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There was no way to uncross the stars of a con artist and someone determined to live her life honestly. What hurt more than their break up was knowing he’d been on her side the whole time.
“She will. She said there was no way you would.”
Lenny coughed as toast crumbs scratched the back of her throat. “Wait, Mom will get a tattoo?”
“If you will.”
“Did you set me up?”
Mal grinned. “Yup.”
Everyone was a con artist.
Mal had sketches, and she’d already made an appointment for the three of them. Sneaky little rat. It was time to move on.
That afternoon the three Bradshaw women got inked. Mal had a tiny Zibu tattooed on the inside of her wrist after threatening to get it above her lip. Mom had hers on the inside of her now-empty wedding ring finger, and Lenny had one the size of a silver dollar on her hip where she could see it, where she could imagine a lover tracing his tongue over it.
They all got a little weepy. It wasn’t that it hurt; it was that they’d survived.
The next week, Lenny’s plans to do more than survive despite her blue heart were given a boost. It was all over the news that Aleksandrs Ozols had been dismissed from the leadership of his party and arrested on charges of abuse of power and defrauding the people of Ossovia. His assets had been confiscated and would be returned to the Ossovian people who had a new prime minister, Baiba Jansons, who planned to release all political prisoners, turn Cookie Jar’s palace into a university, and start construction on a new electricity grid.
Prominent in the story were the names of people who had feted and supported the prime minister during his US stay. There were government officials
, heads of major charities, and leading families named. She held her breath, feeling dizzy, but nowhere in the coverage were the names Bradshaw or Sherwood.
Buried in the details was the fact that Cookie Jar had lied to the UN, became wrapped up in an art fraud—paying over 170 million dollars for a forged Kandinsky—had invested and lost an enormous sum of money from government sources in a sham cryptocurrency scheme, and was rumored to have used stolen charity donations to pay a million dollars to join a fake private club.
He’d been made to look a fool; his reputation was shredded. His cronies and crooked hangers-on had fled his side or were deep in damage control. He’d rot in prison where he belonged.
It almost made her doomed romance worth it to know she’d played a small part in bringing a master thief and an evil autocrat to justice, no matter how sideways of the law that justice was.
Much as she wanted to pick up the phone and call Halsey to congratulate him, play PowerPoint Girl to his Excel Boy one last time, and pretend they hadn’t ended abruptly in confusion, anger, and tears, for all the right reasons, she couldn’t.
Not if she was being true to herself.
And if Halsey was being true to himself, he wouldn’t call. For a lying, cheating, scumbag, grifter, he was an honorable man who kept his word.
And she didn’t know what to do about that, except miss him in a soul-gutting way and curse him for achieving with his dirty money what she aspired to with the only thing she had left—good intentions she feared were a long way from being enough.
It was disappointing how being true to herself felt like all the colors in the world had suddenly dimmed and everything was washed out and muted.
Apart from the delight about Cookie Jar, she dragged herself through each day, struggled to get out of bed in the morning, hated all her clothes, binged on junk food, and in an effort to shake it off, paid too much for a haircut she hated.
Even when she got a sensational offer on her apartment, one that would easily cover Easton’s legal fees and support Mom and Mal for years to come, she felt little joy, which meant that another D4D direct-mail campaign failing wasn’t the disappointment it might have been.
She already felt so low there was nowhere else to go.
But that was an illusion.
A sleight of hand.
A con job.
The headline was “Frauds of a Feather.”
It appeared in one of those glossy weekend magazines. Lenny found it in a stack of reading material in her local coffee haunt. It featured her own smiling face. Twice. She converted her to-go order to stay and took the magazine to the back of the cafe where she could hide out and read it. Maybe it wouldn’t be that bad.
It was a bad haircut for life.
