The Lies That Bind

31: The Lies That Bind

Cooper had spent the last two hours sprawled out in front of his computer, watching illegally-obtained film for no good reason that he could discern.

Blake had emailed the deleted footage over to Cooper—several hours of it—late last night, per their agreement at the non-reunion reunion over the holidays, and rather than prep for classes next week, which he really ought to have been doing by now—well, Cooper had decided to spend his Saturday poking and prodding the film to try and coax out a pattern.

Not that he was having much luck. Sure enough, Blake had erased any trace of Calla's crimes; Cooper watched that particular clip with a grimace, remembering how he'd fumbled and faltered trying to distract Deputy Pendowski long enough for her to lift the case file from the sheriff's office.

But the "rest of the footage", as Blake had put it at the bar, was...well, for lack of a better word, boring.

Why the hell did Calla want any of this wiped? Cooper wondered, watching yet another clip of Greenwitch's near-empty police station. The scene was a familiar one: Pendowski at the front desk, Detective Beitch in the bullpen, bent over a slew of paperwork; and, right on cue, there went Detective Michaels, striding through the front door like he owned the place. He didn't go to the bullpen or the bathroom, but loitered by the front desk with Pendowski, the two chatting it up like old buddies trading war stories. Just another day at the office.

Cooper supposed the answer could be as simple as this: If Blake had only wiped one clip, it would've been all hands on deck to recover the stolen goods. But a random assortment of clips? Hours of menial footage, gone in a blink? That could be chalked up to a glitch in the system. Faulty cameras. Nothing to see here, folks.

Huffing, Cooper closed out the video player. He was liable to scream if he had to watch one more useless video, so instead he pulled up a new browser and typed in a quick search for available apartments in Paris and London and Milan.

Somewhere far, far away from here.

Cooper could do far, far away. Oxford Law would be damn near impossible for him to get into, but he could at least apply, and there were schools in Birmingham and Glasgow and elsewhere he could try if Calla really was set on Oxford Medical—of course she was set on Oxford Medical, he thought wryly, it was the best and she would accept nothing less for herself.

And so it was that he found himself flipping through apartment after apartment, frowning at the wallpaper and outdated appliances and trying to figure out just how the hell they were supposed to pay for anything when they were both going to be in school. Wasn't Europe supposed to be cheap, or something?

Did he even have a passport?

Fuck. He most certainly did not have a passport, or a visa or whatever the hell he was supposed to have to even consider something like this, and that train of thought sent him right down another rabbit hole, filling out applications for various documents and hoping to God they'd get in on time to...to what? He still had three whole semesters left before he had to seriously consider any of this.

"Better prepared than not," he declared to absolutely no one. He had the apartment to himself for the weekend. Vincent was likely warming up somewhere in Atlanta for the National Championship title, which Cooper had promised to watch when it aired later tonight.

And he would. After he'd checked out job prospects in London.

There were several, chief among them an opening for a legal assistant at some tech firm called Ivanov Industries, which didn't sound very London to Cooper, probably because it wasn't—one of seven offices around the globe, he read, impressed.