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At least have the decency not to lie to yourself, Faust had said. Connie was now drumming up the courage to do just that.

On a booking, she drove a well-to-do gentleman to a suburb on the outskirts of Barden, where the mansions outnumbered the residents. She enjoyed the way the car shuddered when she kicked it into high gear to let it loose on the motorway, blowing past SUVs and Land Rovers.

“Jolly good show,” brayed the gentleman, waving at the people they were leaving in the dust. “Mush, mush! Arthur never has the mettle to drive at such speed!”

Connie laughed as she squeezed every last rev she could out of the car, shoving torrents of water in every direction. She was flying.

“Onward, faster,” said the gentleman. “Freer, higher!”

Connie suddenly had to slam on the breaks, because the roundabout was coming up and that was the end of the motorway and the narrow roads around here forced her to crawl at 30 miles an hour. The pruned trees seemed to drift by lazily, in slow motion, and she kept catching herself accidentally going 40.

“I say,” said the gentleman, taking off his rain hat and wiping his brow. “Deirdre was most exacting in her recommendation, and I’m not a bit disappointed. Why on earth is such an excellent driver as yourself working for a scabby taxi firm? If I didn’t have Arthur, I’d take you on myself!”

“It’s good money,” Connie was about to say, the lie rising to her lips as naturally as she took her breaths. But an image of Faust’s scathing expression barged its way into her mind, and it was so overpowering that she accidentally blew past a red light. A battle of two shames was bringing a blush to her cheeks that shone past her makeup – was she more ashamed of being seen as a failure, or was she more ashamed of lying about it?

“Madame?” said the gentleman, swigging from his hip flask. “It was the turning back there.”

“Right,” said Connie, swinging them round in a three-point turn before the guy could even register it. Then the tires were crunching up the gravel of his mile-long driveway. She decided to tell him the truth, and tears welled up in her eyes as she was about to say it. Connie wasn’t a crier… or was it just that she’d told herself she wasn’t a crier because crying meant you weren’t being successful? To Connie, introspecting was like trying to sort out her headphones drawer, because all she saw was a tangled mess of aspirations and justifications with no end or beginning.

“The truth is,” she said. She’d only let one little tear go, but it had blurred her mascara and then dropped down to stain a blotch onto her immaculate white shirt.

She felt an ant before this rich gentleman, pulling up to his mansion with its own golf course and hunting grounds; with a network of fountains that had more complicated plumbing than Barden City Centre.

“Nice place,” she said, craning her neck to count the main building’s five stories.

He put on his rain hat and frowned.

“I suppose,” he said. “You’d think me lucky to have inherited such a property. But the problem with being rich is that you’re only allowed to socialise with rich people, and I don’t like those very much at all.”

“Hah,” she said. “You’d be surprised how often I hear that.”

“Here’s your fee,” said the gentleman, counting out how much he owed her then doubling it by slipping her a fifty. He opened the car door, summoning the gumption to step out into the rain—

“The truth is,” said Connie. “I’m a driver because I couldn’t get hired anywhere else. Turned down by grad schemes. Turned down by internships. Turned down by retail. So I made my own way. And now I work so much that I don’t have the energy to apply anywhere else.”

The man paused. She tried to read his expression in the rearview mirror, but it was hidden by his hat. A guillotine hung over her head. She wiped her face and found it wet, but she wasn’t even convulsing, and her voice was steady – the tears were just running forth like she’d accidentally left a tap on. For the first time in her adult life, she was vulnerable.

“Mmm,” said the gentleman, nodding. “My grandson is going through something similar. Certainly, it’s harder than it was in my day.”

“What?” She turned around. He hadn’t admonished her. Hadn’t told her she should’ve been doing better.

“The most important skill you can learn is to ask for help when you need it,” he said. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of – my friends and I bail each other out of scandals all the time. Don’t suffer in silence, my dear, or suffering will be all you know.”

“I… yes,” said Connie. She reached for her tissue box and wiped her eyes. She blinked, trying to read any sort of hostility on the leathery bag of skin that was his face.

“If you decide to pursue certification as a chauffeur, I’d be glad to offer you sponsorship in the form of a small loan. Don’t hesitate to ask.”

“I… I…” Connie stared at him, mouth agape. The part of her brain that was supposed to be feeding her words seized up.

He tucked a business card into the cupholder.“I suppose you must have a busy schedule and all, so I’ll be off. Ta-ta, my dear, and don’t lose hope!”

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

The gentleman’s butler took his belongings and welcomed him into the gigantic door of his mansion, and he gave a little wave before disappearing into its depths. It was ten o’clock at night, and Connie sat there in his driveway as the rain splashed down on her car, running off it in rivers.

She felt the most embarrassed she’d ever felt, but at the same time, a weight that she hadn’t even known had been tugging her into the depths of despair had lifted. Her reflection stared back at her, makeup ruined, and she instinctively reached for the little kit bag to retouch it. What her hand brought back instead were the makeup wipes.

She took the mask off. It took the whole pack of wipes to do.

This was Connie, looking back at her. Connie with the spots, with the laugh lines, with the off-coloured cheeks. Flaws and all. The skin on her face breathed in the cool air with joy.

(At least have the decency not to lie to yourself. The most important skill you can learn is to ask for help when you need it.) Was she ready?

She snapped a selfie on her phone, of the woman who was not the ideal self but simply the reality, and she set it as her profile picture without adding a filter or even a tag like ‘no makeup challenge’. Instantly, the likes rolled in, and people she didn’t know commented things like ‘Yaaaas queen’ and ‘Such a powerful statement!’

“What,” she murmured. Her normal self was a statement, with the ideal fake being the status quo?

The likes racked up, easily leaping the one-hundred hurdle. At this point, the men began trying to DM her. And she realised, with a growing sickness in her stomach, that no matter what she posted, it would be taken as a statement with performative intent. She scrolled through the photos she’d added in the last year – extravagant breakfasts, a 360 view of her apartment with no corner left untouched, a 1,000 photo chronicle of her finding happiness in Ibiza – and then she looked back at her face in the mirror of her crappy old taxi. Which one was Connie? Which one was happy?

At 10:30, she deleted her account and cruised back down the motorway, ready to pick up Alan MacCain in Slumsfield, Barden.

Connie had spent a year of her childhood in Slumsfield. She had the scars to prove it. Shuffling creatures in hoodies lurked the streets, and they fed on the wallets of tourists. Streetlights flickered on and off, struggling to make headway against the omnipresent gloom of smog, while the majority of windows were boarded up; the majority of doors cowered behind iron bars. It is said that a policeman once stepped into Slumsfield and spontaneously combusted.

Connie kept the spray can of capsaicin in her hand, but truthfully, she would have preferred a gun. She kept her speed up as she followed the GPS to Alan MacCain’s pub, because the streets in this part of town seemed to shift and reformulate themselves in defiance of her memory.

The plan was to arrive outside the pub at exactly 11 o’ clock, pick him up, and get straight out. If she was early, she’d take a wide circle around the block, and under no circumstances would she park – that was a surefire way to get a taxi without wheels, and inevitably, an engine. Getting out of Slumsfield on foot wasn’t possible for anyone short of a prize MMA fighter.

When she arrived at the pub, it was 10:56, so she circled around the block. The pub’s lettering had been nicked, and all the windows were boarded up, with the only indicator that it was open being the spray paint on the door that invited in punters with no less than ten unique expletives.

She’d never wondered the first time round on account of knowing nothing about him, but what was Alan MacCain, the mild-mannered Scottish IT worker doing in a run-down pub in Slumsfield? With one minute until the decisive moment, she didn’t have any time to figure it out. She turned the corner again, easing her foot ever so slightly off the gas, and there it was, the scene that haunted her dreams and tormented her in her quietest moments.

Alan MacCain was running. Despite his macintosh streaked with blood, he was making good pace. Hot on his tail behind him, feet thundering over the crimson droplets, were two of those frightful shuffling creatures in hoodies, one extraordinarily fat, one angularly thin, one with a carving knife, one with a smoking revolver.

“Taxeh! Stop! Stop!” hollered Alan MacCain, his voice absorbed by the gloom. He lurched, nearly falling over, reaching his hands out for the car.

There was a deafening gunshot, and Connie saw a bullet skim her car, thundering into a wall on the opposite side of the street. Her heart thumping in her chest, she yelped and dropped the capsaicin. Another gunshot; another near miss.

“He’s out! Reloading!” yelled Alan. “Slow down and let me in!”

The gunman fumbled with the rounds, getting them out of his hoodie pocket and clicking them into place. Connie wasn’t sure if there’d be time to get MacCain in the car safely. If she slowed down, the two assailants would have a few free shots at her…

It was the kind of snap decision that defined your whole life.

(You have the net, and the audience is watching. Get out and defeat them. Save Alan MacCain. Be successful. What is Connie if not successful?)

She actually started slowing down to do it, as well. And then she saw Faust peering around the corner, watching everything, his eyes wide with fear at the gunshots, clutching his double-edged sword, watching what she would do. He was here the whole time? But… why?

It didn’t matter. She owed him the truth. She owed him that much, at least.

“Slow down!” hollered MacCain. “Let me in, goddamn it! Taxi!”

Connie shook her head; mouthed sorry. Hit the gas. Sped off. Watched him get riddled with bullets in the rearview mirror, watched him fall down, watched his blood pool out and mix with the rain. And then she turned the corner, put it out of her mind, and pretended it had never happened. At least, that’s what she’d done the first time. She hit pause, got out of the car and walked back over to the pub, the raindrops taking form and splashing her mid-air as she passed through them.

Faust loomed over Alan MacCain’s body, checking over his wounds. The two assailants were frozen, their weapons out in front of them. Connie recognised them as the two men who had been in her taxi earlier.

“Why are you here?” she asked. Couldn’t take her eyes off the body.

“Was that the truth?” Faust said. He was soaked, dripping from head to toe. “Was that what really happened?”

She wiped a wet hand over her cheek, rubbing out a stray fleck of foundation. Her heart was beating harder than it had ever beaten.

“Yeah,” she said. “That’s the truth of it. I was the only person who could have stopped him from dying, and I drove off.”

“Yeah,” said Faust. He sighed, deeply and heavily. “Well, it’s what happened. No changing it now.”

“You’re not gonna chew me out for this?” she asked. “Shouldn’t you be livid? Shouldn’t you be screaming ‘How dare you abandon him in his time of need’, ‘How dare you only think about yourself’, ‘How dare you lie about it to the police’?

“You lied about it to the police?”

“Well?” asked Connie, holding out her arms in a come-and-get-it gesture. The police had come the following morning, pleading with her for any information, no matter how small, that might lead to apprehending the perpetrators. And she’d told them that she’d drove around, unable to find him, and eventually went home thinking it was a prank.

Faust just sighed, looked her up and down, looked at the diorama, and shrugged. He punched her lightly on the shoulder.

He said, “It looks like you’ve beaten yourself up enough on your own. Far be it from me to add to that. Look, it’s alright. It’s okay. It’s just what happened. Look, no, Connie, really, it’s okay. It’s okay.”

He smiled awkwardly, and it was infectious enough for her to smile as well. For the first time in years, she relaxed her posture, her shoulders slumping thankfully into a resting position. It was okay.