Helper

The phone went dark and Lacey turned to Terry. "Guess that let the cat out of the bag."

***

Terry hadn't heard from Gwen since their breakup, but after his renewed relationship with Lacey became public knowledge, Terry sent Gwen one last message.

Gwen,

I don't know how you did it, but your friend "L.J.", i.e., my Lacey (who swears she doesn't know you or have a clue who you are) and I are giving it another try and are getting along well. Thank you for a wonderful time and for the very special memories. You once said that I might be a good Cupid's helper, but I think you truly are.

:-)

Terry

Gwen's response, coming within minutes, was short and sweet.

Terry, I'm so very happy for the two of you. Wishing you much love and happiness always.

Instead of her name, there was a Cupid emoji, with the toddler in profile with a drawn bow and an arrow pointed toward a pair of small, entwined hearts.

***

Later in the spring, things were going well between Lacey and Terry, and Terry was hoping they'd be getting remarried soon after Carl and Beth's recently scheduled nuptials. One evening, Lacey walked into the family room with the mail and sat down next to her former and hoped-to-be future husband.

"Terry, one of the first things we agreed on when we decided to give it another try was to not dwell on what happened while we were apart."

"Right," he agreed. "What about it?"

"Well, can you explain this?"

She handed him a manilla envelope addressed to him in ornate, feminine handwriting. The sender on the return address was listed as Park, with a New York address.

Terry was confused. "Who's Park, and what is it?"

She frowned at him under her brow with a bit of frustration. "Open it."

He slit the envelope open to find a sports magazine with a beautiful bikini-clad model on the cover. He looked at Lacey, still confused.

"Well?" she demanded.

Looking back at the cover, he saw the bottom was signed with a wide, permanent-ink marker. It read.

Terry,

Thanks for being a great friend. I hope you found what you were seeking. I did!

Love,

Sue Lee

Surprised, he looked back at the picture on the cover and recognized Sue from the Olympus.

"No way!"

Lacey burst out laughing on seeing his shocked expression. "Sue Lee Park, the Korean-American bikini and lingerie supermodel? You really didn't know?"

He was shaking his head in disbelief. "No, not a clue. She said she worked for a sports magazine, but I thought writer, editor, maybe graphics...something like that, maybe even an accountant. I gave her my card so she could contact me for some attorney referrals, but I never heard from her until now. I didn't dream..."

Lacey kissed him, softly, before snuggling in next to him. "Terry, I'd just made up my mind to come back, apologize, and see if there might be a chance of making up with you, but then I saw you leaving with her at Olympus. I recognized her immediately and what little hope I had left of ever getting back together with you vanished. The way she was hanging on your arm and the way you looked at the bartender, God, Terry, I've never seen someone as jealous as he was right then. It broke my heart and I thought I'd lost you forever."

"I'm so sorry, Lacey. I was just taking her back to her hotel. She wanted to call someone, someone special. From this note, I'm guessing it worked out well for both of them."

Lacey brought up a headline on her phone. "I saw a note on the cover of one of the tabloids at the supermarket that she got engaged a couple of weeks ago. I was surprised at that, considering how you'd slept with her so recently."

Terry looked at the headline, and then focused on the photo. "Lacey, I've seen her before but didn't recognize her that night, and I swear nothing like that happened between us."

"I know that now, Honey. I'm sorry, though."

"Sorry about what, thinking I had?"

"No, that you missed your chance!"

He joined her in laughing before shaking his head, thinking of all they'd been through in the past few years. He'd lost the love of his life, found another who cared for deeply but couldn't be with, and then somehow, possibly with the second one's help, got his true love back.

"I'm not sorry," he said. "I got back what I always wanted most, you, and I'm ecstatic about that."

After all, Lacey, his true love, was back in his life and he in hers, and they both planned to make the most of it.

***

Epilogue

She was smiling as she walked up to the front desk. After surprising her friend and their happy greeting, she asked, "Is Dad in?"

"When isn't he?" asked the receptionist with a laugh. "Go right on in."

"Thank you."

She entered and saw him rubbing his clean-shaven chin as he looked at the monitor sitting on the marble tabletop. He looked up when he heard her.

"Daughter, welcome! You are a welcome sight to take my eyes off this monstrosity."

She smiled. "Oh, Father, you know you love it."

He shook his head. "That's true, in a way, my dear, but I sometimes yearn for the simpler times before computers and all of the files and recordkeeping that accompanies our work. Remember the old days, when the world was younger and seemed so much smaller? Or, at least, it seemed smaller to most people in it? Back then, we could play a hunch and be right more times than not."

"True, Father, but there weren't nearly as many people back then either."

He rubbed his chin in thought. "Yes, simpler times, indeed." Looking back at her, he asked, "So, to what do I owe the pleasure of another visit from my favorite daughter?"

She giggled as they hugged and each kissed the other's cheek before she propped herself against the back of his desk while he retook his seat next to her.

"Father, we spoke a few years ago about true love and throwing in the towel versus giving another chance."

He was nodding. "Of course, dear. And now you're going to tell me how it all turned out?"

She shook her head. "No, Father, for I'm sure you've already read my report with the details. Here's the final version; they remarried a few days ago and seem like they're back on the right track, so I just made a few final updates and comments." She looked down at a small pad device in her hand and sent him a file with the case number and the names Terrance Charles "Terry" Foster—Lacinda Jane "Lacey" (Tatum) Foster in the title.

He glanced at the file briefly and then looked back up at her. "I believe I sense a question? Come, dear: what is it?"

She looked rather uncomfortable as she pursed her lips, trying to ask the question that had bothered her for so long. She gave a long, slow sigh before looking back at him.

"I've been doing this for a long time, Father. When I talk to people, I know practically by instinct when two people are right for each other, when they belong together. That's what makes me and all of your amorini good at this job. I've taken a lot of tough cases, too; I can usually solve where something has gone wrong, why a couple has their trouble, why they split, but this case puzzles me like few others. I've gone over everything, time and again, but I just can't figure out why Lacey would have left Terry in the first place. It...it just doesn't make sense."

He smiled. "Hmmm. If I recall, you said that about your French painter 'friend' some years ago, too, dear. When one gets too close to a client, one's perspective can be—shall we say?—clouded."

She looked down and thought for a moment, remembering that wonderful time all those years ago and then the much more recent ones that seemed so perfect with Terry. She slowly nodded. "I suppose you're right, Father, but is it the complexity of the case and my desire to help the subjects or the men themselves that attract me, that draws me to them?"

His look was one of bemusement. "That is something only you can answer for yourself, my dear. Perhaps one day, though, one of these men will be your 'true love' and you'll take the leap to see if you can make a go of it."

She looked down. "I don't know, Father. It's such a risk; to give up my job and my way of life...for love...I don't know."

He chuckled. "Gwendipha, if you ever give up our more personal line of work, I'm fairly certain you'll continue with your cover, the professional, corporate recruiter side as you've always done, and will continue making, how do they say? Making a killing at it?"

She nodded, holding up her finger for a moment as she used the pad to send him the report on her latest corporate recruiting effort. Her commission on that job was well into the six figure range.

"Congratulations, and well done," he said on looking at it. "As I was saying, you won't go hungry if you decide to concentrate solely on that side of the business."

Leaning back against the marble desktop, he put his hands together with his fingers spread wide and only the tips touching. "As for the other side and your real question dear, I've gone by a number of names over the years; having been in the business of love and getting couples together for over 3,000 years, I've had to. Daughter, I've seen just about everything imaginable as a result. Think about the old days with my putti and cherubs, back when you yourself were a toddler, when people assumed little imps like you used bows and arrows to tag lovers and bring them together. Remember?"

She smiled. "Back in those days before we transitioned to more modern methods with all of us children, your amorini, slowly aging to a more reasonable level for the efforts we were undertaking?"

"Yes, tell me, how would a baby know anything about true love beyond what it feels for its parents? That's a far cry from the passionate love that our personal work engenders. Yes, things have changed a lot more since we had to go mainstream over the past few hundred years, and I'm still getting used to things like this damned computer, but love itself never changes. Sometimes, just like in the early days, people still need a little help realizing what they want."

"Like Lacey and Terry? Since I never could figure out her problem, I had to let them drift apart and then goose them a little to get them to realize what they were missing. With Terry's help, I cleared a few other cases as a result, too."

"Goosing, you call it?" He chuckled as he recalled the number of times Gwen had "met" with Terry and the rather obvious lack of details for those particular events. "We called it something quite different than that back when I was young."

Gwen blushed, but her father waved his hand dismissively. "But, dear, if it worked, it worked and I won't be too concerned about your methods, as long as you're happy with them." Lowering his voice to almost a whisper, he added, "Gwendipha, you are, aren't you? Happy?"

She stared at her feet, unable to look him in the eyes, as she composed her answer. When she spoke, it was little more than a whisper to match his own.

"Life is good, most days, Father, but then I meet someone truly special, like Terry, and realize just how much I give up to continue being one of your amorini, one of Cupid's helpers. Perhaps someday I'll meet the right person, someone who will love me and who I can truly love. When that happens, Father, I'll gladly accept life as a true mortal and will live the rest of my days day by day. That day, though, isn't today."

A goodbye kiss and hug followed and Eros Cupido Amor, known by the ancient Greeks and Romans as their "god" of passionate love and physical desire, watched in sadness as his eldest daughter, Gwendipha Amorini, walked out of his office. After she was gone, he hung his head in his hands and rubbed his temples for a moment—a brief one, for that was all he could ever spare—before he turned to the infernal computer monitor and pulled up a hidden file.

As he watched the file be unencrypted—a comparatively lengthy process since it made use of the deepest encryption available—he recalled the earlier case of her French lover, the famous painter, and how much simpler, in that long ago day, that it had been to set up. He'd finagled the circumstances, ever so slightly, and Gwen had fallen in love then, too, but she'd overcome her own feelings to do her job almost too well. She'd walked away, giving up her own happiness so that the painter and his mistress could be together instead of the way he'd planned it. He shook his head at the memory but smiled at one thought. Getting rid of the evidence of his own actions by tossing the file in the fireplace had been far simpler back then.

He smiled wryly as the title of the file changed to the case number and the subjects' names, Terrance Charles "Terry" Foster—Gwendipha "Gwen" Amorini. Shaking his head sadly at the final outcome, he thought of the effort that he'd put into setting it up so Gwendipha would have another chance at love. Driving a wedge between dedicated lovers like Terry and Lacey wasn't easy, but for his daughter and her happiness, it had been worth the try. That had been part of his mistake; only the very best of his amorini, like Gwen, would have been able to overcome his effort to get Gwen and Terry together. "And doing it," he grumbled, "by reuniting the lovers I'd driven apart to make their love possible in the first place!"

With the file decrypted, he looked at it one last time before deleting it from the system and electronically shredding it, so it could never be retrieved. The case number was voided in the system a moment later, too.

Looking up at the spot where she'd just walked out, the old man smiled wryly.

"Yes, it's not today that you find true love, as you said, my daughter, but someday, dearest Gwendipha, I'll try for you once again."

The End

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Author's Follow-up Note:

Thanks so much for reading! Your comments, votes, and favorites will be greatly appreciated, too. Don't forget to do an author favorite if you want to be informed when my upcoming works are published. Thanks!

References:

Here's a bit of information that might be interesting to mythology and history buffs.

Eros was considered by the ancient Greeks (from at least before 700 BCE, when he was first mentioned by Hesiod in Greek literature) to be the god of passionate love and physical desire, using his arrows to strike, often unexpectedly, at the hearts of those around him. Eros was usually pictured as a teenager or a young man.

The ancient Romans adopted the idea of Eros as their god Cupid or Cupido (or later, in Latin, Amor), but generally pictured him as younger than the Greek version; he was often described as a chubby youth or little boy. Cupid was usually depicted as having wings, since, according to Wikipedia, "lovers are flighty and likely to change their minds, and boyish because love is irrational. His symbols are the arrow and torch, 'because love wounds and inflames the heart.'"

Wikipedia also explains that Cupid was actually believed to carry "two kinds of arrows, or darts, one with a sharp golden point, and the other with a blunt tip of lead. A person wounded by the golden arrow is filled with uncontrollable desire, but the one struck by the lead feels aversion and desires only to flee." In this story, the elder Cupid probably used a modern version of the blunt, lead dart to drive Lacey away from Terry and his golden darts on Gwen and Terry while Gwen countered with her own efforts to reunite Terry and Lacey. That would explain why neither Lacey nor Gwen could understand why Lacey felt the need to leave Terry in Chapters 1 and 2.

Cupid largely disappeared from the public's perception by the time of the Middle Ages, but the Italian artist Donatello helped revive the character as a putto, a chubby, male child with wings, representing a sacred cherub (or angel) with ties to Christianity in the 1400s. Because of the combination of original and Christian connotations, Cupid became associated with Saint Valentine's Day.

Multiple putto (putti) were sometimes pictured in art. A putto representing a cupid is also called an amorino, or in a group, amorini. In this story, Gwen Amorini is one of Cupid's children, having grown up to be one of his helpers as the world evolved and became more modern and more populous. As a result, Cupid's work is depicted as being modernized, similar to the way Santa's work is often shown at the North Pole.