Heartbreaker for Hire

My name is Violet and I am a heart breaker.

Like, literally, it’s a family business. We get paid for it.

So that’s why it’s not a huge deal that I’m cutting a hole in someone’s skylight so I can drop into his bathroom undetected. It’s part of the job.

I make my way down a dark hallway and I’m sidestepping the lasers like I’ve done this a hundred times before. Because I have. But for some reason, I’m a little nervous.

I’ve studied the blueprints for this job. I’ve studied the target. He keeps his heart in a Nike shoebox on the top shelf of his closet and he’s meeting an old friend for dinner tonight, which leaves his room empty from approximately 5:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.

It’s not a tough job either. His insecurity system is pretty standard, so the plan is that I get into the room, I’ll loop the cameras, and then I’ll work on opening the closet, which is protected by a checkbox lock. The checkbox lock requires two things to disarm it: a cup of freshly brewed coffee and the smell of homemade chocolate chip cookies in the room.

Once I get those, it’s another heart broken, another mission accomplished. Right?

Right, I tell myself.

I open the door to his room and I squeeze myself against the wall, keeping an eye on the sweeping anxiety camera in the corner. The blueprints say that it has basic facial recognition, meaning that holding an 8 x 10 school picture of the target in front of my face as I inch across the carpet shouldn’t alert it to change the sweep settings.

But halfway through the sweep, the camera stops. Something has alerted it. As it starts to double back towards me, I dive across the remaining distance and ninja roll under the bed.

And I make it. But… my ninja roll overshoots and the motion sensor in the decoy shoebox next to the wall starts beeping.

I inwardly curse because 1) carelessness only creates more paperwork, and 2) I now only have until 6:00 to complete the job before the heart goes into super lockdown.

Super lockdown, meaning that the Nike shoebox turns into a concrete safe, the whole insecurity system revises itself, and all of my research goes out the window before I even get a chance at the heart.

So far, great start to the job, right? I look at my watch. 5:33 and counting. I always have a backup plan, but there have only been two times in my entire career where I’ve actually had to use one. I pull out my laptop and some cables out of my pack and a couple keystrokes later, I’ve tapped into the wires under the bed and put the anxiety camera on a ten-second loop. I hack into the façade technology in the walls and type in three passwords: our target’s favorite artist/inventor—Da Vinci, the chemical formula for caffeine—C8H10N4O2, and his current free throw percentage—65.7%.

The top half of the walls slide away, revealing a pretty impressive contraption that manifests itself as a combination of pulleys, Tinker Toys, Marble Works, and hardcover books that ends at a coffee maker beside the closet door.

I’ll just pause here to say that it’s a doozy of an insecurity system and that this kind of insecurity system is not very common.

But that’s why I’m a professional. So I roll out from under the bed, set my laptop on the nightstand, and angle the fish-eye lens to capture most of the contraption. Then I walk to the Tinker Toy Ferris wheel that marks the beginning of the machine. There are four little Lego action figures that are boarding the first car and a sign that says, “Start Here.”

I waste no time in loading all four Lego people into the Ferris wheel. The Ferris wheel starts turning, sending a ping pong ball rolling down a couple of physics textbooks and heading for a bucket and pulley.

The entire thing takes exactly twenty minutes to create the cup of coffee that will disarm the lock, which means I cannot afford to have any of its components fail. In the meantime, I’ll have to work on the chocolate chip cookie part while the contraption is in motion.

5:35. I leap over the lasers in the hallway, race down the stairs, and make a beeline for the kitchen.

And let me tell you, I’m a heartbreaker, not a baker, but I start throwing random ingredients onto the counter: flour, sugar, chocolate chips, butter. And I throw all of them into the electric mixer on the highest setting with a big puff of flour.

But after rummaging through the fridge for two minutes, I realize that I have yet another problem. The target is out of eggs.

If I hadn’t hit that stupid shoebox under the bed, I would have had time to run to the store. If the target didn’t like chocolate chip cookies so much, I wouldn’t be wiping melted butter off his cabinets. If I hadn’t decided to take this job, I wouldn’t be leaving the house and casually ringing his next door neighbor’s doorbell.

“Hi, Mrs. Adams. I was wondering if I could borrow two eggs from you?” I hope that the flour smears on my all-black jumpsuit will make the fact that I’m asking to borrow eggs at 5:42 in the evening somewhat believable.

Mrs. Adams smiles all neighborly-like. “Of course, Violet.” She opens the door wider. “Why don’t you come in?”

“I’d rather not. I have a batch of cookies in the oven already,” I lie. “We ran out halfway through.”

I put on my best innocent smile and after two long seconds, Mrs. Adams says, “I’m pretty sure I bought some eggs yesterday.” She disappears and comes back with two eggs.

I run back to the house and I’m like, Thank God for business connections! I crack the eggs into the batter, smack a couple spoonfuls onto a baking sheet and throw the whole thing in the oven.

And now, I wait. I pull out my phone and log onto my laptop’s video feed to check on the contraption. It’s still going as best as I can tell, which means I have time to quickly do the dishes. That’s another benefit of hiring professionals—we clean up after ourselves.

5:52. The cookies are pretty much done—that is, cooked all the way through. Would I eat the cookie splat that looks like it was vomited onto the cookie sheet and then promptly baked? Maybe not. But it smells pretty good. And right now, that’s all I need.

I don’t even scrape the cookie carnage off the sheet. I just take the entire sheet up the stairs with me and back into the target’s room.

When I open the door, the coffeemaker is just pouring its cup of freshly brewed black coffee. The light around the coffee cup glows green and I wave the cookie sheet around like it’s some sort of offering to Rube Goldberg.

Clunk.

The closet door has unlocked itself.

I open the closet. It’s dark, but I can still see the shoebox on the top shelf. I’m not tall enough to reach, so I climb up the cubbyholes on the walls, making sure not to scuff any of the target’s fancy shoes.

A lot of people say that it’s only the cowardly that can afford us—people who don’t want to do the job themselves, people who don’t trust themselves to do the job right—but I say that there’s a certain amount of humility in calling in an expert. I’ve seen some ugly broken hearts in my day and, not to brag or anything, but I would have done a much better job.

I set the shoebox on the floor and take the lid off. The heart looks like any other heart—a couple chips, a few cracks, but it’s beautiful. It’s one of the most beautiful hearts I’ve seen.

My weapons of choice are a glasscutter and a pistol crossbow. I know crossbows are a bit melodramatic, but the heart breaking business is all about knowing about how to break a heart into the fewest pieces possible.

5:55. I draw a single line down the middle of the heart with the glass cutter. Once the heart is broken, I’ll have to leave quickly. The plan is to climb out the skylight I came through, hop over a couple rooftops until I get to the oak tree on the corner, and then drop into my car through the open sun roof. I can still get out, even with the time crunch I inflicted upon myself.

I cock the crossbow, reach into my sleeve, and I load a large ruby shard into the barrel. It slips through my fingers and clinks loudly on the floor and I wince.

My mom has always said that cowardly is paying someone to do your dirty work. Honorable is knowing when someone else can do the job better and you’re willing to do whatever it takes to help them succeed. We always ask two things of all of our clients. One, we ask for the client’s heart as collateral. Two, we give them a hammer and a chisel and ask them to break off a piece of their heart. If they can do it, we take the job. Because the best way to break someone’s heart is with a piece of your own.

I press the crossbow up against the heart. I’m not scared of missing, but my hands are shaking. Because here’s the thing about breaking someone’s heart. The hardest part isn’t breaking it. The hardest part is walking away like you wanted to do it.

I tell myself the same things that I tell my clients. It’s like breaking a bone. It hurts like heck, but it will heal. The heart is a self-healing entity.

I would know. Because the piece of my heart that’s in the barrel right now hurt like heck when I chiseled it off before coming here. And the rest of my heart, which I happen to keep close in a pouch on my sleeve, hurts like heck right now.

I take a breath and steady my hands. 5:57. At this point, I have to make the shot or I forfeit the job.

So I level my gaze and take the shot. The heart breaks cleanly into two pieces.

I want to glue the pieces back together until the big ugly, aching crack that I made fades and the heart looks as beautiful as it did before. I want to fix it. Until the portcullis drops down over the doorway, very clearly sealing off my exit with a loud bang.

Of course he would have something that wasn’t on the blueprints. Of course I’d be sitting here trapped in his closet amongst his color coded hangers, realizing that he actually has more pairs of shoes than I do, as the walls start closing in Star Wars-style.

I never knew that my family meant it literally when they said that personal jobs are always the hardest.

With two minutes left, my options are 1) become a heartbreaker panini or 2) do something drastic. I really hate vandalism, but I hate sandwiches more. So, resigned to all of the extra paperwork I’ll be doing already, I reach into my pocket, pull out my mini-laser, and cut a hole in the wall.

I step through the wall into the bathroom and I freeze. I can hear the front door opening and closing and I can hear his voice as he’s coming up the stairs. He’s singing. Like he does when he’s happy. Or nervous.

“So let it out and let it in, hey Jude, begin. You’re waiting for someone t0—”

And then he stops.

And that silence is the worst thing ever.

I look back through the hole in the wall, through the portcullis and can see him looking at the cookie sheet. But before he turns around and before the walls close up, I shinny up my rope through the skylight.

6:01. The sun is just setting as I climb out onto the roof. Running away goes against everything that I’ve been told about being a good friend or a good person. And in this moment, I feel like neither. But a good exit strategy is always part of a job.

So I keep going. I make my way over four rooftops and climb into the tree on the corner. My car is still waiting for me and I climb through the sunroof and brush the leaves out of my hair. I realize that in my rush to leave, I left that broken piece of my heart at the scene of the crime—yet another thing to add to the paperwork.

6:04. I purposely don’t look in the rearview mirror while I drive away. Even if it was the right thing to do, I wish that sometimes hearts didn’t have to be broken.

Because here’s the thing about being a heart breaker. People think that we’re these heartless evildoers that revel in smugly crushing hearts like iconoclasts of wholesome romance.

But as I drive away and the tears are rolling down my cheeks, the one thing I wish I were right now, is heartless.