The next week he was a fool every time he took a breath because that’s how often he missed Fin, worried about her. Since she wouldn’t answer his messages, he went to see Lenny. Castration would’ve been more enjoyable.
“Wow. I don’t even know what to say to you,” Lenny said, when he showed at the pokey D4D office, “with the exception of get out and don’t ever come back.”
That told him Fin had been in contact, and Lenny knew the truth. “Every dollar that Fin raised for D4D is legit. Even what she took from me. It’s yours. No one is coming for you. You’re not on anyone’s watch list now or ever. You’re free and clear.” And he’d have Halsey make sure the accounting was bulletproof.
“Like I can believe anything you say. You’re just another liar who ruins people’s lives.”
Sometimes the breath stealing ache inside him broke through. He had to lean on the wall to stay upright. “I didn’t mean to hurt Fin. That was the farthest thing from my mind, but I understand why she took the money, and I’ll forever regret I pushed her to it.”
Lenny frowned at him. “I don’t get you.”
“What’s to get? I lied to Fin, betrayed her trust, and she took her revenge.” He shrugged. “I deserved it.”
“You still love her.”
Ah, yes. It was all over him, and he couldn’t not show it. “Guess that makes me a bigger loser.”
“Yeah”—Lenny pointed to the door—“it sure does.”
Without a job to go to, without an agenda for the day, and dodging family calls, he found himself on the street retracing his steps with Fin. He wondered about Scungy. He didn’t even like the mangy bag of fur.
He wandered past the burger bar and didn’t go in because it was their place. And he stood and watched three men run a shell game outside the theater that was playing The Rocky Horror Picture Show until the cops moved them on.
The thing about a shell game played on the street was that it was structured the same way as any con. It lured susceptible players and taught them to believe in something that wasn’t real.
Find the right mark and you could hook them hard enough that you transferred the contents of their wallet to yours. When they were skint and broken down, they still believed it was bad luck, the kind anyone could have.
The thing about Cal post-Fin was he didn’t know if he could still run a con, pick the right mark from all the faces available, give them confidence to master a game rigged against them, and send them away determined to come back and try again. And if he couldn’t do that, then he wasn’t sure how he was going to live. The only legitimate skill he had was sales, and if he couldn’t run a shell game, then he couldn’t sell an overpriced pretzel, let alone a dodgy painting or a newly made dinosaur bone.
When you were born and bred a con, you could see it everywhere: detoxes were scientifically useless; most advice about diet and exercise was flawed; women’s cosmetics made ludicrous claims; the nutritional values of orange juice and milk were inflated; ghostwriters were a deception. There were drugs prescribed for people who didn’t need them; research from respected institutions was selective. The close-door button in an elevator was phony, so was the thermostat in most hotels, only there to give the illusion of control, and it was getting harder to tell fake news from real events. Don’t even start on politicians who bent the truth, sometimes fracturing it entirely to grab power, or the leaders of countries who were self-serving, malevolent corruptions.
But Cal hadn’t seen Fin’s con in the making, and he didn’t know when she’d decided to make him her
mark. Was it when she’d first kissed him on that barstool, or when he’d rejected her advances, or after he’d taught her how to read expressions and noodle? Did she resent his own wealth? Did he make her feel small? Did he teach her how to despise him? Or was it simply that she wasn’t in love with him and took the opportunity to win when it was presented.
He didn’t know which scenario he preferred best, the short con or the long. Both made him question his very existence.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Everything about Windhoek, the capital of Namibia, was a balm to Fin’s sliced up pride and mashed heart. The thick heat, the unfamiliar smells, the mix of shopping malls and desert, donkey carts and Hummers. It was her first time travelling out of the United States, and everything was new and surprising, and it was almost possible to forget what she’d done.
Conned the con artist. Stolen from the thief. Dumped the emotional cheat. Won at the unwinnable shell game.
Once she met with the D4D Aid for Africa project partner, it was entirely possible to forgive herself for being no better than Cal. The large injection of cash would make an enormous difference immediately.
She toured the project offices, met the hardworking staff, and was introduced to dozens of enterprising women who were benefiting from D4D loans. They were awe inspiring. It was a privilege to hear their stories and take pleasure from their success. They were a reason to find a way to keep fundraising big dollars without Cal.
In no hurry to move on, not ready to face Lenny or her family, she spent time helping out in a free school and medical clinic. She cleaned cuts and scratches and read stories and felt guilty for crying herself to sleep at night, especially when she learned the clinic and the school were funded by Sherwood.
She’d done the right thing. She’d played Cal Sherwood at his own game with his own rules, and if he was surprised to find himself momentarily broke and alone, then he’d underestimated her, after all.
It wasn’t till she met Kibali that she had reason to doubt all over again.
Kibali was the eight-year-old son of one of her microloan recipients. He was a twin, a charmer, and a terrible truant. Fin met him at the clinic when he came in for a bandage change on a nasty cut that he’d gotten on an adventure when he should’ve been in class.
“Miss, you are very, very good at bandages, even if you are not a proper doctor,” Kibali said.
“Thank you. I’m trying my best. Maybe if you went to school, you wouldn’t need to have your cut taken care of, and you could become a doctor.”