Special Agent Samantha Jameson left her office at seven a.m., retrieved her dented Porsche from the parking garage at the Department of Homeland Security, and headed toward her bombed-out home.
As she drove in angry impatience, one thought occupied her mind, clouded her vision, and tore at her heart: he lied.
They didn’t have any rules in their relationship except honesty. They’d both survived awful relationships, and had been stripped entirely of their patience for head games or manipulation. They had told each other viciously difficult truths about themselves, and some of those truths had caused pain for the other. But they had done it, because above all, they valued having no secrets between them. They always delivered it with love, but bare-naked, bare-knuckled honesty was the cornerstone of their relationship.
Until now. If Ekman’s cell phone triangulation printouts were correct, it looked like Brock had taken miles-long car rides with a man he claimed not to know, on several different occasions.
Why would he lie to me about that? And who the fuck is Arturo Dibiaso?
She knew that if it was true – if Brock had lied to her – it was over between them. Life was too short to wonder whether the man she loved was somehow playing her.
And it was pretty clear that he had lied to her. Convincingly, too. Fucking bastard.
She had grown up in an environment like that. She could always tell that her old man was lying, because it happened just about every time his lips moved. Missed birthdays, all-night benders, promises long forgotten – they all took their toll on Sam’s psyche, and she had lived the clichéd troubled teenager lifestyle to compensate.
She had let more douchebags than she could count climb all over her body and heart. All the while, she had vehemently denied her need for male affirmation even while seeking it desperately.
She had put herself together professionally, gone to a great school, caught the eye of the spook recruiters, and risen rapidly through the ranks at Homeland, but that was all elaborate overcompensation for the brokenness she felt.
She had endured shitty relationships with horrible men, most of them older, many of them married, all of them completely wrong for her. Her pinup model looks and razor intellect made her trophy material, and she had no shortage of attention. She hated them, but hated herself more.
She had been lying to herself and she knew it, but truthfulness seemed too bitter a pill. To acknowledge the truth would have meant the end of the life she had constructed. It was a horrible life, but change took courage. While Sam was a balls-to-the-wall counterespionage agent, her no-prisoners style had its limits. She knew that making the choice to see herself clearly would inevitably have demanded a life overhaul that she lacked the strength to undertake.
Unsurprisingly, she drank. A lot. Trembles and shakes were a daily reality toward the end. She almost didn’t survive. One Tuesday morning, after returning from the convenience store with a fresh bottle of vodka, she had sat in her garage with the car motor running, daring herself to do nothing while the fumes overtook her.
Then, improbably and at a deep, wordless level within her, a will to live intervened. She turned off the car, went inside, and began living.
She hadn’t thought that she could endure reality unvarnished by an insulating layer of inebriation, but she had beaten the odds and beaten the addiction. And she had thrived. Her sobriety was hard-won, but she did it all by herself. And she stuck to it. Thirty-eight months and counting.
She learned that life was precious, brutally short, and never to be wasted by putting up with bullshit. Especially from a lover. She lived with abandon and rolled with the punches in almost every other area of life, but she could never compromise on honesty. It was the center of her existence and the mechanism of her mental health.
I trusted you. She felt nauseous thinking of Brock’s deception. You were the one, you fucking asshole. She loved him wildly and madly. She couldn’t imagine walking the earth without him.
But she couldn’t stay with him. He had lied. It would never, ever be the same between them.
Sam wiped her eyes and hardened her heart as she arrived home. She had to park across the street from her house, as the cleanup crew had placed a dumpster in her drive to collect the remnants of her bombed-out entryway.
She walked past the workers without a word, lost in her own private apocalypse. She packed a duffel bag full of clothes and sundries, and threw in three full clips of hollow-point .45-caliber ammunition for her Kimber semi-automatic.
She found a notepad and scrawled a note: “You broke our only rule, and you broke my heart.” She pasted it to the bathroom mirror, walked back to her car, and drove away.