Playing God (Helford #2)

(Epilogue) In Infamy

I thought a thousand times about what to say.

I suppose I should start by saying that Caitie Alastair died right before sunrise on the middle day of April, the year two thousand and eleven. She died for love, and I don’t think she could have imagined anything better. She died during Geronimo, a deep, systematic mission to kill one man, the most dangerous man of all, in a mission that spanned the length of continents, decades, and a handful of people dedicated to the cause. There was Jasper Woodburn, the fearless leader; Caitie Alastair, the toy soldier; Nathan Meade, the confidant; and Marci Letchworth, the wronged. These four all played key roles that culminated into the endgame—a warehouse on a lonely strip of shops outside of Paris, a warehouse that went up in flames and took away one of the bravest women I had and will ever know.

We buried Caitie on a Tuesday. There wasn’t much to bury but an empty wooden box, but we did what we could—a yellow dress that looked a lot like a princess’s, a burnt crucifix, and a paper crane.

It wouldn’t be for a long time after that when I discovered these files on her computer, months and months and years until I had the heart to go through her meager belongings, and I found two documents—one of them was named Before, and the other After. It took another week before I could even bare to click on it, before I could convince myself that it had been long enough that I could read the things that she had written, that I could be inside of her mind even for a little while.

Those two documents were what changed my life. Really, those two documents saved me.

I suppose I could introduce myself, but you already know me by now—my name is Jonathon DuPont.

Once, I had asked Caitie to explain it all to me, and she had told me that she didn’t know how, that there was so much to say and there was so little time to say it, and I didn’t realize that, afterward, she had known how to explain it to me. She didn’t know how to sum it up, so she told me everything—she told the story of Paris in the year two thousand and six, where I fell in love with her and she fell in love with me and Rian Blackwell stood in the middle of it all, and she called that story Before; and then she told me about five years on the run, on finding Meade and then finding me, and she told me the story of the last few months that she had to live, and she had called that file After. I want to say that it’s Before because it was before she understood, and After because she suddenly understood too much, but I would never be completely sure on that, the same way I couldn’t ever be completely sure about the last several additions to this document.

Caitie hadn’t numbered the entries in her documents, but I went back and added them into chapters, because this was Caitie’s story, and she was the one telling it. This was the story that she was here to tell, and I was here reading it, like she had always hoped that I would. But, even so, there was a large gap that stood there for a long time, a terrible ending to stories that I read again and again—Caitie’s last entry became the thirty-fifth chapter, the thirty-fifth part of After. It ended with Caitie and I, and Caitie wasting moments we could have had together on that last day by writing this out for me so I would be able to understand, and I couldn’t live with that. Every time I read it, it tore me to pieces.

So I filled in the ending.

I couldn’t be exactly sure of what Caitie was thinking, or how exactly she saw us, but I had read these stories of hers so many times, so continuously, so obsessively, that I felt like I knew enough to finish her story. I felt like I owed her that, I guess. She died for me, and I buried her, but I didn’t give her half of what I wanted to give her.

I would have given Caitie the world. Now, I can only give myself this closure.

It has been a long time since that day, and it nearly killed me to revisit it, but I did, because I owed her that much. I went by Valerie’s words in reports, in the tears she shed at the funeral, at everything she never talked about. I watched security tapes and I watched the woman I loved go up in flames again and again. I saw into the world of Caitie Alastair and, even when I was writing a couple of entries that probably won’t mean much in the long run, I suddenly understood her a little better. I saw into her mind and I saw her reasoning and her grief and everything that made her Caitie and I understood her, and, eventually, I finished her story.