Page 89 of Give Him a Chance

“Did all those letters I wrote not count?” Bernard could not help but say.

It was the wrong thing. Ire sparkled in Lucy’s eyes. “And for all I know you were placed here, by the enemy!”

Bernard blinked. Nowhewas the one utterly lost. “The… ‘The enemy’?”

“Judge Bonner!” Lucy declared, as though she had managed to untangle a great web of deceit and had found him, Bernard, right in the center of it. “For all I know, you and Judge Bonner cooked this up to distract me!”

“Lucy, that’s ridiculous!”

“Is it?” Her finality, not the volume of her voice, was what stopped Bernard in his tracks. Lucy stared as though he were a stranger, as though he were someone she did not know and could never know. “More or less ridiculous than the story that you’re a spy?”

Bernard swore in a mutter and turned away from her, unable to look at the woman who was simultaneously infuriating and delightful in every twisting second.

How had this gotten so out of control? How had this gotten so out of hand? How was it possible?

“Ask me.”

Bernard almost looked around to see why Lucy had spoken, before he realized those two syllables had come from his own lips. Then he turned around to see Lucy’s face.

Distrust marred her wrinkled brow. “Ask you what?”

“Anything. Anything. I’ll tell you anything.” And the importance of his missions, Hovell, his own true identity…all of that faded away.

Nothing was more important than this. Nothing was more important than her.

Bernard had expected Lucy to brighten, to start pouring question after question into his lap, but instead, she…frowned.

“You should want to tell me,” she said, her voice breaking and her arms now hugging around her as though she needed them to be able to keep standing. “You shouldwantto share your life with me, Bernard. Isn’t that… Isn’t that what marriage means?”

“I…” Bernard swallowed, unable to continue.

When had this happened? When had it become so difficult to even think about his old life, his real life? When had ‘Bernard Dixon’ become such a part of him that he hardly knew how to parse it from the rest of him?

Why did his mind go blank when asked about his real life?

Lucy’s shoulders slumped. “I see.”

“No—No, Lucy, I can do this. I can be anything you need!”

“But I don’t want you to fabricate who you are just to please me,” she shot back, the tears flowing again. “Bernard, I… Maybe you should go.”

Bernard took a long, slow breath as he tried to calm himself. She was right. As usual, Lucy was right. “Yes, I’ll step aside for a moment, and then when I come back—”

“No, I think you should go.”

Her voice wasn’t sharp. It did not need to be, for there was a finality in it that brooked no argument and denied any clarification.

Go.

Bernard blinked. “‘Go’?”

“I think it is fair to say that you have overstayed your welcome,” Lucy said, a coldness in her voice he had never heard before.

He’d done that. His lies, his secrets, his inability to tell the truth.

And in the face of losing her, of seeing a life stretching out before him with no Lucy in it, Bernard impulsively did the only thing that he could think of.

He told the truth.