Ending an important relationship is never easy. It’s always going to hurt, whether it was your decision or your partner’s. But that doesn’t mean anyone did anything wrong. Sometimes two people just fall out of cahoots.
One day you’re madly in cahoots. The next you’re not.
Most of the time, no one’s to blame. Falling out of cahoots is just something that happens, even to the most dastardly of people. And now it’s happened to us. Maybe our criminal plots grew apart, or maybe, in the end, our devious antics just weren’t compatible. Maybe it was because we stopped making time for schemes.
It didn’t help that we were always fighting over laundering money.
I’ll never forget the beginning, and how could I? There we were, reaching for the same crowbar, and suddenly my whole world changed. We made so many secret plans for our future together. We were so fully committed to fraud in those days we would stay up all night passionately discussing which enemies we should frame for a crime. Back then, I’d find myself cackling for no reason. I’d scream maniacally in the shower. I’d listen to the birds, and it would sound like they were conspiring right along with us.
We were so in cahoots it was crazy.
Remember that first summer? I taught you how to tap the phone lines. You taught me how to use bolt cutters. We got matching prison tattoos when they threw us in the pen. We surprised each other with switchblades and silencers, just because. We burnt off our fingerprints, and when I was worried mine looked bad, you assured me they were perfectly illegible.
You made racketeering feel so easy.
I would have spent the rest of my life riding around in hot-wired cars with you—the windows down, the radio on, and the backseat overflowing with stolen electronics. I saw decades and decades of misdeeds ahead of us. We were going to travel the world and break into that bank vault in Switzerland. Maybe one day even blow up a house in the suburbs with a couple of lackeys.
But of course it was naïve to think our days of spreading mischief and mayhem could last forever. Rubbing the palms of my hands together doesn’t even make me feel nefarious anymore. It just makes me sad.
Regardless of how we got here or why, you deserve to be in cahoots with someone who makes you feel diabolical—we both do. Don’t cry. Just because this didn’t work out doesn’t mean the perfect crony isn’t somewhere out there waiting for you. And even though we’re not co-conspirators anymore, hopefully we can still get together and scheme from time to time.
Now come pick up your brass knuckles, or they’re going to Goodwill.
