“You can leave that one back at the cabin,” Harmony quips.
She reaches out her hand to me, so I take it, joining her as we wait for the last two Mountainettes to reveal their picks. All the while, my mind is racing. This is good. This is good! This is exactly what Morrie and I have been planning. When I steal a glance over at him, I see him holding up double thumbs-ups, grinning wildly.
I wish I could muster the same enthusiasm. And it’s not because of Nina. Well, notonlybecause of Nina. In all the times I’ve had to pretend to be somebody else, I’ve never had to pretend to be falling in love with somebody. As an abstract concept, it felt like something I could do, to achieve the necessary end goal of gaining Aaron Miller’s trust. But now, with Harmony standing right beside me, her hand in mine, I don’t know how I’m possibly going to be able to pull this off.
When I trained to become an undercover agent, I was warned that it’s easy to lose yourself. Most human beings are naturally empathetic. There’s a reason why laughter is contagious; if someone else laughs, our instinct is to laugh with them. If we see someone hurt, we feel sorry for them. We seek connection with other people, and we do that by feeling what they feel, intuitively responding to what emotion is shown to us.
So when you go undercover and someone is kind to you, laughs at your jokes, confides in you, it’s incredibly difficult to remain neutral to them. Even if you go in with the mindset that all of your interactions are pretend, that they aren’t real toyou, the fact that they’re real to someone else makes it hard not to get sucked in. Try as you might to remain removed, emotions always get involved. Always.
Earlier in my career, I thought taking on physically dangerous tasks, like going undercover for a drug cartel, would be the most difficult part of my job. But it’s really the emotionally dangerous missions that can fuck you up. Like befriending someone. Integrating yourself into their family. Growing to genuinely like and care about them.
I’m not worried that I’ll fall in love with Harmony. My heart is otherwise preoccupied. But what am I supposed to do if she starts falling in love withme?
As if she can read my thoughts, Harmony turns to me now, smiling. The camerasare still rolling, but this isn’t a moment that’s been orchestrated by the show. It’s just a small exchange between the two of us. “Are you excited?” she whispers.
Hearing the nervousness in her voice, the hopeful hitch, my heart clutches painfully in my chest.Wrong. This is wrong. I do my best to smile. “Can’t wait,” I murmur back.
The producers give the four Mountain Men who were selected for one-on-one dates a short amount of time to change and get ready. We’re herded back to our respective rooms. To get a better sense of “who we really are” (ha), we’re meant to wear our own clothes from home on these one-on-one dates, so there’s no one from the wardrobe department to help us get ready.
As I go through the motions of getting dressed, my mind is spiraling. I don’t know if I can do this. I don’t fucking know if I can do this.
When I step outside the room, Morrie is waiting for me in the hallway. I can see by the grin on his face that he’s ready to give me shit, as usual. But when he catches sight of my expression, he sobers immediately. “You need the recording?” he asks me.
“I need the recording,” I confirm grimly.
This isn’t my first time going undercover with Morrie. We always have an escape hatch in case things start to get too real once I’m deep undercover, if I lose sight of what it is I’m trying to do. I’ve never had to use it so early before.
Morrie takes me back into the room and locks the door. Without saying a word, he hands over his phone. I pull up the file and listen to the recording he has saved there.
The voice is a woman’s. Mabel Winthrop. I can hear the strain of emotion as she struggles to tell her story matter-of-factly. “My husband, William Winthrop, was a deacon in the Church of Light. The senior pastor was Aaron Miller ...”
I listen as Mabel recounts how her husband was taken in by Aaron’s charm, by his pretend kindness, by his enthusiasm for William and the work they would be doing together. She describes the complete trust that Aaron put into William, and says that William happily reciprocated, believing that Aaron had been called by God, and that together, they would do great things.
Unfortunately the tale quickly takes a dark turn as Mabel tells how William began to have some doubts. He made some financial discoveries in the church records that he asked Aaron about, believing there must have been some mistake. Not too long after that, Aaron and his family left town. And William was left behind with a paper trail of bank statements, deposits that he never knew about, withdrawals that were made under his name but that he never authorized.
All of it added up to an embezzlement charge that not only landed William in prison, but lost him his church, his congregation, and his community.
“That life was everything to William,” Mabel states. “He worked so hard. He truly believed that he was doing God’s work. He would have done anything for Aaron, and in return, Aaron betrayed him. He framed him. He humiliated him. He broke him. He?—”
Her voice breaks off as she begins crying.
By now, of course, I’ve listened to this recording so many times I already know how it’s going to end. It doesn’t make it any easier to hear.
Not long after his imprisonment, William found a way to die by suicide in prison. Mabel was left behind with their three young children. As if that sorrow wasn’t enough, Mabel was ostracized from her church community, who still believed that her husband had committed these terrible crimes against them.
“Those people were our family,” Mabel tells us in a choked voice. “And then we were nothing to them.”
I stop the recording, breathing heavily, as I try to regain control of my emotions. This is what I’m here for. This is what I can’t lose sight of.
William Winthrop was just one of the many people betrayed, framed, humiliated, and broken by Aaron Miller. And if I can’t find a way to stop him, he’ll just keep doing this again, and again, and again.
There has to be proof. He’s smart but he’s not invincible. Everyone makes mistakes. Even Aaron Miller.
I just have to find a way to prove it.
I look up to see Morrie watching me, his face grim. “You good?” he asks.
For once there’s no trace of anything sarcastic or snarky in his voice. As much as he gives me shit, Morrie is in this undercover operation with me. He’s been trained to help me through it, and to pull me out when it seems like I might begetting in too deep. He also knows exactly what I need to hear to keep my head in the game.
