“So,” he said. “Can I know about the heist now?”
She wanted very badly to retort that the details of her personal history could not possibly amount to the same sort of knowledge she would have gotten from a Wikipedia page—which was, after all, what the bee factoids had been—but she did feel she owed him something.
His transactional nature was rubbing off on her.
“It wasn’t a heist,” she said.
He seemed amenable to a discussion on nomenclature. “What was it?”
“Complicated, but not a heist.”
“Why not?”
“Because a heist implies … I don’t know. Theft.” She sipped her wine. “Which it was, ultimately,” she admitted, “but that wasn’t really the goal.”
Aldo looked unsurprised. “I was already pretty sure the goal wasn’t money.”
“No, not really. Sort of.” She tapped her glass. “My boyfriend needed the money,” she admitted. “That part was true.”
“Let me guess,” he said. “Your parents didn’t like him?”
They never liked anyone she dated, which was probably why she chose the people that she did.
“He was a sculptor,” she said. “Not with ceramics, or at least not exclusively. He had access to a lot of different materials.”
“So he was resourceful?” Aldo guessed.
“Yes, very,” Regan said. “I met him while he was working on an installation that involved different types of metals. He was a blacksmith in his spare time,” she added. “That was his only real source of income, which wasn’t a lot.”
“You’re telling his side of the story,” Aldo pointed out. “I asked for yours.”
“They kind of intertwined at this point,” she said, shrugging, though she was mildly pleased he could make the distinction. “So he was forging at the time, right? And he had this idea to make fancy swords and daggers and things, you know. Like, to sell at Renaissance Faires.”
“Right.”
“And I watched him recreate these swords and I thought … I could do that, but more efficiently.” She felt herself leaning forward before she realized she’d planned to do it. “He was making these fakes swords for money, right? But I,” she mused, reaching over to refill her glass, “figured I could probably make fake money if I wanted to, which seemed like a quicker way to get things done. Cut the middleman, you know? I could do the designs well enough, and he had access to materials. I thought about it, but just like, for fun. I was just turning it over in my head, at first. But it was just like … once the thought had occurred to me, I—” She cleared her throat. “I couldn’t shake it.”
Aldo nodded. “Hexagons,” he said, and she smiled weakly.
“Bees,” she agreed, and shrugged. “Anyway, it wasn’t like I’d left a lot of room for myself to do other things. Specializing in art wasn’t exactly leading me to any career in particular. I don’t like to teach, and I wasn’t interested in academia—”
“You said you’re an artist,” Aldo interrupted. “Digital art?”
“I said I wanted to be an artist, yes, but I’m not one. I tried working as a graphic designer,” she said, “but I didn’t like having clients. Nobody knows what they want, not really. ‘Oh, change it, I don’t like it,’ but then they can never explain what they want me to change. I’ve never liked dealing with other people’s tastes.”
“Understandable,” Aldo said, fingering the stem of his glass. “And I don’t enjoy the necessity of having to predict how other people think.”
“You’re doing it now, aren’t you?”
He shook his head. “I’m not trying to predict you. I’m trying to understand you.”
“Couldn’t you predict me if you understood me?” She felt sure she’d caught him. Why else was he doing any of this?
“Seems like a question better suited to our inevitable robot overlords,” he demurred with a sip, “which is not a philosophical meandering I have any expertise in, to be clear.”
That, she thought, was the sort of conversation Marc liked to have when he was high, along with how he planned to survive the zombie apocalypse. But she agreed with Aldo’s position that not every hypothetical situation was worth pursuing.
“Why choose to fixate on bees?”
“Hexagons,” he said again. “I’m not an entomologist. Or an apiarist.”