By the time we arrived at our location, I knew that agreeing to be here hadn’t been my greatest idea to date, but it didn’t feel wrong. Jonathon was a puzzle that I couldn’t figure out how to solve, such a new person that I wasn’t sure how and where to begin understanding him. We barely spoke as he drove us here, and now we were walking up a side street in the direction of a crowd, our hands shoved into our pockets despite the temperature. Neither of us seemed to know what to say, and I couldn’t help but to wonder why he had invited me along at all.
“It’s called La Rambla,” Jonathon spoke for the first time. I looked up at him, startled to hear his voice as we started through the crowd. “It’s a street, about a mile long. I stumbled into it when I was here my first week—it’s one of my favorite places to go in the entire city.”
I glanced around, my breath catching. As far as my eyes could see, there was everything—cafes and galleries lined the streets where tourists and natives alike walked. On the curbs were artists showing and selling their work, and I could see a woman dancing to a soft flute ballad not five feet away from a large statue of a man, immortalized in old-fashioned attire, the plaque beneath his feet the only indication as to whom he might be. There must have been a garden or a florist nearby because women were walking by with large bundles of fresh flowers of all colors and sizes.
This boulevard was filled with color and people and lives being lived, so much unlike my perspective’s stormy gray London that it was laughable. I breathed in the smell of pastries and flowers and I breathed out the weight that had been crushing down my shoulders every time I looked at Jonathon. At least he always had somewhere intoxicatingly lively and happy that he could go to if he ever felt like the world wasn’t turning fast enough.
I couldn’t help but to be happy that Jonathon had managed to find a slice of happiness here if he wasn’t happy about anything else. It was a morbid thought, I suppose, but all I wanted was the best for Jonathon. I just wanted him to be okay.
And I think that was the main reason that I came here in the first place. I think I just wanted to be reassured that Jonathon was going to be okay.
I couldn’t help the smile that passed over my face, the weightlessness that swelled in my chest and made me feel as though I could float away. For a moment, I just glanced around with wide eyes, wanting to see and live it all. I think this eagerness, this awe, was what it felt like to be a child.
I snapped out of it when I heard Jonathon chuckling softly behind me. I turned my body and found him glancing around at the place he had called La Rambla, a smirk on his face.
“What?” I demanded. “What are you laughing at?”
He shrugged, laughing lightly again. “I guess I’m just glad that someone else had the same reaction that I did. No one else I’ve met seems to think this place is as special as I do.”
I considered that for a moment, the street full of movement that my eyes automatically kept flashing to, before I answered. “I see a place full of life that I haven’t truly felt in a while, and you might see it for another reason completely. They might see it like a gypsy craft fair for all I know, they might think that it’s a waste of their time—it all depends on perspective. It’s hard to find someone who sees the world the same way that you do.”
I hadn’t meant to get so deep, so personal—I had almost wanted to completely close myself off from Jonathon, as if that would somehow be able to help me—but that plan was decidedly moot after my philosophical lesson of the day, and I nearly winced. I kept my eyes on the crowd, seeing Jonathon but refusing to meet his gaze head on like the coward I am.
Jonathon regarded me with surprise, as if he had never fathomed that I would have a reasonable and somewhat philosophic head on my shoulders. He looked impressed, and I was going to comment on the look sarcastically until Jonathon stumbled back a step, attempting to get out of the way of a pedestrian talking animatedly on a cell phone in Spanish, paying everyone else around him no mind. Automatically, my eyes followed the man as if he was a personal threat, keeping note of him as he made his way through the crowd.
“That is how I see it, too,” Jonathon confessed to me, shoving his hands even deeper into his pockets. “Everything here is just so alive with energy. It’s odd—but nice. A breath of fresh air, I suppose you could say.”
I nodded, not willing to add anymore of my personal thoughts on the matter. As if he knew that, Jonathon placed his hand politely on the small of my back, guiding me to start walking, guiding me to the right. I was hyper-aware of his hand there, suddenly feeling a little uneasy.
The move would have been casual if his hand hadn’t lingered for just a second too long to be a friendly gesture before he allowed his hand to drop back to his side and he played it off like nothing was amiss, leading the way down a crowded street with not a thing off on his face, no checking to see if I was still behind him because he knew I would be. I followed robotically, my mind racing.
Maybe he hadn’t meant the prolonged contact, but I felt it still in the heat of the skin on my lower back, the constant pounding of my heart making it impossible to forget. My head was swimming from an injury that may never heal but I still focused more on Jonathon than where I was going, even staying upright. Just knowing that Jonathon was there still felt like some kind of dream.
So, I still had it bad for him. I guess that was only to be expected, especially since it was extremely important for me to maintain my cover identity. I probably should have seen this natural disaster coming from miles away.
We side-stepped a magician performing an illusion before I got this odd feeling in my stomach that I haven’t felt often lately, one that I had always learned to trust as the truth. I glanced around, searching for inconsistencies, becoming troubled when I couldn’t find signs of them. I forced myself to stay facing forward, determined not to alert Jonathon.
It felt like we were being followed.
Jonathon started to tell me, “There is something off about you, Nina, if you don’t mind me saying. I can’t figure you out.”
I looked back at him and smiled evenly in amusement. “Do tell.”
“I read your file—my superior sent it over when the case was assigned, and I was so curious to hear that you were Underground to completely ignore the opportunity to understand a little more about the situation. But your file is incomplete and highly censored, to the point that it was entirely unreadable. I was wondering what was so secret about your life that not even your own agency could know about it.”
My lips twitched into an interested grin, and I paused our walk to feign interest in a fortune teller who was pointing at miscellaneous people in the crowd and giving them a reading. The distraction gave me just enough time to compose my thoughts, hindered by a migraine slowing me down considerably, and allow myself to consider an answer as to his inquiry, thinking very carefully.
“I can say that I was Helford at one time, but I have since turned my back on their values and what they stood for. Otherwise, nothing else is shockingly redacted, due to my position of authority. Just imagine the uproar that would explode when people realized who I have been this entire time—I would certainly not strike confidence in the hearts of my fellow members of Parliament, and that is for certain. I have many skeletons tucked away in my closet that I would prefer not to have any perfectly common rebel to have access to. A girl is allowed her dirty little secrets.”
He smiled lackadaisically as we started walking again, bypassing small shop fronts and busy little cafes, passing by people we would never see again. “Why did you leave, then? Not many people in the Underground have actually left Helford—they’re just fighting against it from the inside.”
“The reason I left is a familiar story to you, Jonathon, and therefore not worth the retelling.”
“You mean Caitie,” he deadpanned, a funny expression on his face.
I half-nodded, analyzing that expression of his. I hadn’t really expected him to jump on the opportunity to talk about me, but I still remember what he had said in New York that made me accept this mission in the first place. The way he still had hope, like he had just seemed to know that I would still be listening, like he wanted me to hear what he had to say . . .
I was so alone. I was alone and I missed Jonathon. I couldn’t be ashamed of that
Still sending him looks, considering the expressions on his face, I asked, “Why are you making that face?”
He answered my question with a question: “Would you like to get a drink?”
I liked his strategy of distraction, and I had a feeling that he would allow me to hear a damn good answer. I smirked at him, feeling like I appeared like the Cheshire Cat. “Is that an offer of business or personal, Mr. DuPont?”
“Miss Abraham, I am offended that you would even have to ask me that.” He smirked.
And because I still somehow managed to hopelessly love him the way I always had been able to, I nodded, accepting his offer. His smirk grew into a grin as he led me across the street to what looked to be a coffeehouse, but the façade was run down and peeling, unflattering. Jonathon noticed my observations and laughed.
“It doesn’t look like much,” he conceded, “but it is really an undiscovered gem of this city. The coffee is as good as the stuff from home.”
Every time he mentioned Paris, he got this look in his eyes. I knew he had to miss it something terrible. It was the only home that he had ever known for eighteen years. It was the only place where he had ever known his mother and his brothers, even if it was where they had died.
I pitied Jonathon even though I knew he wouldn’t want to be pitied. It was all too easy to feel sorry for one of the saddest people in the world.
I ordered a coffee plain black, as black as my soul, and the woman was already serving Jonathon with what had to be his usual before he even had the chance to speak. We took our beverages to a sofa in the back corner of the shop, shrugging off our jackets in the heat of the small place, relaxing against the soft cushions and pretending like the tension around us didn’t exist nearly as thickly as it truly did.
A million questions I wanted him to answer were on the tip of my tongue, but I forced them away with a deep sip of scolding hot coffee, my eyes on Jonathon as I wondered if I would ever get my answer.
When I figured he would answer, he did. It made me feel like maybe I still knew a bit about Jonathon after all, but that high died quickly when I heard the words that he was speaking.
“I thought I loved Caitie once, but I only ever loved the part of me that she let me see, and I don’t even know if that part was real or fiction. It doesn’t really matter, I guess, since I never saw her again, and it never really ended up being something that mattered. She saved me, and I will always appreciate that, but I think that I will always hold a grudge against her for not staying with me, for running away the way she did.”
“Helford was gunning for her; she never would have wanted to draw attention to where you were. It’s one of the simplest tactical strategies we have drilled into our head from the beginning of our training. She knew that. If they found her and she was with you, the operation she betrayed them with would have been for nothing, because they would have ended up killing you anyway.”
Jonathon was breaking open. Cracks were opening over his skin and the truth was pouring out of him, and he could do nothing to stop the flow. He was crumbling down, unable to hold us his resolve of being perfectly fine any longer.
He raggedly replied, “If she really loved me, then she wouldn’t have left me like that. She would have told me where she was going—maybe I would have been able to see her before she ran. I would have maybe been there to stop her from going and getting captured, getting killed in the worst possible way . . .”
I started like I had been electrocuted. “What?”
“They keep telling me that she died four years ago,” he told me with snarled acid, but his hands were shaking and his eyes were like cracked glass. “She got captured in Turkey and died somewhere in the Arctic Ocean—from a fall from a helicopter, from drowning, or from hypothermia, they don’t know. I don’t know. But she would have—she might have—”
Jonathon didn’t finish because he truly didn’t know what Caitie Alastair would have done. He didn’t feel as though he had known me at all, but I knew that there was no one on this entire planet that had ever known me as well as he did. There was no way for me to explain that to him, though, no way that he would believe me of all people even if I tried.
And then he said it: “I know she isn’t dead.”
I choked on my coffee. “Pardon me?” I coughed, my throat and eyes burning. Jonathon stared down at his hands on his own mug, what looked like a laugh pulling at the corner of his mouth. He took a sip, looking thoughtful.
“I know she isn’t dead,” he repeated solidly, “because I wouldn’t have gotten this one year after she supposedly died if she had.”
To my horror—and all of the happiness I had in my heart—Jonathon held up a beaten and battered paper crane.
It took all I could not to break down and admit it all to him right then and there. I bit my tongue and tried to look at the crane like I had no idea what I was looking at. I must have done a decent job because Jonathon looked smug when he tucked the crane back into the inside of his jacket, zipping it into a pocket I had otherwise been unable to see.
He kept it with him wherever he went. My heart felt worse than destroyed—it felt like it was slowly being cut open, allowed to bleed out, but it would only suffer forever.
“I made that crane for her, five years ago,” he explained to me slowly, because I shouldn’t have known what it was. “I made it for her when we were dating, when we were studying one day for a test and I had been trying so hard to get her to like me at least a fraction of how much I liked her. She kept it, and, three years ago in New York, a waitress told me a woman asked her to give me that crane. It was one year after she reportedly died, but I don’t believe it for a second. No one would have known the significance of that piece of paper like she did.”
“I suppose it’s possible.”
He heard my faked skepticism. He sighed, leaning his head back.
“You don’t have to believe me, Nina. I don’t believe myself half of the time, to be honest with you. But I like the idea of it—she might come back, if she is still alive. I might be able to see her again and just know to myself that she didn’t die that day. That’s really all I want.”
Jonathon was coming clean, and the illusion of him was falling away. He wasn’t a super-confident supervisor of an intelligence sector of the Underground—he was a boy who had his heart broken and was still clinging to a hope he knew would never be reality. He was vulnerable, and he was perfect, and he was still some of the same person that he had always been, just buried deeply underneath.
For one blinding, illogical moment, I imagined what would happen if I told him right here in this coffee ship who I was. I thought about the apologies I would give him for not sticking by him the way he had wanted me to and the tears I would shed because it hurt to think that he had been waiting for me to turn up for him all of this time. I might not have fallen straight into his awaiting arms, and Woodburn might have ended up being very outraged about it when he found out, but I wouldn’t have been lying to him for the first time, not about anything, and the moment would have been pure and sad and heavily broken, but we would have been okay. We always had been.
But I didn’t say it. I knew that my identity had been worked up so carefully over the years that it would have caused too many problems. Jonathon would probably hate me for fooling him even this long over being Nina Abraham, and I would have understood that.
I really only stayed quiet because I was a coward. A certifiable coward.
I could make as many excuses to myself as I wanted to, but I knew what the real reason was behind why I simply took a long sip of my coffee, now cold, and didn’t respond to Jonathon. I didn’t ask him all of the questions I had for him because I was now afraid of what the answer might be. Jonathon was waiting for me to find him, but all of this time I had been pushing him further away from me.
That said a lot about our relationship. That told a lot of outcomes that would always end with Jonathon withering away, waiting for a visit that would never come, while I deluded myself into thinking I was protecting him and making the world a better place for him by staying far away.
I looked away from Jonathon and took another sip of my coffee, hoping he wouldn’t notice that my hands were shaking.
For now, I was content with being a coward.