Page 22 of The Fixer and the Fugitive

“Do you want to hear my heartbreak or not?” he demanded.

“All of it, in its goriest detail, double bonus points if it still makes you cry.”

“Only at night when I can press my face to my stuffed bear,” he said. He took a breath and stared at the fire, like a Shaman about to deliver an allegory. Maybe he was: The Dangers of Being Born Into a Psychotic Family, Part One. “I met the girl my first day of freshman year of college, and she was adorable.”

“I thoughtIwas adorable,” she muttered.

“There can be more than one adorable woman in the world. Don’t be jealous. I certainly never got shot by her neighbor.”

“We’ll always have that,” she agreed. “Proceed.”

“Wonder of wonders, she seemed to believe I was adorable, too.”

“Are we certain this isn’t fiction?” she interrupted.

He held his fork aloft like a weapon. “One more insult and I will extend this monologue until the power comes back on.”

She zipped her lips.

“Anyway, we were always together after that. Our relationship progressed naturally and easily until we became engaged.”

“And then you realized you’d made a horrible mistake because why marry the love of your life when you could sell weapons to terrorists instead?” she said.

“It’s the classic boy meets girl, boy fakes death, boy becomes a terrorist trope,” he joked, eating another bite. “In reality, it was much more complicated.”

“How so?”

“My father died in a car accident. Apparently he had been acting as the boy with the finger in the dam of family drama because afterward it all came flooding out.”

“How so?” She tipped her head to study him. It wasn’t possible that his family trauma was worse than hers, was it?

“My uncles threatened to murder my fiancée if I didn’t break it off.”

“That’s pretty bad.”

“They actually were terrorists, so I knew they meant what they said.”

“So then you faked your death. I hope you were able to keep the deposit on your tuxedo.”

“Has anyone ever told you compassion is your gift?” he asked.

“One guy. And then I killed him,” she said, deadpan.

“Okay,” he drawled. “Back to me.”

“Pretty sure we never left there,” she groused.

He sighed, annoyed, and she pressed a hand to her mouth, pushing back another giggle-snort. “Anyway, I promised to go away with them, but it wasn’t enough.” His tone turned somber and hers followed.

“They killed the girl?”

He shook his head. “My mother.”

Her mouth made an “O” but no sound came out.

“Everything was rather a blur after that. My mother was gentle and kind, so much that she was able to draw my father away from the dangerous world in which he was raised. We had a normal, loving, carefree life before everything fell apart. The juxtaposition from before to after was too much for my mind to handle for a while. I was angry, to say the least, so angry that I lost my head a bit. In a matter of months I had gone from being in love, being the happiest man in the world to being a desolate, loveless orphan who, in the eyes of the law, didn’t even exist anymore. Instead of rebelling against my uncles, I leaned into it. I became what they wanted me to be. I became what everyone in my life from before would have loathed.”

Celeste understood that sort of anger. “Did it help?” In the beginning she had enjoyed her job a bit too much. The Colonel, prescient as always, took her aside and told her she shouldn’t.Hurting others won’t fix what’s gone wrong in your life. I didn’t recruit you to be a vigilante. Find healing in some other way. This is the job and only ever the job.

---