The Mask Of Truth

The gala theme is 'Beyond the Mask,' which is amusing because I’ve worn one for years, and nobody has ever asked to see what’s underneath it.

“Breathe,” Myles murmurs, squeezing my palm. He is a good man—too good, if you ask my guilt. He thinks I’m nervous because I’m about to get another plaque that says Hero in a serif font.

At the far end of the ballroom, the stage gleams like a dental smile. They’ve put my foundation’s logo everywhere: a paper mask split down the center, one side gold, the other side soot black. The board loves a metaphor that matches the napkins.

“You okay?” Myles asks.

“Peachy,” I say. “If a peach had anxiety and an arrest record nobody knows about.”

He laughs because he thinks I’m being cute. I’m not. Across the room, a woman in a red dress signals the band to lower the volume and then glides toward me like she’s late to a confession. Black hair, blunt fringe, journalist face—the kind that looks kind even when it’s about to set your life on fire. “Ms. Radan?”

“God, don’t,” I whisper. “Makes me sound like a math teacher.” I extend a hand. “Nora.”

She smiles without her eyes. “I’m Lila. We emailed. Walk with me?”

Myles bristles. “This is Nora’s big night—maybe after the program...”

“It’s fine,” I say, and kiss his cheek to send him back to the land of canapés. I follow Lila along the edge of the ballroom. We stop under a chandelier that looks like it’s carrying a grudge.

Lila slips a tiny recorder from her clutch and doesn’t turn it on. She just holds it so I can see it. “Relax,” she says. “Off the record.”

I lean on my cane. “You’re about to ask something that needs anesthesia.”

“Not anesthesia,” she says softly. “Permission.” Her voice thins to a wire. “Can you keep a secret?”

The room tilts. For a second, I think it’s the heels I wore to look tall on stage; then I register the question. Exact phrasing, an old ghost key. “I can keep lots of things,” I say. “Secrets, receipts, grudges.”

Lila’s gaze flicks to my cane and back. “I think you started the fire,” she says, as if we’re discussing the weather. “At Saint Bernadette’s. I think you meant to trap someone in there, but it spread.”

I could do that thing my face does—tilt, soften, project sincerity until the other person doubts their own skull. It’s worked on donors, boards, and talk-show hosts. It worked on me for ten years. But Lila’s eyes are steady, and my bones are tired of rehearsals. “Who told you?” I ask.

She lifts a shoulder. “Survivors talk. There were things in the report that never squared. A burnt matchbook from the parish supply closet. Your… trajectory.”

“My trajectory,” I echo, like it’s ballet. “If you think you’ve uncovered a monster, why ask me to keep a secret?”

“Because,” she says, and now the recorder looks heavier in her hand, “I’m not actually after you.”

Across the room, someone clinks a glass. On stage, the emcee shuffles note cards. “Who then?” I ask, throat dry. The past has a texture; it’s always felt like wet wool.

“The man you meant to trap,” Lila says. “He changed his name three times. Moved. He’s in this room.”

“You’re sure?” I whisper.

“I’m sure enough to be sued,” she says. “I’m sure enough to gamble my job on it. He’s a donor to your Foundation, Nora. A big one.”

Of course he is. Darkness doesn’t orbit the light; it pays for the venue.

“I want you to tell the truth,” Lila says. “On your terms. If you don’t… I still will. But I thought...” She glances down at the cane, at the gold-and-shoot logo, at me. “I thought you might be ready to stop holding your breath.”

I am. God, I am. But the truth is a switchblade; once you open it, it doesn’t fold the same way. I remember the way I’d said, “Can you keep a secret?” to the girl who shared my bunk. She nodded. I slipped into the hallway with the matchbook stolen from Father Peter’s pocket. I stood shaking in the storage room with its towers of paper towels and plastic-wrapped bedding. How easy it was to summon a tiny sun, yet impossible to control it once it woke.

I remember that when the smoke devoured the hall, everything in me sang RUN, so I did. But, turned back because a small boy in dinosaur pajamas was throwing up from fear in the stairwell. I carried him while somebody took a photograph that made me look like the Virgin Mary with bad posture. The nun who actually saved three kids died in a hallway nobody thought was worth photographing.

“Why now?” I ask Lila, buying time with air.

“Because you’re accepting the Hero of Truth award,” she says, grimacing at the irony. “Because the theme is masks, and you’ve outgrown yours. Because he’s here.”

I look at Myles. He is talking to a producer from a podcast who loves the way I sound like hope in a microphone. “I’ll tell it,” I say. My voice is steady now, like a decision you planned in reverse for years. “I’ll tell it all.”

Lila nods. She believes me. I don’t know yet if I do. The MC says my name like it’s a prize he gets to unwrap. Applause folds around me, warm as an oven. Myles squeezes my hand and whispers, “You’ve got this, hero,” and my stomach cramps around the word like it swallowed a thumbtack.

I take the stage. The teleprompter offers the speech I wrote with three other people and a lawyer. Thank you… This work is not about me… We are all heroes… The usual song we sing to keep the wolves polite.

“Good evening,” I say. “I was supposed to tell you a beautiful lie.” A ripple. Lila’s head lifts a fraction. “But tonight is for the truth,” I continue. “I’ve been polishing an image so long my arms ache.. It’s saved lives and paid mortgages. Even paid for this very average salmon you’re about to tolerate. I won’t spit on what it built. But I can’t be its prisoner anymore.”

Dead silence. Even the ice in the glasses stops clinking.

I breathe in the way my therapist taught me: two quick sips, one long pour. “You know me as the woman who rescued six children during the fire at Saint Bernadette’s. I carried a boy when the stairs looked like a dragon. I did wrap a girl in a curtain that smelled like hotel disinfectant with lies, and I did bang on doors until my hands were raw. But that’s not where the story starts.”

I pause. Myles is grey. Lila is stone. Across the room, a man sets down his glass. “The story starts in a storage room,” I say, and my voice is airless. “Where I lit a match.”

Gasps are a cliché until you hear them aimed at you. Myles grips his chair. The MC reaches for the sound tech; I see the board’s PR director stand up like a prairie dog about to perform damage control.

“I lit a match,” I repeat, “because a man who follows girls to quiet places and makes them feel like ghosts. I couldn’t make anyone see him as a storm, so I made a storm instead. I wanted it to scare him and smoke him out. I wanted it to choke his smile. I didn’t want it to take Sister June, who saved more lives in that place than the budget ever did. The headlines wrote me into a saint because sainthood sells. I let them. I wore laurel like a neck brace. I built a Foundation to keep children away from men who hide in quiet places. I married a man who doesn’t touch secrets with dirty hands. I told myself I’d speak when it mattered most.”

I scan the room. I know his posture like I know fire alarms.

“His name wasn’t Mark then,” I say, my voice finding metal. Lila’s head jerks. “It isn’t even Mark now if we’re honest. But his hands are the same. He cracks his left thumb with his right forefinger when he’s annoyed. He does it when someone else is talking. He did it in the storage room when I asked him for a new blanket. He’s doing it now.”

He freezes, left hand hovering, caught between habit and exposure. Cameras pivot. So do necks.

“Security,” someone whispers in a stage whisper.

“No,” I say into the mic, before they can drag him out. “Let him stay. Let us all look.”

He stands. “This is outrageous,” his voice smooth as church glass. “Defamation. She’s unwell.”

“I’m finally well,” I say, and it shocks me to realize it’s true.

He tries to leave. Lila steps forward with her phone held up like a lantern. “Mark Ralston, formerly Peter Marks, formerly...”

He moves faster than his tux suggests he can. Slaps the phone. It skitters. The room inhales as one body. A woman near the back with a secondhand dress and first-hand anger stands. “You told me my crying made you tired,” she says, and she rips off her mask like skin. “In the exam room.”

Another voice: “You told me I misunderstood how hugs work.”

Another: “You told me you had a daughter my age, so you knew best.”

Voices multiply like sparks finding kindling. He spins, calculating angles, exits, and alibis. “This is a witch hunt,” he says, because a certain type of man always reaches for old metaphors when new ones cut too deep.

“We’re just tired of pretending to be trees,” I say.

The board finally springs onto the stage, flustered and beige. The audience roars, then doubts its right to. Myles has his hands in his hair, eyes wet and bewildered. I want to go to him, to apologize, but I’m anchored to the podium by something heavier than guilt.

The rest of the evening is a smash-cut montage: security and statements; Lila connecting dots with surgical cruelty; women and men and one nonbinary volunteer lining up their memories in a row like dominoes that point to the same place.

I give my plaque to the small boy I carried down the stairs once, who is eighteen now and taller than his fear. He doesn’t want it, but takes it and says, “Thank you for coming back for me,” and I almost sit down on the floor and cry into my own elbows.

When it’s over, Myles and I step into the service corridor that smells like lemons and loneliness. He leans against the wall. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because I wanted you to love the mask first. So, you’d have momentum when you hit the real me.”

He scrubs his face. “I would’ve loved you anyway.”

“I know.” I swallow. “That’s worse.”

He laughs. One sharp sound that wants to be a sob when it grows up. “You set a fire.”

“I did.”

“You saved kids.”

“I did.”

“You let people call you a hero.”

“I did,” I say again. “Because sometimes the costume saves lives, even if the body inside it is a mess.”

“What happens now?”

“Reporters,” I say. “Donations are hitting zero for a while. People who were waiting for permission to speak are finally speaking. People who prefer stories with clean edges get upset that the world is jagged. Me… sleeping, maybe.”

“And us?”

I meet his eyes. “That depends on whether you can love someone who burned down a room and called it weather.”

Myles steps forward and wraps his arms around me in that way he does, like he’s building shelter. He smells like coffee and pen ink. “I married a writer,” he whispers into my hair. “We love stories even when they open with arson.”

***

That night, after the police become paperwork and the board becomes an emergency Zoom, after I answer forty questions and refuse a hundred others, I go home and sit at the kitchen table with a pen that leaks a little because the universe loves symbolism. I write the statement I should have written years ago. Lila edits for accuracy; my lawyer edits for prison avoidance. We post it in the morning. The internet does what it does: applauds, condemns, memes, cycles through seven stages of content digestion, and asks for seconds. Donors threaten. A woman from Saint Bernadette’s asks if we can dedicate a scholarship to Sister June. We can, and we will.

By afternoon, my past calls. Unknown number. I answer because cowardice got me this far; it can take the rest of the day off.

“You always liked an audience,” he says. His voice is older, as if he’s been sanding it with respectability for years.

“I liked windows,” I say. “The way they let light in.”

“You won’t win.”

“I don’t need to win,” I tell him. “I just need the next girl to know that the storage room isn’t quiet because nobody can hear her.”

He chuckles. “You always were dramatic.”

“You always were a cliché.”

A pause. He lowers his voice as if he’s about to say something tender. “You won’t tell the worst thing,” he says. “You won’t tell them that you liked the feeling. When the match took.”

He thinks he’s naming my monster. But the worst thing isn’t that I enjoyed the instant when the match obeyed me. The worst thing is that I learned how good people will let you keep wearing a mask if the mask throws fundraisers. The worst thing is how much relief there is in finally taking it off.

“Go practice your left-thumb crack,” I say, and hang up.

***

Myles sits at the table with the girls’ homework spread out between us like a peace treaty. Our youngest asks what defamation means. Our oldest asks what courage means. I tell them both the same thing: “Telling the truth when the truth is a feral cat.”

When the house goes quiet, I put on my coat and walk to the river. My therapist says rituals help, and I’ve always been the kind of girl who wants to make meaning out of a mess. I pull the old matchbook out of my pocket—how many years did I keep it? Long enough to harden. I strike a match. It flares, small and obedient. I let it burn down to kiss my skin and then drop it into the river, where it dies without a scream. I do it again and again, not as penance but as proof: fire is a tool that can be a prayer or a weapon depending on the hand. The last match hisses out in the water like a curse, losing its vowels.

Behind me, footsteps. Lila. She sits on the bench without speaking. We share a quiet I don’t want to keep.

“You could’ve destroyed me last night,” I say.

“I still might,” she says, honest as salt. “Depends on how you move next.”

“I’m going to build the Foundation again,” I say. “Smaller. With locks on doors that should never have needed locks. With windows that open. With kids who learn to leave the second someone asks them to keep a secret in a room that smells like bleach.”

She nods. “Good.” A beat. “You were funny up there.”

“Was I?”

“When you said the salmon was average.”

I huff. “It was. Hero of Truth award, and they give me hospital food.”

She smiles. The river pretends to sleep. “Do you regret telling them?”

“Yes,” I say, because honesty is a muscle and I want mine to start lifting its own weight. “And no. Regret isn’t a verdict. It’s a weather pattern.”

Lila laughs into her scarf. “A donor called to say he loved the speech.”

“Of course he did,” I say. “Some people clap for thunder if they think God is watching.”

“Nora?”

“Yeah?”

“If you had to do it all over… would you light the match?”

I look at my hands. One palm bears the pale map of an old blister. “I would’ve found a different kind of fire. One that burns the right person first.”

She nods as if that’s the only answer worth saying out loud.

***

At home, Myles is waiting with tea and a question in his eyes that he asks by not asking. We climb into bed like two countries negotiating a border. “Hey,” he says. “One more thing.”

“Hmm?”

“People will ask me what I knew.”

“They will.” I brace.

He leans in, kisses my forehead, and says with a crooked grin, “My lips are sealed.”

I laugh—relief, grief, something cleaner. “That’s a terrible line,” I say.

“It is,” he agrees. “But it’s ours.”

***

In the morning, the sun is the same liar it’s always been bright and optimistic. The girls spill cereal like confetti. The kettle screams and calms. The Foundation’s phone rings. A board member quits in a paragraph full of leadership jargon. Three survivors ask if we could meet. A journalist I don’t like wants an exclusive. The world keeps happening, oblivious to how it almost burned again.

I look at my reflection in the hallway mirror. The woman in the glass looks like me for once. “You’re not a hero,” I tell her, finally and mercifully. “You’re a person who did a catastrophic thing and a good thing and now you’re trying to do better things.”

She nods back, as if we’ve both been waiting to be demoted to human. I slip on my coat, tuck my cane under my arm, and step into a day that doesn’t owe me absolution. The truth isn’t a mask I can take off. It’s a face I can finally wear.