It’s just a backpack.
It’s just a backpack.
The decks of playing cards I had practiced with over and over again were sitting right at the top. I wouldn’t need those again.
Immediately in the trash.
I reached into the backpack again, then gave the playing cards a second look as memories played like a movie in my mind.
Jude eating me out while I went through speed drills.
The time I took a break from practicing and we took turns seeing who could throw cards most accurately.
The hour we spent building a house of cards only for it to come tumbling down when a particularly strong draft crept through an the window on a particularly breezy day.
Nope. Nope. Nope. They were just playing cards.
There were a handful of musty clothes we had packed. Those immediately went into the trash. No matter what Jude had said, washing clothes in the sink wasnotthe same as a washing machine.
. . . Even if we had hung them out to dry during the day. The feeling of putting on crunchy, air-dried clothes should have been bothersome, but it wasn’t. It felt like wearing sunshine.
The snacks went into the trash without a second thought. Most of them were crushed to smithereens after endless days of travel across the country.
In my haste to switch backpacks after Jude was arrested, there was a handful of chips that I had never cashed out at the casino. Those, I kept. Maybe I’d go back to Vegas and play one more epic hand someday.
Someday.
Someday, when I could handle the thought of blackjack again. When I could redeem the thing I had truly come to love thathehad tarnished.
Three mass-market paperbacks were wedged in the bottom. I had been reading one of them on the train. The page I had paused on when we disembarked in Arizona was still dog-eared.
It had been months, but I knew exactly where I had left off in the story.
It felt sacrilegious to throw away a book. It wasn’t the book’s fault that it had been purchased by a liar.
I froze as the four-letter word slipped through my mind.
Liar.
Maybe that’s what hurt the most.
Jude had shared so much with me. Things that I knew to be true. But he didn’t trust me enough to be truthful about who he really was.
No. Stop it. Jude’s lies are not my fault.
It was something Dr. Chen had reiterated over and over: we’re all responsible for our own choices.
The weight of Jude’s decision to not tell me the whole truth rested solely on his shoulders.
I had been through every iteration ofwhy.Why hadn’t he told me? Why hadn’t he trusted me?
You can’t lie about something you don’t know.
I wanted to believe that he had a good reason for not telling me that he was FBI. That knowledge would’ve changed everything.
I would’ve immediately trusted him when he kidnapped me.
But I trusted him even when I didn’t know . . . Didn’t that say more about his character than the context his job title would have provided?
