Chapter 14: Don’t Lie to Me
1970 Words
LUCY
Marco was making pancakes when I brought the black notebook into the kitchen.
He noticed.
He didn't say anything.
That was how I knew.
A week ago, he would have asked immediately. Now he flipped a pancake, glanced once at the worn leather cover beside my coffee, and returned to the stove.
The pancake landed slightly off-center.
“Improving.”
“Thank you.”
“I meant the pancake.”
“So did I.”
I opened the notebook.
Morning had arrived bright after last night's rain. Sunlight cut through the shutters. Butter hissed in the pan.
It should have been ordinary.
Instead, I'd written Phoenix at one seventeen in the morning and spent the hours afterward trying not to think about it.
I'd failed.
Marco slid a pancake onto my plate.
“Homework?”
“No.”
“It looks like homework.”
“It looks like notes.”
“That's homework for adults.”
“I wasn't aware adulthood exempted people from learning.”
“It should.”
“That explains a great deal.”
He sat opposite me and poured syrup over three pancakes.
Then added more.
I watched him.
“What?”
“I'm calculating whether we need another bottle.”
“We do.”
“We bought that yesterday.”
“I've had a difficult week.”
“So has the syrup.”
He smiled.
There.
Ordinary again.
My coffee was black, unsweetened, exactly cool enough to drink.
Marco had stopped asking how I wanted it.
I'd stopped noticing when he'd started making mine with his.
That wasn't entirely true.
I noticed.
I simply hadn't examined it.
His eyes dropped to the notebook.
“What are you studying?”
“Nothing.”
Too quick.
His fork stopped.
“That sounded suspicious.”
“It wasn't.”
“You're holding a secret notebook over breakfast.”
“It isn't secret.”
“Can I read it?”
“No.”
His eyebrows rose.
I stared at him.
He stared back.
Then laughed.
“Lucy.”
“You asked.”
“I know.”
“I answered.”
“Very efficiently.”
I closed the notebook.
He didn't ask again.
Somehow, that was worse.
---
Marco was examining the gutter when I left.
“Don't climb onto the roof.”
“I wasn't planning to.”
“You're holding a ladder.”
He looked at it.
“This is circumstantial.”
“Marco.”
“I'll be careful.”
“That wasn't what I said.”
“Have a nice meeting.”
“I didn't say I had a meeting.”
“Have a nice mysterious non-meeting.”
I adjusted my bag.
The notebook rested inside.
“Stay off the roof.”
“No promises.”
I considered taking the ladder.
His laughter followed me through the gate.
---
Puerto Espera still glittered with yesterday's rain.
At the bakery, I almost kept walking.
Three steps later, I went back.
The woman behind the counter was arranging fresh pastries.
“Two?”
“One.”
She looked at me.
I looked at her.
“Two.”
Her smile was unnecessary.
I put the second pastry beside the notebook.
Marco would eat it.
This was almost certainly true.
Father Gabriel's church stood above the eastern edge of town. By the time I reached it, heat had gathered beneath my collar.
Below, Puerto Espera spilled toward the harbor in pale roofs and bright awnings.
I'd come to Moira because nobody here needed anything from me.
No reports.
No emergencies.
No negotiations.
No decisions measured in casualties.
Then Marco washed ashore.
Now I was climbing toward a church with notes on impossible healing and blue-gold fire.
Marco wasn't a project.
That was precisely the problem.
---
Father Gabriel looked up from a ledger when I knocked.
“Miss Hart.”
“Father.”
“What brings you all the way up here?”
“I was hoping to look through some older records.”
“That sounds dangerous.”
“Books?”
“People who call books records.”
I sat.
“What are you looking for?”
“Old folklore.”
His eyebrows lifted.
“Something specific?”
“The oldest stories you have.”
“Dragons?”
“No.”
“Sea spirits?”
“No.”
“Dead saints?”
“Not currently.”
His eyes sharpened.
“Fire,” I said.
Father Gabriel stood.
“Come.”
---
The archive room smelled of dust and old leather.
Father Gabriel unlocked a cabinet and removed a volume wrapped in faded linen.
The cover had no title.
Only a worn sunburst.
“Most of these aren't Moiran stories,” he said. “Ships brought them. Families. Priests copied them. Travelers added things that probably never happened.”
“Probably?”
“I've learned not to insult dead storytellers.”
He opened the book.
Old illustrations broke the handwritten passages.
Creatures.
Symbols.
Fragments of prayers.
Then I turned a page.
Stopped.
A bird stretched across the paper, wings spread wide. Its feathers had been painted as flame, the gold pigment faded nearly brown.
My fingers hovered above it.
Father Gabriel watched me instead of the page.
“The Phoenix.”
“I didn't ask.”
“No.”
“Then why show me this?”
“You stopped turning pages.”
Fair.
“What do the oldest accounts agree on?”
“Very little.”
“Father.”
He sighed.
“Fire.”
I waited.
“Death.”
Another pause.
“And renewal.”
“Not rebirth?”
“Some translations use it.”
“But you don't.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Rebirth suggests repetition.”
“And renewal?”
“Continuation.”
Something cold moved beneath my ribs.
Marco waking on Cala Verde with only a first name.
Wounds closing.
Hands remembering medicine when his mind remembered nothing.
Fire sleeping beneath his skin.
Continuation.
“How many were there?”
“At once?”
“Yes.”
“One.”
I looked at him.
“Always?”
“In the oldest versions.”
“One dies.”
“Eventually.”
“And another is born?”
“So the stories claim.”
“Same family?”
“No.”
“Bloodline?”
“No.”
“Then how?”
He smiled faintly.
“If the book knew, someone stole that page before I was born.”
I looked down again.
Experimental alteration remained possible.
Rare elemental magic.
An unusual regenerative species.
Something created in that white room.
None explained enough.
“Do you believe this?”
Father Gabriel looked toward the high window.
“I've lived long enough to stop asking whether old stories are true.”
“What do you ask instead?”
“What kind of people needed them.”
“And these people?”
His gaze settled on the painted bird.
“They needed to believe ending wasn't the same thing as being finished.”
Neither of us spoke.
Then I closed the book.
Gently.
---
Marco had fixed the gutter.
And the garden gate.
And the loose board beside the kitchen window.
I stood in the yard staring at all three.
He appeared in the doorway.
“You're late.”
I looked at him.
“Later than usual,” he corrected.
Better.
I lifted the bakery bag.
“I brought compensation.”
“Pastry?”
“Yes.”
“For me?”
“Mostly.”
“Lucy.”
“What?”
“You're my favorite mysterious administrator.”
“I'm the only administrator you know.”
“Still winning.”
He took the bag.
Our fingers brushed.
Warm.
His skin was always warm.
Today I noticed too much.
Marco noticed me noticing.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
There it was again.
His smile faded slightly.
He stepped aside.
I entered.
He didn't ask where I'd been.
Somehow, that felt more like a question.
---
I left the notebook on the table while I washed my hands.
A mistake.
Not because Marco opened it.
He didn't.
When I returned, it remained exactly where I'd left it.
Closed.
His pastry sat beside it.
Marco stood at the sink.
“What's a Phoenix?”
My hand stopped on the chair.
One heartbeat.
Two.
Too long.
He turned.
His expression wasn't accusing.
That made it harder.
“An old myth.”
True.
Incomplete.
Marco looked at the notebook.
Then at me.
“Okay.”
That was all.
He took his pastry outside.
For the first time since he'd arrived, I wanted him to ask another question.
He didn't.
---
We drank coffee on the porch after sunset.
Marco had been quiet for almost three minutes.
A personal record.
“If you knew something…”
I looked at him.
He rubbed his thumb along his mug.
“…would you tell me?”
“Yes.”
The answer came too quickly to examine.
“If it was bad?”
“Yes.”
“If it changed everything?”
“Yes.”
“If you thought I wouldn't want to hear it?”
I held his gaze.
“I would tell you.”
He watched me.
Then nodded.
“I believe you.”
My fingers tightened around my cup.
“I don't need every answer right now,” he said.
I said nothing.
“I know you think I do.”
“I don't.”
“Lucy.”
A small smile touched his mouth.
“You get this line between your eyebrows when you're deciding how much truth you're allowed to give me.”
My hand almost rose to my forehead.
I stopped it.
His smile widened.
“You were going to check.”
“No.”
“You absolutely were.”
“I wasn't.”
“That one might've been a lie.”
A laugh escaped me.
Marco looked pleased.
Then his expression softened.
“I just don't want you to lie to me.”
Quiet.
No accusation.
No anger.
That made the words land harder.
He wasn't asking for my history.
He wasn't demanding the notebook.
He wasn't asking where I'd gone.
One thing.
Something simple.
Something I should have been able to give.
“I won't.”
The promise left softly.
Marco nodded.
“Okay.”
He believed that too.
We sat without speaking.
My coffee went cold between my hands.
---
After Marco went to bed, I carried the notebook into my room.
Not because I thought he'd read it.
He wouldn't.
That certainty was its own kind of problem.
I opened to the marked page.
Phoenix.
Father Gabriel's book had given me no proof. Only stories. Old ones. Dangerous ones.
I thought of Marco pretending not to stare at the notebook.
Repairing my gate because it creaked.
Asking whether I would tell him something terrible.
I just don't want you to lie to me.
I'd promised I wouldn't.
And I hadn't.
Not exactly.
Outside, the guest-room window scraped open.
Marco liked fresh air when he slept.
I knew that now.
I knew how he took his coffee.
How much syrup he used.
Which pastry he chose.
How he joked when frightened.
How he grew quiet when something genuinely hurt.
Ordinary things.
Small things.
The kind that accumulated before anyone noticed they'd become important.
I picked up my pen.
Beneath Phoenix, I wrote:
Possibility. Not conclusion.
Then, after another pause:
Tell him when I know enough to be honest.
I stared at it.
Reasonable.
Responsible.
Careful.
All the things I'd spent most of my life learning to be.
I closed the notebook.
Somewhere between silence and a lie, there was supposed to be a safe place to stand.
I'd spent years becoming very good at finding it.
For the first time, I wondered how long Marco would let me stay there.
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