Page 15 of What Started In Deception
“I’ll need to go to your house—get familiar with your place and your everyday life. I want to meet your friends and your grandparents.”
“My grandparents are out of town for the rest of the summer—until mid-August.”
“Okay, so your friends, then. We’ll need to take pictures so IT can backdate images into our cell phones.”
Lydia sipped at her water again. “If you’re going to know everything about my life, I want to know about yours.”
He nodded. “We’ll make sure you’re well briefed on my legend.”
She frowned. “I don’t know what that means.”
“My backstory for this operation. For the foreseeable future, I’m Ty, a personal trainer who just moved to Oliver Heights.”
She shook her head. “No. I want to know you. The real you.”
“That’s not how operations like this work.” Not that he’d ever participated in an undercover operation quite like this one before.
“You know everything about me. Or I assume you do.”
He shook his head. “Not everything.”
“But a lot.”
He nodded. “On paper, I do.”
“I can’t say the same about you. You want my trust, but you’re one-dimensional—a stranger.”
He nodded again. “Okay. That’s a fair point.”
The waitress brought over a huge plate of nachos covered in cheese, meat, salsa, sour cream, and guacamole.
“Man, this looks great,” Ty said.
Their waitress beamed at him. “Do you folks need anything else?”
He looked at Lydia. “I don’t think so.”
She smiled at the waitress. “I think we’re all set.”
“Holler if you change your mind.”
“We will,” Lydia said.
Ty immediately dove in, grabbing a cheesy, meaty chip, dipping it in the guacamole, then bit in. “Not bad.”
Lydia sipped at her water again.
He reached for another chip, noting that her shoulders were still stiff, but she was relaxing by degrees. “So, how can we even out our knowledge gap? What do you want to know about me?”
She shrugged. “Basic things, I guess. We could start with your age. And is Ty even your real name?”
He chuckled. “Yeah, Ty’s my real name. Or Tyler, if we’re getting technical. I’m thirty-two. I just had a birthday in May. On the fifth.”
“What’s your middle name?”
“Christopher.”
“Do you really have a sister?”
