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E is for “Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining” – Just a romantic story ala Hallmark

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I was once told that there are five ways of doing something,

The right way

The wrong way

My way

Your way, and,

The way it should have been done!

For the better part of my life, I always believed my way was the right way, and that was fine while I was responsible only for myself.

Once you add someone else to the equation, then suddenly, everything you do becomes far more complicated.

So, how did that happen?

The first tendrils of light were flickering through the window, between the cracks on the curtain.

I couldn’t sleep, not so much because the bed was uncomfortable, but because of the decisions I had made.

I looked at the calm, serene expression on the face of the woman I tried ever so hard not to fall in love with.  In my line of work, there was no room for such sentimentality.

Being a lone wolf was a necessity.

Those words rolled around in my head, over and over I heard Rawlings speech the day we began, that first day of the rest of our lives.

Do not get attached to anyone, anywhere, anything.  Do not live in one place, do not have a regular pattern of movement, do not stay in one particular hotel more than once, do not drive the same car.

If you believe you’ve been compromised, go off-grid.

Where we were was as off-grid as you could get.

It wasn’t so much that I had dragged Penelope into this mess. It was more that she had invited herself along for the ride.

Two nights before, I sent a message to say I needed to see her.  She suggested dinner and picked a restaurant, small and easy to blend in and at the same time keep an eye out for trouble.

She had recognised my preferences.  That should have been a red flag, but I let feelings into that equation.

I arrived first, doing the mandatory check outside for anything unusual, then going inside, assessing the threat level and exits, and then sitting at a table near the rear.

It was the first time I wondered if there would be a time in my life when I could stop looking over my shoulder.

Penelope arrived ten minutes later, knowing I didn’t like arriving late, dressed plainly so that few people registered her arrival.  Those that did, I noted.

She saw me, smiled, and came over after a brief word with the waitress who had ushered me to the table.

The waitress followed with a bottle of champagne and two glasses, poured, and left us alone.  A quick glance around the room didn’t identify any problems, but with Penelope sitting next to me, my judgement was compromised.

She took a sip and did that little shiver thing every time she first sipped her champagne, and then said, “What is so urgent I had to drop everything?”

She had one of those mesmerising voices that could take you down a rabbit hole and never want to come back.

I shook my head, trying to clear it.  It didn’t work.

The speech I had rehearsed in my head sounded appropriate … in my head.  Now, in front of her, it sounded ridiculous.

“I have to go away.”

“So.  You’ve done that before.”

“Permanently.”

Expression change, not happy.  When she frowned, it was like the darkness setting in.  “Where?”

“England.”

“Why?”

“It was always a possibility, but I didn’t think it would be this soon.”

“When?”

“Tonight.  It was just sprung on me.”

“So …”

“I can’t do long distance, and I couldn’t ask you to come with me.  You have your aspirations, and that promotion is just around the corner …”

“We should break up?”

It’s definitely not a happy face now.

“I don’t want to, but there’s practicality in play.  I don’t want you to lose what you have worked so hard for “

“Then don’t go.”

It wasn’t an option, and I couldn’t explain why.  And if I did, she would be out the door so fast her feet wouldn’t touch the ground.

“I don’t have a choice.”

“You always have a choice.”

And whilst that might be true, I was not going to get the time to argue the point.  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw movement by the door.

Two men, scanning the room, stopped on me.

I sighed.  If I was on my own, it would simply be a matter of sliding down and getting out the rear entrance, not six feet from where we were sitting.

An extra body, not sitting closer to the door, and now a target, just proved Rawlings statement.  The thing is, she was not going to become collateral damage.

Not today.

They, like me, had stopped to assess the damage, knowing that I was not going to go quietly, and that people were going to die.  Their issue was that other diners had looked up at them and would now remember their faces.  It added just enough of a hesitation factor.

Penelope and I not so much, but if the restaurant had CCTV, that was all moot.  Camera over the front door, camera over the door to the kitchen.

“We have to go,” I said quietly.

She, too, had seen the two men and had instantly recognised trouble.  Textbook thugs, the way Hollywood portrayed their bad guys.

“Who are they?”

“Trouble.”  I had a gun, but using it in this confined space was a recipe for disaster.  I could shoot them, but between me and them was a dozen unpredictable humans.

They hadn’t moved.  A waitress was moving towards them.

I grabbed her hand and, in one fluid motion, slid out of the booth and pulled her to her feet, and then dragged her through the kitchen doorway.

Movement by the door, one shoved the waitress whilst the other drew his weapon, and three shots thwacked into the closing door.

Seconds later, we were through the back door, and the men were in pursuit until I turned, pulled out the gun, and shot the both of them as they came out the doorway.

Not to kill.  It was never my first choice unless I had no choice.

I didn’t give her time to think. I just pulled her along, up another alley to the main street and plenty of foot traffic to blend in.

She had not pulled her hand away.  Yet.

“What just happened?”  She spoke quietly, but not with a hint of hysteria, just breathlessness.

“The reason why I wanted to break up.  I have a past, and it’s about to catch up with me.  Those men would shoot the both of us dead, without hesitation.  Chances are you still have a degree of anonymity, but it won’t last long if you stay with me.”

“What did you do?”

“I tried to save a friend and failed.  He was in trouble, and I thought I could fix it.”

“And made it worse?”

“Things tend to go sideways when I get involved.  Wrong people, bad intelligence, or just plain bad luck.”

I wasn’t going to add it was one of our own people who was trying to find me.  I unmasked him quite by accident.  No one knew he was playing on both sides of the street, and he wanted to keep it that way.

“Then I guess you’re stuck with me.  Tell me you have a plan.”

“You won’t like it.”

“I don’t like the life I have, and I was about to go back home.  Believe me, you’ve saved me from a fate worse than death.”

I was not that sure she had traded up.  I could see the bright look in her eyes, the flush in her cheeks, and adrenaline flowing through her.  When that subsided, everything would be different.

It was a case of damned if you do or damned if you don’t.  I shrugged.  “OK.  Welcome to the first day of the rest of your life.”

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©  Charles Heath  2025

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D is for — “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t”.  Between the devil and the deep blue sea

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There is always that one person.

Always there.  Nothing is too much trouble.  Always happy to help even when they know it will not be acknowledged.  Always the ones overlooked because they are, basically, invisible.

That one person had a name.

Deanna Wilkinson.

I met her on the first day at my new school, having moved from another state.  It was my fourth school in three years, and with different education systems, I was finding it harder to catch up and keep up.

Deanna Wilkinson made that easier because having lived in Dantonville all her life and more interested in learning than boys, she made a very good tutor.

And that being the case…

Over the years, from the last two of grade school and through middle school, we became friends while keeping me on track scholastically.

However, being a boy and easily distracted, especially after the try-out for the football team, and later the role I played in bringing success to a team that always fell short, I found myself popular in ways I never imagined.

The most improbable in that last year of school was being brought into the orbit of Sandra Oliphant.

Before I arrived in town, the Dantons and the Oliphants were two of the main families who had been in the district since before God, or so Archie said, and they all owned everything between them.  Why else, he said, would the town be named after them?

Nearly everything.  My father had seen a parcel of land up for sale and bought it.  A property that had been given to one of the other Dantons, who wanted to quit town because of the old man, and put it up for sale.

The recipient knew if he sold it back to old man Danton, he’d get nothing for it, hence the sale to my father.  When Danton heard about it, he offered to buy it back, cheaply, but my father refused.

Thus began hostilities.

The land belonged to the Dantons, Sandra Oliphant belonged to the Dantons, and everything else belonged to the Dantons, apparently.

Including the football team, the Dantonville Raiders.  A team that never won a championship.  Before I realised that no one with any talent joined the team. I made the mistake of trying out.

The coach then asked me to play, and that first game, we won.  Then another, and another.  Then I realised why no one joined the team.  It was all about Archie.  And his father.

I tried to quit.  My father said I couldn’t.  The coach said I couldn’t, and old man Danton made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. He’d stop giving us grief over that piece of land.

He was right, I couldn’t refuse.

Then Sandra Oliphant decided I’d make a better boyfriend than Archie.  I told her I wouldn’t, then told Archie that I was not making a play for his girlfriend. After telling her I was flattered but I was not interested.

What worried me was that she was too easily convinced.  Something else was in play, and I was going to end up in the middle of it.

I learned some very valuable lessons that year.

One.  Never volunteer for anything, whether you might be good at it or not.

Two.  Men like Archie’s father and boys like Archie and his friends used wealth and power to manipulate and bully those around them simply because they are allowed to.

Three.  Men like Dalton and my father never liked to lose and would do anything it took to win

Four.  I would never understand girls or women, and that any expectation or level of understanding I might have or thought I had could be undone or changed unexpectedly at any time.

When everything became too difficult, I would saddle up Joey, the placid horse Deanna had loaned me, and ride up to the hilltop cabin.  It was a halfway point when moving cattle from the hills to the Plains.

I planned to stay there for a day or two before the last game of the season, the championship.  That would be followed by graduation, the Prom (though I wasn’t going), and then I would be leaving to go to college.

My father said football scouts would be at the game and had frequently told anyone who would listen that I was big city team material.

Archie Danton might be, but I certainly wasn’t.  Anyone could catch a ball and run with it.

But as many times I said I didn’t care that my chances of being seen, let alone drafted into the major football league, it was as remote as my chances of being Prom King and going out with Sandra, something my mother held great stock in.

She, like my father and my sister, just didn’t listen.

I just hoped my father wasn’t the one who called the scouts, knowing that it was exactly the sort of thing he would do to bug me.  But then, that was Archie’s father, too, and there was a rivalry going on between them.

And the subject of yet another argument before I left in a huff.

I could see another horse and rider in the distance, and it wasn’t hard to tell who it was.

Deanna.

I sat on the swing seat on the front veranda and waited.  Like always, she was in no hurry.  Olivia, my pugnacious sister, must have told her where I was despite the fact I had told her not to tell anyone.

It was just like her, presuming that after all this time, Deanna and I had known each other and having spent so much time in each other’s company, we would get together.  It wasn’t as simple as that, but Olivia was not up to the stage of complicated relationships.

Deanna tied up her horse, came up the slight incline leading to the steps, gave me her usual cursory glance, and then negotiated the stairs before sitting at the other end of the seat.

As I watched her get off the horse, hitch the reins to the post, then walk the short distance to the stairs, it wasn’t hard to notice the changes from the precocious seven-year-old I first met all those years ago to the beautiful eighteen-year-old grown-up woman she had become.

I wished I could say I had grown up, too.

“Olivia said you were hiding up here.”

“If I were, you wouldn’t find me.”

“Things that bad?”

“You once said I was the master of my destiny.  You were right.  I should not have turned up to the tryouts.  You said not to.”

“When did you ever listen to me?”

“When you tutored me enough to pass my exams.  Never thanked you, but then, I don’t think I’ve ever thanked you for everything you’ve done for me.”

“No need.  It was a pleasant way to spend my spare time.”

“You could have done something more important than waste it on me.”

She gave me one of her annoyed looks and then shook her head.  “I’m not going to dignify that with a retort.”

I took a moment to give her a sidelong glance. She could ride a horse better than any cowboy I’d seen; I’d worked with her chasing strays, and she had participated in several girls’ events at rodeos.  She had even taught me to ride a horse.

If I ever became a rancher…

“What are you going to do come graduation?”  We had talked around the edges of what the end of the year might bring.

“College, maybe, but more likely look after Mom.  The fall she had a few months back; she is not getting any better.”

I was there when it happened.  We both knew her mom should not have been on that horse in the first place, but it was difficult to tell someone who’d been doing it all their life.

“And college?”

“It’ll have to wait.  Besides, you’re going to become this big-time footballer.  You’ll be far too busy settling in.”

“I’m not that good, and a lot of people are going to be disappointed.”

“Your father thinks you are.  So does the coach.”

“The coach wouldn’t dare say that in front of old man Dalton.  There is only one player on the team worthy of selection for the big time, and that’s Archie.  For once, I actually agree with them.”

“You have to admit, until you joined the team, they never looked like winning.”

“Coincidence.  I’m not going to accept if it’s offered.  I want to be a journalist and report the games, not play in them.  Or get mixed up with those cheerleaders. Archie and the rest of the team can have them.  My five minutes with Sandra was a nightmare.  Please tell me he’s been elected Prom King.”

“I can tell you Sandra is the Prom Queen, and your mother has been pleading your case.  She seems to think Archie has got everything else, someone else should be selected.”

I shook my head.  My mother was trying to curry favour with the heavyweights, both Mrs Dalston and Mrs Oliphant, and I wished her luck.  There was no room in that group for another.

“Those two have been together since they were born, would be perfect together at the Prom, which I might add I’m not going to if I can avoid it, and they will be the perfect couple when they get married.”

“If only.”

“And Archie?  Are they going to make him the king?  I mean, really, he is the only choice, given his parents’ standing in this town.”

She shrugged. “Everyone is talking about the new hometown hero.  You’d better play badly so he can shine.”

“That’s ridiculous.  I had nothing to do with winning that last game.”

“Didn’t you?  Drawing the defence left Harry open.  It was brilliant.”

“I was trying to minimise my involvement.  Get them to win without me.”

She smiled.  “Not how the coach saw it.  But, if you’re so adamant you don’t want the king, just tell the organisers to take your name off the list.  I’m sure Archie will be on it already for you.”

If I knew anything about Archie, he would have found a way to make sure I didn’t win.  In a sense, it should have annoyed me, but in another, it was a certain relief.  Having to put up with Sandra would be simply too much.

“So,” she said with just a hint of a wistful smile, “by the way, just who are you interested in?”

Good segway.  She looked at me with those piercing blue eyes, the eyes that could see into your soul.

I took her hand in mine.  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”  I looked into those eyes, and that was my first mistake.

“Emily?”

I shook my head.

“Andrea?”

I shook my head and squeezed her hand gently.

She was going to say another name, then didn’t.  Instead, I could see her eyes moisten.

“It could never work.”

“I know.”

“We are friends.”

“Very good friends.”

“Special friends.  When did you come to this conclusion?”

“About a year ago, maybe a bit less.  You were so angry with me; I was sure you were going to punch my lights out.  I wanted to hug you.”

“I wanted to kiss you.”

“I’ve wanted to do that for a long time.”

“You only had to ask.”

“May I….”

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©  Charles Heath  2025