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Even though Julian had let her know in advance that he was coming, even though she’d spent hours steeling herself for this moment, even though she knew on some level that Carlos Fonnegra, former detective, was not at fault for her husband’s death, it still killed her inside to see him at her farm once again. Ann Sadler Randol couldn’t force herself to be cordial to him. She didn’t have it in her. So when the car pulled up the driveway she stood behind her stepson and scowled as Carlos stepped out. Her muscles tensed uncomfortably. Julian, however, only smiled and extended his hand to Carlos. “Detective,” he said. “We’re glad you could join us.”
“Former detective,” Carlos replied, taking Julian’s hand in his. There was something in his voice – not sadness, but something like it – that indicated how much Carlos didn’t want to be there, how he didn’t have a choice. He was a tall man, much larger and more formidable than Julian, but his handshake was weak and noncommittal. He seemed like someone broken, but Ann couldn’t muster up any pity for him. She hadn’t any to spare.
Instead she shifted her attention to Betty Robertson, the woman who had arrived with Carlos, who had in fact been the one who led him here, to Liber8. Ann could tolerate Betty. Betty hadn’t been there on that awful day. Betty did not remind her of how quickly or how violently someone could lose so much.
“Come on,” said Ann. “I’ll show you where to put your things.”
Betty Robertson thought she would always love games. Some of her earliest memories involved Candyland and Uno and an Atari with cartridges called Joust and Dig Dug. She learned how to play rummy with her grandfather while she was still in Oshkosh B'gosh overalls, and she begged to go to bingo with her grandmother every week. Games were everything to Betty. After all, there were so many reasons to love them. They had rules and they had order and they had clear winners and losers, and most of the time, Betty was a winner.
But then Betty Robertson learned to hate herself in primary school. It was easy because children are cruel; they pointed out each others' flaws and judged one another based on arbitrary rules that Betty could not figure out. These rules were not laid out clearly in an instruction manual. They could not be explained by the adults she would ask. It was a game she could not win. So instead of playing along she resigned herself to becoming the loser. She learned to hate her clothes and she learned to hate her backpack and she learned to hate the school supplies she'd been so excited to help pick out at the end of August because they were all yellow and green instead of purple and pink. She learned to hate even her favorite things, because they were not loved by anyone else - she hated her favorite books, she hated her favorite foods, and she hated her favorite toys and coveted the ones that other people had instead without knowing exactly why.
The older she got, the harsher the game became, and she learned to hate herself more and more. In middle school she learned to hate her hair and she learned to hate her nose and she learned to hate her teeth; her classmates were swift and unforgiving when pointing out these imperfections to her. When she finally started high school, what she most hated was her name. Betty. It sounded old-fashioned and motherly. The only other Betties she could name off the top of her head were Betty Rubble and Betty Crocker.
In her head Betty invented her own game, creating different identities for herself with slightly different names. First there was Liz, who was confident and cool. If she'd been Liz all along she'd have been popular. Maybe she'd have become a cheerleader instead of joining the chess team. Then there was Libby, who was kind of a klutz but had a good heart. Libby could have had lots of friends. Libby would have been invited to parties. And there was Beth, too, who was the most mature among them, and also smart and funny. Beth would have made good decisions; Beth would have given good advice. Sometimes Betty would adopt one of these invented personalities for a day and see how far she could get, but it never took long for the facade to crumble, even when nobody noticed the difference.
And then, in high school, when her school library finally got some computers hooked up to the internet, Betty found a whole new outlet for herself. She found that online she could be Liz, or Libby, or Beth, and no one was the wiser. She built entirely new profiles for herself based on half-truths and lies of omission. Online, nobody needed to know that she'd never been asked to a dance, or that she'd only been kissed once on a dare. She could be anyone she wanted to be. It made her feel empowered. It made her feel, for the first time, that she was in control of her own identity.
Betty felt she could finally just be herself. As long as she was pretending to be someone else. Solitary and social at the same time - just what Betty needed.
The internet led Betty to other things, of course. She rediscovered her love of games in a big way. All her old favorites - card games, board games, video games - could be downloaded, imitated, or emulated. When she found others online to compete or cooperate with Betty thought she'd found her calling.
Like every other tech-savvy college student, she imagined herself going into game design, or something similarly cool. But when she graduated, she ran into one obstacle after another. She found herself competing for jobs with the same people she'd gone to LAN parties with in college.
And, unsurprisingly, Betty had a hard time selling herself. She had a decent resume that got her called in, but she wasn't able to come across as well in interviews as she did on paper. The childish reasons she hated herself kept dogging her. She worried too much about her hair, her clothes, her tendency to stumble over her words when she was nervous. So she tried to be Liz. She tried to be Libby. She tried to be Beth. She kept getting turned down. “We’re going in a different direction,” they’d tell her, or “We filled the position internally.” And that was if they even had the courtesy to tell her.
But she had made good with most of her professors, and when one of them heard that a temp position opened up in the district attorney’s office, strings were pulled and the job went to Betty. And she did good work there; when her contract was nearly expired, one of her coworkers suggested taking a couple of courses in criminal justice. “They’re always looking for people with your skills in the police department,” he told her. “You just need the qualifications.” He arranged for her to shadow someone in the department for a day to see how she felt about it.
The man she was paired with, a cop named Carlos Fonnegra, was tall, dark, and handsome. That alone was reason enough not to fall head over heels for him. How cliche would that be? Taken straight from the plot of a mid-90s romantic comedy - nerdy girl falls for stereotypical jock guy. It would probably involve a makeover montage set to a terrible girl-power ballad.
“Elizabeth Robertson," he said when they were introduced. "Kind of a mouthful. Do you go by Elizabeth, or...?"
This was her chance. She could say she was Liz. She could say she was Libby. She could say she was Beth. But she was too disarmed by Carlos' charming smile to think quickly enough, and she stumbled over her words when she was nervous.
“Betty,” she said, instantly regretting the lost opportunity. "Most people call me Betty."
“Betty," Carlos repeated. "I like that. Too many Liz zes and Beths, you know? I think we already have two or three of each in this precinct alone."
It wasn't something she loved, and it wasn't nearly as cool as gaming, but after a day shadowing Carlos, Betty enrolled for some criminal justice classes online.
In the kitchen where her husband died, Ann Randol Sadler confronted her stepson Julian about the wisdom of his actions. She thought she could handle seeing Carlos again, but having him here, in her home, triggered something inside her she wasn’t sure she could control. The heat had been turned up on her slowly seething anger.
“I know what I’m doing,” Julian said. He was eating a sandwich and talking with his mouth full. He was still such a child sometimes; Ann had to bite her tongue to keep from chiding him. She knew better – it wouldn’t go over well. Julian had gone through too much.
But she couldn’t let the matter with Carlos drop. “Are you sure?” she asked, low and pleading and afraid.
Julian looked hurt. “Don’t you trust me?”
“Of course I do, sweetheart,” Ann said. “Of course I do.”
He shrugged and shook his head. “I know it’s asking a lot of you,” he said. “You don’t like him very much.”
“He might not have been the one who pulled the trigger, Julian,” Ann said, her voice cracking with emotion, “but he killed your father. I can’t forgive that.”
“Neither can I,” Julian replied. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t use him. Believe me - I know what I’m doing.”
“Are you sure?” Ann asked again.
“We don’t have to have them in the house if that makes you too uncomfortable,” Julian said. “The barn is empty. Alec’s not coming back.”
Julian hadn’t meant anything but it, but his remark stung Ann in an entirely different way, enough to make her forget her anger at Carlos for the moment. “Fine,” she said, distracted the reminder of another kind of ache . “That’s fine.”
"Think of it like a game, and you'll be fine," Inspector Dillon had told Betty when he gave her the secret assignment. "Try not to take it too seriously."
The look on her face must have betrayed her insecurity. She imagined there was some mixture of surprise and fear in her expression that made Dillon immediately try to reassure her.
"Wouldn't Carlos be a better choice for this kind of thing?" Betty asked.
"I'm afraid he's got enough on his plate right now; he's got a full case load. Besides that, he's been working these Liber8 cases with Agent Cameron for so long I worry he's too recognizable."
"So you picked me because I'm not recognizable?" she asked, and a memory of how she hated her hair and her nose and her teeth flashed through her mind.
"And you're smart. Smart enough to get out when you recognize danger, instead of sticking around and making it worse."
Betty wasn't sure whether that was a compliment or not.
So she treated it as a stealth mission. She'd completed dozens of them in all kinds of video games before; there was little more to it than getting in, gathering relevant intel, and getting out safely. If anyone asked her name, she could tell them she was Liz, or Libby, or Beth. She came up with an invented backstory she could share - one that relied on half-truths and lies of omission and didn't involve working undercover for the VPD - in case anyone asked.
But Betty did not count on being so drawn in. There was something in Liber8's message that appealed to her, just as it appealed to the others that went to that meeting. These were people disenfranchised just because they couldn't play by the rules of a game they never learned. Just like her.
She didn't realize it yet, but she wasn't going to complete the assignment that Dillon had given her. Maybe she wasn't smart enough to avoid danger after all, or maybe she was switching teams.
She told Dillon she didn't learn anything useful, and had no information to give him. None of the higher-ups had been at that meeting anyway. But when she went to another meeting, and another, and another, she kept that to herself.
She knew on some level that what she was doing was wrong. There were laws, of course, and she was breaking them, putting herself at risk of losing her job or worse. But those weren't the repercussions she feared the most.
Her heart raced every time she saw Carlos, and not for the same reasons it did before.
Roland Randol was not a gun nut, at least not in the way some of the media wanted it to seem. He was an enthusiast, perhaps. Or simply an ordinary person who knew how to use a gun. Firearms were tools to him, not weapons. They were used with respect, and never against another human being.
Ann had gone with him to the shooting range once in a while. She had learned to shoot as a girl but hadn’t been interested in it much since then. It took some practice for her to feel comfortable with a gun in her arms. The recoil from a rifle felt unnatural, unnerving, and anything smaller she gripped too tightly. The first few times she returned home with redness in her palms and bruises on her arms and a tenseness in her shoulders she couldn’t shake out.
Though her aim on a handgun was decent, Ann never quite got the hang of it on the rifle. She trusted the scope too much, but when she centered the crosshairs on a target only a few yards away, she found that her actual shots would be off-center. Not by much, her husband would reassure her, but enough that Ann found it discouraging.
“I don’t think I’m cut out for this,” she’d say to Roland. “Guns don’t agree with me.”
“Julian knows how to do it, and he’s just a kid,” Roland would reply. “It’s important to me that if we have guns in the house, you know how to use them.”
“I do know,” Ann told him. “I just don’t know how to use them well.”
And then he’d smile and say something encouraging and rub the tension from her shoulders while she rested her head against his chest. "You know, it's good if it hurts," he'd tell her. "That's how you know you're doing it right."
Now he was dead from a gunshot wound, and Ann Randol cradled a semiautomatic pistol in one hand. She wasn’t sure where it came from. It hadn’t belonged to her husband; all of his firearms had been confiscated, and hadn’t been returned. But ever since Julian had been released from prison, ever since he started leading Liber8 by more than just example, weapons of all sorts had begun appearing at their home, and Ann didn’t question it. She knew their safety was at stake.
She released the safety and racked the slide of the gun. There was a satisfying click as a bullet loaded into the chamber.
She wasn’t afraid to use it anymore.
After Julian left them in the barn, Betty dropped her things, cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted “Hello!” just to hear her voice echo back to her. It was a large and empty space, and Julian warned them it would be cold and dusty. But Betty wasn’t bothered. She was almost happy to be here. Happy because Carlos was here with her. “Tight quarters, huh?” she said, turning around. He was leaning against a wall, hands in his pockets, looking down at his feet. “Sorry,” she said. “Lame joke.”
“I’m just not in the mood, Betty.”
“I get it,” Betty said. “Sorry.”
“Why’d they make us move to the barn, anyway?” Carlos said, an edge of suspicion to the question. “Seems a rather abrupt change of plans.”
“It makes sense,” Betty said, coming to the Randols’ defense. “If the VPD comes looking for us, they’ll have to go through the house first, and that would buy us some time to escape. Plus, if we did get caught, it would give the Randols some plausible deniability, moreso than having us as guests in their home, anyway. And also this is where the other son had his computers and everything, I guess, so Julian was saying if I wanted to get any tech…”
“Betty, stop,” Carlos interrupted. “It was a rhetorical question.”
The color must have drained from her face when he said that, because Betty was suddenly thrust back into memories of childhood and adolescence and never being able to do anything right. But Carlos was quick to correct himself. “Damn,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“I know you’re upset,” Betty replied. “I know you have a lot to be upset about.”
“But I shouldn’t snap at you,” Carlos said. He walked over to her and put his arms around her, pulling her in close. “You’re the only one trying to help.”
“What about Kiera?” Betty asked.
“I have no idea,” Carlos said. “I’d rather not talk about it.”
Betty didn’t pry, but her jealousy of Kiera eased up somewhat. Maybe she could be Carlos’ partner now.
They made themselves a place to sleep from old horse blankets and an air mattress and they laid side by side for the rest of the night.
She knew her way there in the dark. She could walk confidently without stumbling; she knew where to avoid the floorboards that creaked. She’d had to find her way like this back when Alec still lived at home, back when his computers and monitors and other gadgets she couldn’t name were crowded all together in the loft of the barn. Back then she’d come out here at all hours of the night, telling her son to go to bed, reminding him that he had school in the morning and other obligations and responsibilities around the farm and with his family.
She missed him. And it hurt. But this was not about Alec. He could still come back some day.
This was about Roland, who had been taken from her for good.
She hadn’t expected to see them sleeping side by side. It wasn’t so cold in here that it was done out of necessity. She could see Carlos’ feet sticking out from beneath the blanket they shared, shoes still on, so it wasn’t something romantic. Still, it seemed oddly intimate. It threw her off. She had to rethink what she was doing, how she was going to do it. She gripped the gun too hard, the way she used to. She gripped it so hard her knuckles went white. She straightened her arm and locked her elbow instead of letting her muscles go loose. That would hurt when the gun recoiled. But she didn’t have Roland there to correct her, and she knew it. She fell back on old habits as though it was going to bring back his ghost. Ann lost herself in thought for a moment, thinking back to the afternoons at the shooting range with her husband, his tenderness in the evenings afterwards.
In that moment Betty woke up and slowly sat up in bed. She must have been a light sleeper. “Mrs. Randol?” she said, whispering. “Mrs. Randol, what are you doing?” The gunmetal glimmered dimly in the cold slice of moonlight coming in from a high window, and Betty’s voice trembled.
“I’m not here for you, don’t worry,” Ann said. She kept her aim fixed on the sleeping man. “But Carlos… don’t wake him up,” she warned. “Don’t wake him up or I’ll shoot.”
“Mrs. Randol, can we talk about this? Can you put the gun down?” Betty pleaded. “Please?”
“Why?” Ann asked. Her voice pitched too wildly for her to control her own volume, but Carlos didn’t stir. “Why does he deserve to live after everything he’s done? After everything that’s happened?”
“Carlos isn’t the enemy, Mrs. Randol,” Betty said. “I know… I know this has been hard for you, and I can’t even pretend that I understand what you’ve been going through, but please…” Betty closed her eyes, as though in prayer. “Please… please… don’t do this.”
It was only then that Ann realized. “Do you love him?” she asked.
“What?” Betty stammered.
“You do, don’t you?” Ann said, her voice flat now. “You love him.” Her muscles relaxed. She let her arms fall to her sides in defeat. She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t repeat what had been done to her.
“Mrs. Randol?” Betty said, finally gathering the courage to move, finally shifting away from Carlos and standing alone, apart. “Are you all right?”
Ann felt her knees buckle; she sank to the floor slowly, falling forward onto her elbows, shutting her eyes and trying to suppress a sob. “You can call me Ann.”
When she opened her eyes Betty was beside her.
“Can I take the gun?” Betty asked. “I just want to put the safety back on.”
Ann nodded, and Betty took the firearm away and slipped it into her waistband after setting the safety. And then Betty wrapped her arms around Ann and began to pull her up. “Carlos never needs to know that this happened,” she said, “but let’s get you back to the house.”
“Will you tell Julian?”
Betty shook her head. “I won’t if you don’t want me to.”
Ann let Betty lead her back to the house, even if it meant stepping on the creaky floorboards and stumbling, at times, in the dark. The moon had already reached its apex and began to sink towards the horizon, preparing for dawn. “I’ll make coffee,” Ann said. “Do you drink coffee?”
“Sure,” Betty replied. “About tonight… You won’t tell Carlos, will you?”
“That I tried to kill him and you saved his life?”
“No, I mean…” Betty said. “The other stuff.”
They agreed to keep one another’s secrets in the kitchen where Ann’s husband died, and afterwards Ann locked the pistol up in his old gun safe. As she did so she felt the muscles in her shoulders tense and then relax again. It's good that it hurts, her husband's gentle words echoed in her memory. That's how you know you're doing it right.