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By Root 364 0

was unlikely to be the trusting sort, especially when it came to strange men. If he attempted to falsify or even embellish his relationship with Freckles and was caught in a lie, he might lose his chance to convince Tess to call her old friend. Sticking to the truth would be the easiest and the safest strategy, and so this is what he did. Beginning with his discovery of the camera on the bench on an afternoon that seemed eons ago, Milo told his story with as much detail as he could muster, leaving out only those parts of the tapes that he thought Freckles would want to remain secret. Her love for hospital food. Her involvement in exposing Sherry Ferroni’s first period. The blame she placed on herself for Meera’s death. But he kept in the rest, including his decision to continue to watch the tapes, the story of Tess Bryson’s disappearance, and the means by which he was able to locate Cassidy and Tess and learn the fate of Tess’s father.

Emma remained nearly silent throughout the story, only asking for clarification when Milo accidentally referred to Cassidy as Freckles. She reacted very little to the story, which made sense, Milo thought, since she didn’t play a role in it. But the lack of any reaction to the events that Milo was describing made it difficult for him to press on. He couldn’t help but wonder if he was boring the woman, or if she didn’t believe his story, or if she found his decision to watch the tapes reprehensible and was simply counting the seconds until she could get up and leave, offering Milo no hope in finding Tess. Then he’d be left trying to convince Freckles that he, the man who had taken her video camera from a park bench and listened to her deepest, darkest secrets, had found a woman five hundred miles away who claimed to know Tess Bryson but refused to allow her to be contacted.

Not exactly compelling.

Plates of eggs, pancakes, and bacon arrived in the middle of the story, but both Milo and Emma left the food untouched until he was done speaking. After describing the events of the last twenty-four hours, including his fruitless visits to the Brysons and Kelly Plante, Milo raised his fork and knife and began cutting his pancakes into smaller squares, waiting for Emma to respond.

After a moment, she did. “Why did you come all this way, Milo? I mean, you don’t even know Cassidy. Not really. What made you think that this was your job? What made you think that this was any of your business?”

“I don’t know,” Milo said, not anticipating this sort of question. “It’s not like I listed the pros and the cons. For twenty years, this girl has blamed herself for the disappearance and death of her best friend. But after I found out about Tess’s father and realized that she may have disappeared for a reason, I thought that there was a chance that she was still alive and well. Cassidy has been carrying around this secret for most of her life. Hell, she still thinks that Sean Bryson was treated unfairly when Tess disappeared. She’s got this enormous burden on her shoulders and I had a chance to get rid of it for her. It was just what I had to do. I felt like it was the responsibility that I took on when I decided to keep watching the tapes.”

There was more that Milo could have said, but he hoped that that would be enough. Saying more would’ve meant exposing his secrets to this stranger, and this was not something he wanted to do.

Had he the courage, he might have spoken to Emma about secrets, and how he finally understood the debilitating nature of living a secret life. He could’ve explained that even if a person appeared to be living a normal life to outsiders, someone with a secret like his or Cassidy’s or even Tess Bryson’s operated behind a veil of constant fear and shame, and it lingered over everything the person said or did. For people living with secrets, Milo knew that nothing was what it appeared to be. Happiness was a shallow, falsified state of being that was adopted only for the sake of others. For the sake of normality. Milo thought that this was what Cassidy was living with on a daily basis.