The item he was looking for didn’t take long to find. After just a few seconds of searching, he found a burner smartphone in the tote’s inside pocket, the kind that required cards with minutes as opposed to a formal plan. It was so cheaply made, it looked like a toy.
But it wasn’t a toy. It was just as he’d suspected. She had a secret phone. That was how she’d been in contact with her brother, whose number hadn’t appeared in the history of the iPhone X he’d had Wayne give her.
Who else had she been calling on it? Her father? And perhaps someone else…
The memory of how close Asher Peretz had been standing to Dawn before he saw Victor came back to him in a rush. And it made his chest burn.
Nonetheless, he returned the phone to the tote. He’d do the necessary work to unlock the cheap device later. But for now, he’d have to trust Dawn enough not to let this discovery derail his surprise.
He was just putting away the nozzle when Dawn returned to the car.
“When’s the last time you actually had to fill up your own tank with gas?” she asked with a teasing tone.
“It has been a while,” he admitted. “But I remembered how to, don’t worry. There will be no Z-O-O-L-A-N-D-E-R accidents.”
She burst out laughing after he spelled out Zoolander. That had been her brother’s all-time favorite movie for some reason. And Byron had somehow convinced Victor to watch it during one of their coverup hangouts at his place. The movie had been in English, but the comedy had been so baffling. It had taken Dawn and Byron more time for them to explain to him why it was supposed to be funny than to watch it.
“So you’re really not going to tell me where we’re going,” Dawn asked, still laughing as I got back into the Audi.
He paused in restarting the car to remind her, “It’s a surprise.”
“Is it vegetables?” she demanded. “Because the only thing worse than fruit would be vegetables.”
“It’s not vegetables,” he answered, his shoulders once again shaking with laughter.
Many of The Silent Triad members had never seen Victor smile. But he’d laughed more with Dawn over the last few weeks than he had over the previous ten years.
Really, over the last fifteen years.
And he was beginning to get used to it.
That realization gave him pause as he waited for her to finish buckling up her seatbelt. They were only pretending. But somehow, she was doing it again. Making him laugh. Making him happy. Making him feel more alive than he had since…
Well, since her.
“At least tell me where we’re going?” she bargained as he pulled out of the station.
He raised one hand from the wheel to once again say, “It’s a—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Dawn cut him off with the roll of her eyes. “It’s a surprise.”
He was saved from answering any more questions when he got back onto the highway and needed both hands to drive.
They sank into a companionable silence as they listened to a Jack FM station dedicated to playing a random mix of music from the 90s to the current decade. Dawn tried to posit a few more guesses about what his surprise might be, but she didn’t get anywhere close.
Which made it even better when she saw their destination.
“Oh, my God….” Dawn clapped her hands together, and her entire face lit up with wonder when she saw all of the cherry blossom trees surrounding Washington DC’s famous Tidal Basin. “It’s cherry blossom season! Just like in Japan!”
Deflecting all of her questions…the long drive…taking the chance that he’d be at least seven hours out-of-pocket if Kuang decided to ask for one of his last-second meetings...
The look on her face alone made it all worth it.
It was a bit of a line to get into the parking lot along Maine Drive. And he barely got the car stopped before she jumped out and ran toward the trees.
This was something else he’d forgotten about her. Her unabashed enthusiasm for all the things she thought were beautiful. Like anime. Cherry blossom trees. And him.
He caught up with her at the top of the trailhead path after he finished paying for parking.
“It’s so beautiful!” she called out to him. “I can’t believe you brought me here!”
He couldn’t believe he’d brought her here either. It was one thing to run Operation Good as New 2.0 back in Rhode Island. It was another to do something like this. Something that reminded him of the fool he used to be. Specifically when it came to her.
It was raining now. Cherry blossoms, not droplets of water. The petals floated down, catching in Dawn’s braids.
She was so beautiful. He stopped in his footsteps, then feet away, because suddenly it hurt to look at her.
The cherry blossoms showering down on her were delicate and fragile. Yet, they could only grow after a winter’s frost. In Japan, the pretty pink petals served as a symbol of many powerful things: life-and-death, beauty and violence, and the ephemeral-yet-cyclical nature of all four.
