’s room before we have lunch, but you go ahead.” He dropped his empty tray at the buffet line and then disappeared the way we had come.
I grimaced at the ham and cheese croissant on my plate and sat back in my straight chair. Although it smelled fantastic, my appetite was gone. I had kept my promise to Raven the best I could. I’d not told Charlie what Raven and the two blondes had found. I felt horrible that I was a part of his entrapment, but if Charlie had done nothing wrong, there was no way he’d be trapped. This was his own doing. His own lies. And that was the part that hurt the most.
I’d always thought Charlie was one of the most honest men I knew; to find out he was a common liar who told the truth selectively had been a shock to both my heart and my ego. I hadn’t realized it before, but his stories varied according to the audience, more out of his need to people-please and not have anyone mad at him for taking a particular stand. That’s how he navigated the world: by taking the middle ground and never making a decision on his own.
Raven had been right that someone in our camp was dirty, but I would have thought Emry before Charlie, or even Dru. Everything in my life had turned upside down in the course of a few days. I wasn’t sure what was real anymore, and what was illusion. Charlie had never seemed to be a player, and yet here he was involved with this woman who was, according to Nike, a known mastermind throughout Europe and Brazil.
This time it was Charlie who was being played. By a woman from Los Angeles named Barbara Ann Simmons, aka Bambi Torrelli, aka Mrs. Marco Torrelli, aka Rune O’Maney, aka a slew of other identities she’d used to filch millions of dollars from unsuspecting fools. She was the mastermind, with her husband, his brother, and the brother’s wife carrying out her orders. With each mark, she knew exactly which buttons to push. Charlie didn’t have money, but he had access to artifacts that were much desired on the antiquities black market, and The Lost Teachings of Dead Monks was considered priceless for reasons that went beyond its supposed magic. According to Nike’s psych assessment of Charlie, his fucked-up need to rescue others even if he martyred himself must have been easy pickings for a con woman like Bambi Torrelli. The greater the personal sacrifice he had to make, the greater the psychological reward.
A week ago, I would not have believed any of this. I wouldn’t have believed it a month ago, or six months ago. Since coming to work at Dru’s library, Charlie had been my mainstay, especially through hard times. I was the one who, for so long, had pushed him away, and then I’d finally been willing to trust again. And I had loved every delicious moment of being able to trust him. As much as Charlie needed to be a martyr, I needed to trust someone, someone other than Drusilla. Someone who would be a partner to me rather than a mother figure.
I needed it especially after Jakin. To know that there was a man who was trustworthy. That there was a good man out there for me and that I wasn’t destined to live a life with men who seemed to enjoy breaking my heart. I needed to know more than anything that there was a good man out there who loved me back, and thought I was worthy. And until today I had thought Charlie was that man.
I pushed my plate away and ignored the espresso as well. Charlie had been kind to stand in line and buy our lunch, but he’d been on his phone the entire time, busily tapping at the screen. I could only imagine that he was making plans with a certain redhead.
I turned over my own phone, screen up, from where I had placed it on the tabletop. It took me a few moments, but I found my app for Fourth World. I wasn’t the fan of it that Charlie was, but I had installed it on my phone several months ago, and we had occasionally talked via the messenger feature so he could have me test out some of the St. Augustine Virtual Library features. I’d removed the “world” part of the app and left just the messenger so that I didn’t risk getting addicted like Charlie had, but Illyria had reinstalled it for me. I pressed the icon on the screen and waited for it to bloom to life, welcoming me to “Fourth World, an Interactive Un-reality.”
The tall, glass door next to our table blew open, and the damp wind sent a chill through me. The light from the row of windows dimmed as a soft rain pelted against the railing of the balcony outside. I had taken off my jacket in the toasty warmth of the café, but now was too cold with the open door only a few feet away. I rose and went to the door to close it but stopped to squint over the courtyard in the misty rain.
I stepped out onto the balcony, a mostly protected area, and breathed in the beauty of it. The quiet. The architectural reminder of how many people had stood in this very courtyard with all their problems and joys. Lifetimes stretching out over the centuries just as I had felt at Tara, that sameness of the human experience spread across time. I was no different from anyone else. Even though my life had been filled with moments of terror and moments of despair, I wasn’t the only earthly inhabitant who had encountered such horrendous things.
Maybe the bad things that had happened to me as a child were considered newsworthy in this decade, and yet over the millennia, I was only one of hundreds of thousands of children who had been abducted and abused. Maybe even some of the others like me had taken on the characteristics of their abductors in order to live.
No. No, in order to survive.
From my perch on the balcony, I watched two or three people—American, probably—running to find a dry space away from the rain. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw another figure, a man in a familiar jacket walking in a slow, methodical way that I could not mistake.
Charlie!
The restrooms were inside, not across the courtyard. He stood, hands in his pockets under a trellis area, and waited. The pit of my stomach turned over. I knew exactly whom he was waiting for.
I wanted to scream at Raven, or at Nike and Illyria. I wanted to make excuses for Charlie like I made excuses for anyone in my life who had shown me any affection at all, no matter how broken they were or how fucked-up their version of love. I wanted to save him from himself, from the Torrellis, from whatever it was he had done.
Impossible though. I couldn’t even save my own self.
No matter how much I wanted to make excuses for Charlie, I had seen the evidence myself. There was no denying that he was caught up in an attempt to steal The Lost Teachings. Why ever would he choose to work with international art thieves? I knew enough of Drusilla’s past working for a crime family in Europe that the black market for art, especially when that art contained secrets that could be used as weapons of mass destruction, was a dangerous world. Surely, they had targeted him for his access to Dru’s library.
They’d never approached me. Probably because I didn’t trust anyone, and I’d willingly destroy myself rather than be coerced again.
Or let the monster inside me out.
The very fact that Charlie had stolen even unimportant, relatively inexpensive books from Dru’s library was so unlike Charlie. He had always been honest to a fault. Or at least, I had thought so. Until recently, the only time I’d ever seen him act strangely was when I asked about his former fiancée and he’d bolted from the room, only to mope around the library courtyard in the dark for the next few hours.
I couldn’t help it—I still loved him. Maybe I wasn’t as much of a monster inside as I thought. I couldn’t just turn off my feelings, even when they were mixed with pangs of betrayal. If there was any way of saving Charlie, regardless of our future together, I would do it. Mist and tears on my face, I watched Charlie under the latticework with vines hanging down, keeping him at least partially dry in the light rain.
On the other side of the courtyard, out of Charlie’s sight, a woman waited in the edge of a doorway. Long blonde hair and a tan hooded coat with black fake fur around the face. She nodded to someone out of my sight, and suddenly another woman stood in front of Charlie. Red jacket, with tufts of magenta-red hair flowing out at the collar in a glaring clash of colors. I was 99.9% positive that the shade matched the fistful of dyed hair and blonde roots I’d shoved into Charlie’s hand when he couldn’t explain himself outside of the safehouse. I hadn’t gotten a good look at my assailant’s face—or anything above her vagina. I’d seen this woman before though, on the stairs outside of the Darbyshire Memorial Scholar’s Library before an explosion had turned it into bricks and ash.
Exactly how long had Charlie been involved with her? Nike and Illyria had made me watch just to make sure I knew what I had gotten myself into and who it was I had fallen in love with. They didn’t want me to forgive him again in a moment of weakness when I was still experiencing anger as deep hurt.
As soon as Charlie had left the safehouse to go downstairs, Nike opened the laptop on the table and pointed to a moving red dot. “That’s Charlie,” she had said, her upper lip curling as though she smelled shit on the sole of her designer pump. “As long as he has the safehouse key on him, we know exactly where he is, and” —she pressed the UP key several times— “we also know what he’s saying.”
With the volume turned up and Charlie living up to an arbitrary twenty-minute timetable, we had been able to hear even his footfalls descending the wooden stairs and the murmured “Oops, excuse me” as he stepped into the flow of people on the sidewalk.
And then, the worst of all. The transmitter in the key fob not only tracked Charlie’s every movement and every word but tapped into his electronics. I had watched in utter despair as he messaged Rune and she answered. I watched her flirt in her little-girl voice, I watched her ridicule him when he didn’t recognize it, and I watched her roll her eyes at his idiot plan at the instant that Nike and Illyria and I rolled our eyes, too. I watched every second—every miserable second—of their video chat, hearing a voice that I knew so well and yet not knowing the man at all.
This was the face of the woman he’d chosen over me. Those were his own words he was speaking, not hers. And the way he disembodied me, disrespected me, disconnected me from his life by referring to me as her to please this woman. Nike and Illyria had been right that if I knew everything, I’d be pissed off, but it hadn’t quite sunk in yet. I knew it would. So had they. They were right that witnessing Charlie’s betrayal was important. I had needed to be able to make an informed decision about him that didn’t include whatever well-chosen excuses he threw at me. Otherwise, I still wouldn’t have believed it.
Now, recalling the conversation I had both watched and heard, thanks to the Historical Society’s CIA-level spying abilities, I gripped my phone even harder. Forcing myself to look away from Charlie and the woman who was believed to be Bambi Torrelli, I ran my thumb over the touch controls of the Fourth World app and instantly found Charlie’s profile. His avatar was more of a caricature of him, a librarian holding a book, something he had designed over many hours of time to resemble him. He’d adjusted the shape of his avatar’s face, color and texture of hair, eyebrows, color and shape of his eyes, depth of his winter tan thanks to Florida beaches, amount and color of facial hair, a wardrobe—tweaking all until his avatar was a slightly idealized representation of the real Charlie.
Whoever the real Charlie is.
I pressed the INFO button, and his profile showed a recent change from single to engaged. I found the controls for my own profile, and it flashed briefly onto the screen showing no changes in the last three months. Then I went back to Charlie’s profile, looked for circle of friends, and held my breath while I pressed it. I scrolled quickly through his seventy-five friends and found three of the newer ones. A blonde named Lovey, a man named Marco, and a redhaired woman by the name of Rune O’Maney. The blonde looked like the woman in the courtyard, and the other woman was familiar as well. Too familiar.
I felt sick. I grabbed the rail and lifted my face to the sky, letting the cool chill of rain lessen the heat in my face. I wiped the raindrops from the screen of my phone and pressed the INFO button on Rune O’Maney. She looked exactly like the librarian avatar that Charlie had created last autumn in honor of Jakin’s twin sister who had died from a lightning strike as a teen. Definitely not the same woman, but the avatar of Rune O’Maney had morphed from Charlie’s imagination to an alias for a real person. The INFO box showed they had been friends since early January and that she claimed California as her residence. She had one recent change: her relationship status now said she was engaged, though it didn’t identify her partner. I thumbed my phone off and shoved it into my pocket.
Charlie and the woman were talking still. I couldn’t hear, but his posture was stiff and his gestures angry. She took something small from him, then wrapped her lithe body around him in a hug that he didn’t return at first.
Charlie turned and walked slowly back toward the building. The woman walked away, glanced over her shoulder to make sure that Charlie was out of sight, and then took off in a dead run toward the woman I had noticed earlier. The blonde in his Fourth World circle of friends.
Lovey.
I pulled myself together, shook the raindrops out of my hair, and walked back inside, closing the glass door behind me. I had barely sat down when a gust of wind blew it open again. I took a single bite out of my sandwich. It took everything I had to swallow.
I was contemplating a second bite when Charlie returned and plopped down in the chair across from me. “Sorry about that.” He looked everywhere but at me. “Sorry that took so long but I, uh, I took a wrong turn somewhere.”
“I know.”
He wasn’t paying attention. “So how’s the croissant?”
I shrugged. “I’m not really that hungry.”
“Oh. I am.” Charlie wolfed down his sandwich in an unmistakable message to me that he was too busy to talk. He grunted and made a few gestures to let me know how good his meal was.
I wanted to ask him who the woman was, but I already knew. Moreover, I didn’t want to hear another lie from his mouth. How had he gotten involved with her when he and I were sharing so much time together? I wanted to ask but didn’t want to hear his excuses.
Why wasn’t I enough? I wanted to ask, but that was an answer I was afraid of, too. I didn’t want to hear how I was “just friend material” even though he and I had been just friends for six months before he’d won me over and we’d talked about sharing the future.
I wanted to ask what I could have done differently. I wanted to ask why I kept repeating the same mistake with men and what I could do to never again repeat it. I had all these questions burning inside my chest, but I swallowed them, every last one. For as much as I wanted answers, I didn’t want lies. In my gut, I already knew what vague words he would offer, and if somehow I didn’t have to hear them, then they wouldn’t be true.
I watched him eat. My breaths came heavy and tired. I wanted to curl up into a ball and sleep, or hide under the covers and sleep, or wrap up in warm blankets and sleep. If I could sleep, then I could wake, and when I woke, then maybe I would find that all this had been a nightmare. A dream about someone in the past. Ford or Jakin or even as far back as the boy in the basement.
But no matter how much I wanted it to be a dream, I knew that for the rest of my life, I would wake up knowing that this was real and the pain would return, fresh, each time as if it were the first time I’d realized I’d lost Charlie. Once again, I had mistaken an illusion for love. I wasn’t meant to have a good man in my life. I wasn’t meant to have a partner. I was meant to walk through this life alone, and that was my punishment for things I had done in my past.
Horrible things that even if God could forgive me, I will never forgive myself.
“We need to talk,” I said. Maybe it was my way of torturing myself or maybe it was my last chance to get the truth out of him. When he ignored me, I repeated myself, then I remembered everything I had overheard watching the laptop screen with Nike and Illyria. “Let’s go back to the safe house and just sit and talk.”
Charlie jerked his head up. “No!” Then more softly, “No, I mean, we should do the tourist thing, see the town. I know you like the Viking museums. Maybe there are some more libraries you’d like to see.”
He was stalling. Damn him. Protecting his partner in crime so he could give her space to steal the canvas bag full of treasure! Did I dare hope there was a possibility he was protecting me, too? He wanted me away from the safe house, but whether it was for my own safety or to make sure that Bambi Torrelli or Rune O’Maney or whatever had enough time to safely take the artifact and leave, I couldn’t tell.
Then he glanced up at me, averted his gaze just as quickly—and snickered.
In every relationship, I knew the exact moment it was over. Not by what others had told me of deceit or by being ghosted or the gnawing realization in my gut of something wrong, but by a single moment when the man had looked at me a certain way, and I’d known, just known. With Charlie, it was that moment when he lied to me and snickered without realizing it. Not that he saw anything funny about it. He seemed unaware of the involuntary but nervous noise he made in his throat. That snicker was the lie announcing itself. With every failed relationship that had telegraphed its end, I’d known in my heart even if I hadn’t admitted it to myself yet. Charlie’s tell was no longer deniable.
I knew now what he had given to the woman: the key to the safe house. Exactly as Raven had said would happen when I’d spoken with him earlier. Somewhere in another safe house not too far away, Nike and Illyria were probably hunched over their laptop, following the woman and her tracker back to the safe house above the pub. I checked my phone for the second time since Charlie had returned. It was already past noon, but I knew it would be best if we gave the woman at least a couple of hours to steal something that wasn’t quite what she thought it was.
In any case, I knew that I wouldn’t be going back to the safe house and that it would be abandoned in favor of a different rental in Dublin. Nike and Illyria would take my belongings from the hotel room and transfer them to another safe house for pickup later. I would head across Ireland tonight to meet someone—I didn’t know who—tomorrow at the Cliffs of Moher. Raven would spend this evening in deep meditation, authenticating The Lost Teachings of Dead Monks and at the same time guarding against its magic. I hoped I’d see him again there and that he’d be part of the handoff, but I knew better than to get my hopes up about anything.
My plane ticket back to the States had already been changed, and I would be leaving late in the day on Saturday, new temporary identity tucked into my plastic passport cover. Within fifteen hours of returning to Dublin from the Cliffs of Moher, I’d be back at Orlando’s international airport. After that, it would be a few hours’ ride back to Florida University where Dru would meet me and take The Lost Teachings off my hands, only to stash the artifact away deep inside one of the SCIFs of the library. Then and only then would I let myself fall apart, but for now my jaw hurt from clenching so hard.
Charlie finished the last bite of his sandwich and looked like he was going to throw up. His gaze started nervously around the room almost as if he expected to see someone he knew. Or maybe to see law enforcement storming in to drag him out.
“Okay, I think I know where I want to go.” I forced a smile with the words, but he didn’t look up to see it.
I was testing him now. I could barely contain the anger rising inside me. It wasn’t purely hurt I was feeling now, though the hurt still burned in my chest. I couldn’t let him see it. Not yet. I couldn’t tip him off, but in my head, words kept forming.
Traitor. Liar. Thief.
“Let’s stop by the Chester Beatty Library. Okay, Charlie? I could spend probably three or four hours there. I want to check out the papyrus fragments like Dru suggested.”
Underneath the table, I wrung my hands. I waited for what I knew was coming next. I could feel it in his energy, and I already knew it from the eavesdropped discussion outside the safe house.
“Nah, let’s go see St. Patrick’s Cathedral first.”
I could barely breathe. I couldn’t stand to see how his lies were unfolding, how gullible he thought I was.
“Why St. Patrick’s first?” I asked, giving him every opportunity to tell the truth.
He didn’t look at me but shrugged instead. “I don’t know. I think there’s more to see at the cathedral. More, um, history.”
Yeah. That and the woman who needs to return the safe house key.
I caught myself shaking my head and stopped. Charlie had slept with her. I was sure of it now. I knew the scent of Charlie’s body after sex, and the woman who’d attacked me had reeked of him. I didn’t even realize it until now. I wondered if he knew what I did now, that Marco Torrelli was not her brother but her husband. And that Marco was dead, thanks to the boobytrap at the Scholar’s Library. Between Charlie and me, I wasn’t the only fool.
Somehow, I would catch the two of them together while Charlie was pretending again to be lost or delayed, when the woman tried to return the safe house key to him. Charlie wouldn’t be able to hide it anymore and the truth would come out. Just as the truth always comes out, but I didn’t say any of that.
Instead I said, “Sure, Charlie. I would love to see St. Patrick’s Cathedral now. We can spend the rest of the day drooling over papyri.”
He seemed both relieved and in a hurry, as if he couldn’t leave the café quickly enough. We walked in silence all the way to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, waited in line at the door, paid the entrance fee, and walked inside. Our eyes adjusted to the dimmer light. Other people meandered around the huge interior looking at gravestones, engravings, Celtic jewelry in the little shop, and sitting in pews closer to the altar area. I heard Japanese behind me, Italian to my left, another language I surprisingly didn’t recognize to my right. I stared up at the stone archways, my favorite feature of these Gothic cathedrals, and when I’d had my fill of those, I stared for a while longer at the stained-glass windows.
Charlie said nothing but scanned every corner visible in the cathedral. He was by my side but a million miles away.
He stopped on the outer corner of the gift shop and slowly twirled one of the display cases of jewelry. To anyone else he would have seemed extraordinarily drawn to a silver and gold Celtic cross, but as an empath, I knew better. His energetic walls were thick and high. Whatever was going on with him, he didn’t want me to see. Still, frustration and confusion roiled inside of him, and just a little bit of sorrow. The grandest emotion I sensed from him though was desperation.
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