I tried to figure it out but admittedly did not get far. Puzzle held a special intrigue to me as a child, but it seemed like his life was a knot that I could not unravel. I’d been told by many different people that he left to go find his family. But in all the years that I talked to him he never spoke of anyone.

They say assassins can’t have friends. But I always felt like we were friends, even if I just been a boy at the time. Maybe that’s why he didn’t mind me. I’d learn later that the night he left was the bloodiest day the family had ever seen.

Puzzle was the thin man, not too tall, smelled like gingerbread cookies, and rolled a silver coin over his knuckles as he talked. I always knew there was something different about Puzzle, but he never struck me as a violent man. It made me wonder if I knew the real Puzzle or if he had hidden his true nature from me.

We all contain pieces of ourselves that don’t seem to fit the rest of our lives, but they do. Our lives are not one linear heroes arc of a journey. They are the unruly amalgamation of many different stories pieced together with one common thread – ourselves.

I had forgotten about him. I had forgotten most of my childhood after I left for the city. I didn’t talk of it as I realize the kids around me would not understand growing up surrounded by made men and things that go bump in the night.

But the universe loves to laugh – so outside of my school one day I saw him. He held a boy by the scruff of the neck and stared at him. The boy had been giving me trouble in my classes, but nothing I couldn’t deal with. Puzzle looked up to see me and smiled. He dropped the boy and walked away. I never saw him again after that, but I always had the feeling that he was nearby.

I’d wondered if he wanted to keep me from joining the life he led. The life my family had led before his final day in their employ. I wonder if he felt guilt for what he did. Or if he was repaying a debt. I couldn’t tell. But every now and then I’ll smell the scent of gingerbread and think of him.

Each time I would remember more from my childhood. Memories of my mother pleading with him. Insisting that I wasn’t his burden. His quiet growls that I was. I remember staring out the window of a villa in the fields of golden wheat.

I remember how Puzzle struggled to smile like the rest of the adults. How it came easy for them but for him it was like opening an old chest that had rusted hinges. The notes of a language I no longer speak flutter through my mind like a butterfly that’s just out of reach.

I remember sitting in his dark room as men screamed outside in the courtyard. Two bags sat at the end of the bed. Only one was taken. Two bags sat at the end of the bed. Only one was taken.

I remembered pushing a pin to the end of my thumb to gather the tears of a dutiful son as the remaining men lowered my father into the earth. even before his cough and closed my father’s face had been distant from me. The ache in my heart was another’s abandonment, not his. I laid that to rest long before.

I got in fights as I got older. Hoping Puzzle would reappear like that day outside school. I had my ass handed to me enough times to learn that he wasn’t. I even accepted a contract, but I didn’t need Puzzle stepping in to tell me that it was a bad idea. I played ignorant misgivings and the favor of a fading name.

I run numbers now. Easier to accept steady variables than unknown ones. Still, I face Christmas with the hope of a wary child as familiar aromas fill the air. I’ve long since given up on Santa. But I still believed in some things.