Page 35 of The Pretender

“Nothing.” He shook his head as he stood up and poked the fire.

Right now would be the right time to let the topic drop. She knew that. His comments hinted at something deep and difficult, but she couldn’t walk away. If that were possible she’d be back in the guesthouse and not sitting next to him right now.

That was the point. From the very beginning, something about him pulled her in. Two people who skirted the truth. Two lost souls. Two people with secrets that threatened to split them open. Whatever bound them together attracted and scared her, and it wasn’t going away. Not yet.

She continued to watch him stir the embers and send puffs of red sparks flying into the air. “You started this, Harris.”

“What I said isn’t relevant.”

She’d used lines like that her entire adult life. She recognized the trick. “If you want forgiveness, earn it.”

He turned around with his back lit by the fire. He hesitated, holding the stick but not moving. Then he blew out a long breath. She could visibly see his chest rise and fall as he pitched the stick to the side.

“She had this secret life.” He dropped down next to her with one arm stretched on top of the back of the bench behind her. “She did the carpool and ran forgotten projects to school.”

“Sounds like normal stuff.”

“Yeah, my dad and I thought she went to work every day. In a way I guess she did. It’s just that instead of going into the doctor’s office and being a receptionist as she said...” He stopped as if it hurt to say the words. “She stole things.”

“Excuse me?”

“For most of my life it was small stuff, not that I knew that at the time.” He sighed. “I found out many years later—everyone did—about the money missing back when she had a part-time job at the preschool. She was let go and no one said anything. Then it was the money from my soccer club. Then things went missing from friends’ and relatives’ houses. Then a jewelry store. Then another, all without getting caught. The police only discovered the pattern later.”

Gabby figured it had to be a cry for help or something similar. “So, she’s a kleptomaniac.”

“Oh, no. It’s so much bigger than that.” This time he shook his head. “What she did with those smaller jobs was prepare for her dream career.”

She felt a little queasy. “I almost hate to ask.”

“She robbed banks.”

Gabby almost laughed. The idea was so absurd that he had to be telling a joke, like some tall tale to get her to smile. “What?”

“Sounds ridiculous, right?”

“A little.” Way more than a little. It sounded like pure fiction. The kind of story he told to impress a woman in a bar with what a bad boy he was. She’d heard silly lines over the years but never that one.

He wrapped a strand of her hair around his finger. Didn’t tug or pull. Just slid the circle he made up and down, smoothed it over his skin.

He believed this nonsense. The thought slammed into her. This wasn’t a joke, or if it was he played the role well. His shoulders slumped and some of the color drained from his face. He looked beaten and exhausted. Totally done.

“She kept meticulous notes and it was obvious she planned out the bigger jobs for months, maybe longer, and fed her stealing habit with smaller jobs in the meantime,” he said, as if that cleared anything up.

“I don’t...” God, she just couldn’t take it in. Gabby put her hand on his knee and leaned in closer, hoping to be able to read through any act he was trying to sell. “Are you serious?”

“Very. She doesn’t exactly own her actions and take responsibility for them, but expert witnesses and therapists who talked with her over the years point to her having this compulsion. This need to keep taking, to ratchet up the danger and live in this chaotic state.”

“God, why?”

“A really messed up childhood with a dad who put her to work stealing instead of signing her up for kindergarten.” He exhaled. “On the outside she presented one picture of herself—this totally together loving mom—but there was this broken part inside she kept trying to fix with these dangerous thrills.”

“Where is she now?”

“In prison.” He stopped looking at her hair and his finger and met her gaze. “Will be there until she dies.”

Her hand squeezed his leg. “What the hell did she steal to get that sentence?”

“Her accomplice, the driver of the getaway car and likely her secret boyfriend, though she won’t admit that part, got into a chase with the police. An officer and an innocent woman driving her dog to the vet were killed in the chaos.” He pounded the side of his fist against the bench. Not hard but enough to make a soft thud. “That’s how we found out about her other life. The police came to the door.”

---