Right Place At The Right Time

Right Place At The Right Time

Authors note

I needed to give Chuck a break. He’s been extremely busy, and poor guy deserves a little time to figure things out. Sarah, on the other hand, is just sitting around bored.

Just a quick update to let you know that Sarah and Chuck have been separated for a little less than two days. Chuck has been trying to figure things out, while Sarah is trying to find things to keep herself occupied. Of course, both of them are constantly thinking about each other.

This is part two of a two-part arc. This is Sarah growing up, learning to become independent, and finding her own way. Then, just weeks before her eighteenth birthday, she finds someone she’s willing to give her trust to.

Don’t own Chuck.

Chapter 15

What We Bury

By twelve, Sarah could separate the truth from the performance without hesitation. She could lower her eyes, soften her expression and make herself appear vulnerable before allowing whatever story the situation required to come naturally from her mouth. The lies simply came. Somewhere along the way, Sarah had stopped pretending to be part of the team.

She had become the team.

Eventually, Jack and Emma decided they had stayed on the move long enough. They rented a small house in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and for the first time in Sarah’s life, they stayed in one place long enough for the word home to almost make sense.

The house wasn’t large or particularly special, but Sarah loved it because it gave her something the motel rooms never had.

Permanence.

More importantly, Sarah was enrolled in school. It was her first real school, and she entered seventh grade without having the slightest idea how she was supposed to behave around other children. She knew how to read people and recognize when someone was lying, but none of those skills helped her understand how to sit at a lunch table and simply make friends.

At first, Sarah kept to herself. She watched the other students carefully, studying them in much the same way her father had taught her to study adults. Eventually, however, she began to realize that the other children weren’t nearly as complicated as the people her parents had taught her to manipulate.

Slowly, Sarah began to loosen up. She laughed more, started talking to people and eventually made a few friends. For the first time since she had watched that little girl playing in the motel pool, Sarah had something she had always wanted.

People who knew her name.

People who expected to see her the next morning.

People who wanted to spend time with her simply because they enjoyed being around her.

Then her father reminded her of the rule.

“Don’t get attached.”

Sarah looked at him, confused.

“What?”

“Friends are fine,” Jack explained. “I’m not saying you can’t talk to people. I’m saying don’t trust them enough to become attached.”

Sarah frowned. “They’re nice.”

“That doesn’t mean they’re trustworthy.”

“But they’re my friends.”

Jack shook his head.

“You don’t know what they’re capable of.”

Sarah couldn’t understand why her father seemed determined to take away something she had finally found.

“They wouldn’t hurt me.”

“You don’t know that.”

Her father moved closer and lowered his voice. “People will find a way to use you. They’ll accuse you of things. They’ll turn on you. They’ll hurt you if they get the chance. So whatever you think a friendship is, you keep it buried.”

Sarah stared at him.

“Bury it?”

“Deep down.” He tapped the side of her chest. “You can take it out whenever you want to remember it, but you don’t leave it sitting on the surface where somebody can reach it.”

Sarah didn’t answer. She hated the rule, but she had already learned that arguing with Jack rarely changed anything. So she did what she had been taught to do. She buried the friendships and kept them separate from the rest of her life.

Emma noticed the change in her daughter.

Perhaps that was why she insisted Sarah begin learning martial arts. She enrolled her in her first Taekwondo class because she believed Sarah needed something beyond the skills her father was teaching her, something that would give her discipline rather than simply another way to hurt someone.

Sarah already had instincts the other children didn’t possess. She had spent years learning how to protect herself, and when someone pushed her too far, she didn’t always know how to stop herself.

When some of the boys at school tried to push her around, Sarah pushed back. When they tried to force her into doing something she didn’t want to do, she refused. On more than one occasion, when one of them decided that being bigger meant he could put his hands on her, Sarah reacted before she had time to think.

She took them down. Sometimes hard enough to leave them hurt and crying while she stood over them with a satisfaction she didn’t fully understand. Her reaction got her into trouble more than once.

Her mother had several conversations with her about the difference between defending herself and looking for an excuse to hurt someone.

Sarah listened, but the lesson didn’t come easily. She had spent her entire childhood learning that strength was valuable and weakness was dangerous.

What she hadn’t learned was how to control the part of herself that had begun to enjoy having power over someone else.

Eventually, Sarah discovered another reason her parents had decided to remain in Albuquerque.

They were under suspicion.

Law enforcement had begun connecting some of the identities her parents had used, and people were actively searching for them. They weren’t in immediate danger, but continuing to move from town to town had become too risky.

Albuquerque gave them an opportunity to stay quiet for a while and allow the attention to fade. Sarah was learning that every skill had a purpose, but she was also beginning to understand something far more troubling.

Eventually, something was going to go wrong.

The con wasn’t always going to proceed according to plan, and sooner or later somebody was going to get hurt.

Her parents had taught her how to manipulate people, how to lie and how to defend herself. They had also taught her something more dangerous. Pain was going to be part of the job.

The memory that followed came back to her with painful clarity.

She was twelve years old again, sitting on a bicycle and looking down the road while Jack watched from a distance. Emma stood nearby, and even before the con began, Sarah could see the uneasiness in her mother’s expression.

“You’ll be fine,” Jack had told her.

Sarah nodded because she trusted him. The plan was simple.

Sarah would ride her bicycle toward the street at exactly the right moment, appear to lose control and turn directly into the path of the armored truck.

The truck would stop.

Everyone nearby would panic. Their attention would be drawn toward the injured little girl.

While everyone was focused on Sarah, her father would make his move.

At twelve years old, Sarah believed the worst thing that could happen was that she might get hurt. She didn’t yet understand how badly that assumption could be wrong.

The plan didn’t go the way Jack expected.

Sarah remembered the sound of the armored truck more than anything else. She remembered the sudden impact, the sickening jolt as everything went wrong and the bicycle disappeared beneath her. She remembered hitting the pavement.

Pain shot through her arm before she even had time to understand what had happened.

Her head struck the ground hard enough to leave her with a massive lump, and her arm was broken badly enough that she couldn’t move it without crying out.

But the con continued.

Even injured and frightened, Sarah was still part of the plan.

The confusion created by the accident was exactly what Jack and Emma had been counting on, and while everyone’s attention remained focused on the injured girl, her parents managed to get inside the armored truck and escape with several bags of cash.

She remembered the pain, her mother holding her and her father telling her that she had done a good job. More than anything else, though, she remembered wondering why doing a good job had to hurt so much.

By the time Sarah turned thirteen, she was living in another motel room with a cast on her arm.

The jobs started going wrong again. Twice more, Jack used Sarah as a decoy, and twice more she was hurt.

Emma finally reached her limit.

“That’s enough.”

Emma’s voice left no room for argument. She sat beside Sarah on the motel bed and gently examined the bruises on her daughter’s arm while Sarah tried to pretend they didn’t hurt.

“I’m fine, Mom.”

“No, you’re not.”

Sarah looked away as Emma carefully brushed her hair away from her face.

“You shouldn’t have had to experience any of this.”

Sarah didn’t know what to say. She had always believed this was simply what their family did. Her father had taught her to think of the cons as work, and Sarah had become proud of how good she was at them.

Now her mother was looking at her as though she were finally seeing the cost of that life through her daughter’s eyes.

“I won’t do this anymore,” Emma said.

Sarah looked at her mother.

“What?”

“You aren’t going to be used as a decoy anymore.”

Jack, standing across the motel room, immediately shook his head.

“Emma, she’s good at it.”

“She’s thirteen.”

“She gets banged up a little. That’s part of the job.”

Emma turned toward him.

“No.”

Jack sighed.

“She heals. She’s young.”

“That’s your answer?” Emma’s voice rose. “She’s young, so she heals?”

Sarah watched her parents argue, something she had seen before but never quite like this.

Her mother was relentless, and her father kept trying to defend the decision by explaining that she was talented, that she knew what she was doing and that sometimes things went wrong.

Emma wouldn’t accept it. “I didn’t bring my daughter into this life so she could be hurt for your cons.”

Jack went silent. Emma’s eyes were wet, but she refused to look away.

“If this is what you think her life is going to be, then I’m taking her and leaving.”

Sarah’s heart stopped. She had never heard her mother threaten to leave before.

Jack stared at Emma for a long moment. Then he looked at Sarah. Something in his expression changed.

Perhaps he finally understood what Emma had been seeing all along.

Perhaps he finally remembered that the girl sitting there wasn’t one of his partners.

She was his daughter. Jack slowly sat down beside her.

“Okay.”

Emma stared at him.

“Okay?”

Jack nodded.

“You’re right.”

He reached over and gently touched the scrapes and bruises covering Sarah’s arms, legs and face.

“Sometimes things go wrong,” he said quietly. “That’s what our family does. We take risks, and sometimes we pay for them. But you’re not going to pay that price anymore.”

Sarah didn’t know what to say.

Jack pulled her into his arms.

“Daddy?”

“Darling, you won’t ever have to do those kinds of jobs again.”

Sarah rested her head against his chest.

“We’ll find something different.”

“Okay.”

Jack smiled and squeezed her gently.

“Now, what do you say we go get ourselves some Rocky Road ice cream?”

Sarah couldn’t help smiling. Rocky Road had always been one of the few things capable of making everything seem better.

The years that followed were different.

The cons became more sophisticated. Jack moved away from simple street-level scams and began dealing with larger insurance settlements, inheritances and carefully constructed financial schemes.

By sixteen, Sarah could read a room, recognize a lie and become vulnerable, charming, frightened or innocent depending on what the situation required.

She no longer needed much direction.

Then came Florida.

Her parents had arranged for the three of them to become guests of a wealthy European family. The estate was unlike anything Sarah had known during her childhood. There were no faded motel carpets, thin walls or cheap curtains. Paintings covered the walls, antique furniture filled the sitting rooms, and small pieces of jewelry and art were displayed as though they were ordinary household decorations.

One afternoon, while her parents were occupied elsewhere, Sarah wandered into a private room and noticed something inside a display case.

A brooch.

She stopped and stared.

It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. Delicate gold work surrounded a pale stone that caught the light whenever she moved.

Sarah simply loved it.

The brooch felt different. It wasn’t something she had been asked to steal. It wasn’t part of the team’s plan.

For once, the choice belonged entirely to her.

Sarah looked toward the doorway and listened carefully.

Nobody was there.

She opened the case and carefully lifted the brooch into her hand.

For several seconds, she simply held it, turning it slightly so the light caught the stone and reflected across the delicate gold work.

There had been no instruction from her father, no plan and no role for her to play. Nobody had told her to steal it. She simply wanted it.

Sarah slipped the brooch into her pocket and closed the case.

For once, Sarah had made the decision herself.

The con itself didn’t fail spectacularly. There was no dramatic confrontation, no police arriving at the estate and no mad rush toward the nearest exit.

Things simply became uncomfortable enough that Jack and Emma decided it was time to end their relationship with the family and move on.

They left quietly.

Through the grapevine, Jack and Emma eventually learned that the family had begun searching for them. Something valuable was missing from the estate.

A family heirloom.

The brooch had been passed down from generation to generation since the 1800s.

When they confronted Sarah, she didn’t try to lie.

“Did you take it?”

Sarah looked directly at her father.

“Yes.”

Emma’s expression fell.

“Sarah.”

“I wanted it.”

Jack stared at her for several seconds.

“You stole it?”

Sarah nodded.

“It was beautiful.”

Emma shook her head slowly.

“You know what kind of trouble this could cause.”

Sarah’s expression hardened.

“They’re criminals.”

Jack raised an eyebrow.

“So?”

“So I don’t feel bad about taking something from people like them.”

For a moment, nobody spoke. Sarah expected anger. She expected Jack to demand that she return it immediately.

Instead, a slow smile appeared on her father’s face.

“What?”

Jack shook his head in amazement.

“You’re unbelievable.”

Sarah wasn’t sure whether she was in trouble.

“You actually pulled it off,” Jack said.

Emma looked at him.

“Jack.”

He ignored her.

“Do you realize how difficult that must have been?”

Sarah felt a small smile appear.

“I was careful.”

“I can see that.”

Emma stepped closer.

“She needs to give it back.”

Sarah immediately shook her head.

“No.”

“Sarah.”

“It’s mine.”

Emma looked at Jack, expecting him to support her.

Instead, Jack surprised them both.

“Let her keep it.”

Emma stared at him.

“Are you serious?”

Jack looked at Sarah.

“She earned it.”

Emma’s expression told Sarah exactly how much she disagreed, but Jack had made his decision.

Sarah kept the brooch.

For a moment, Sarah wondered whether that had been the moment her father finally realized that the little girl he had taught to become a con artist was becoming someone he could no longer completely control.

Not long afterward, they were moving again, changing their names and identities.

This time they were heading west to San Diego.

By then, Jack had already taught Sarah how to drive, and shortly after her sixteenth birthday, he decided it was time for her to have a car of her own.

Sarah still remembered the afternoon he came into the house and called to her.

“Darling, come with me. I want to show you something.”

She followed him outside, expecting nothing more than another one of her father’s surprises.

Then she saw the small yellow car sitting in the driveway. She stopped and stared at it before slowly turning toward her father.

“Dad… did you get me a car?”

Jack grinned.

“Well, darling, I can’t be driving you all over the place forever. You’re legal to drive in this state now, and I figured, why not? You deserve it.”

He pulled the keys from his pocket and tossed them toward her.

Sarah caught them. It was, by far, the greatest birthday gift she had ever received.

She stared at the keys in her hand, then looked back at the car. A smile slowly spread across her face before she threw her arms around her father.

“Thank you, Dad!”

Jack laughed as he hugged her.

The car represented something more than freedom from depending on her parents for transportation. It was something that belonged to her.

From that point forward, whenever Sarah went somewhere, she made sure she had her car. Having the keys in her pocket gave her a sense of independence she had rarely experienced growing up.

Her mother insisted that Sarah continue learning how to defend herself, no matter how much Sarah protested.

She enrolled her in a local jujutsu school, and Sarah excelled almost immediately. The few months she had spent studying Taekwondo two years earlier had given her a basic understanding of balance, footwork and timing, while her years of learning how to protect herself had already taught her to watch an opponent’s movements.

Jujutsu gave those instincts structure.

It taught Sarah that strength wasn’t always about overpowering someone. Sometimes the best defense was using an opponent’s own momentum against them.

Sarah trained hard. She learned when to move, when to strike and, just as importantly, when to hold back.

Not everything about the school was positive. Heather Chandler and Dick Duffy were two of the worst. They found ways to torment her, and Sarah endured more than she ever told her parents. She could have fought back. By then, she knew enough to hurt them badly if she wanted to.

But she also understood the risk.

Her parents had spent years teaching her to stay invisible, deliberately changing her appearance so that anyone searching for the family would have difficulty recognizing her.

Sarah knew that putting someone in the hospital or leaving them with a broken bone would attract attention. Attention was exactly what her family couldn’t afford. So she endured it.

She hated how she looked. She hated being noticed, and she hated the people who seemed to take pleasure in making her feel small.

But Sarah had already learned how to endure things that hurt. By then, however, something else had changed.

She no longer wanted to participate in her parents’ cons.

She told them she was finished.

Jack argued with her, but Sarah had reached the point where she wasn’t going to change her mind. Emma listened, and eventually Sarah made it clear that if they wanted to continue, they were going to have to do it without her.

For the first time in her life, Sarah was making a decision about her own future rather than simply following someone else’s.

She still loved her parents.

She still cared about them. But she didn’t want their life anymore.

Sarah began finding her own way.

Eventually, that path led her toward Los Angeles, where she started spending time with a small group of thieves operating on the fringes of the criminal world.

They weren’t like her parents.

There was less planning, less sophistication and far more danger, but Sarah believed she could handle it. She had been trained for years, and believed she understood the rules.

Then came the night when everything changed. The memory returned now with such force that a chill ran through Sarah’s body as she lay awake in the darkness.

She could see the house again. Hear the gunshots. See the four men standing over her friends.

Her friends were dead, and now Sarah understood that there was no con, no performance and no lie that could change what she had witnessed.

That was the moment something inside Sarah finally broke through the excuses she had spent years accepting. The life she had grown up in wasn’t a game. People could actually die.

Her parents had spent years telling her that the people they conned would recover, that the money they took was insignificant to those who had more than enough and that their family was simply doing what it needed to survive.

Sarah had accepted those explanations because she needed them to be true.

Now she knew better. People could die simply because they were standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Unlike everything else she had learned to bury, this memory would remain, waiting to remind her what happened when she continued down the same path.

It would be a warning. A reminder that no matter how skilled she became, she could never control everything.

Sarah opened her eyes and stared into the darkness of her bedroom. The memory was still there, lingering at the edges of her thoughts, but another image slowly began pushing its way through the fear.

Chuck.

She pushed the covers aside and got out of bed, walking over to the window.

Outside, the neighborhood remained quiet beneath the darkness of the night. The moon hung above the rooftops, casting a faint glow across the sky and giving the darkness just enough light for Sarah to make out the shapes of the houses below.

She rested her hand against the window and stared outside, her thoughts turning toward the man who had somehow managed to find his way into her life.

Chuck Bartowski was someone she had never expected and certainly never planned for, yet somehow he had slipped past every defense she had spent her entire life building. She didn’t understand how he had done it.

She had spent years learning not to trust people, not to become attached and never to let anyone close enough to hurt her.

Her father had taught her to bury friendships.

Her mother had taught her how to perform.

The life they had lived had taught her to keep people at a safe distance.

Then Chuck came along. A small smile touched Sarah’s lips as she thought about him.

She remembered the laughter they shared, the way he could make her laugh when she least expected it and, more than anything, the feeling that settled over her whenever she was with him.

Somehow, being beside Chuck made her feel safe. As though she could finally let her guard down and simply be Sarah without having to worry about what might happen next.

More importantly, Chuck made her want things she had spent years convincing herself she didn’t need.

Finally, Sarah didn’t want to run.

She wanted to go back.

Back to Chuck.

She knew how to fight, use weapons and survive. She had spent most of her life preparing for danger. But none of those skills mattered as much as they once had. After everything Sarah had survived, everything she had done and everything she had lost, she couldn’t shake the feeling that Chuck was somehow going to be the turning point in her life.

Maybe he was the person who could finally show her that she didn’t have to keep living the way her parents had taught her.

Maybe he was the person who could help her build something that wasn’t based on lies, deception and survival.

For most of her life, Sarah had been taught to prepare for the next con, the next town, the next identity and the next danger.

Now, for the first time, she wanted to prepare for something beyond survival.

She wanted a future. And for reasons she still didn’t fully understand, she wanted Chuck to be part of it.