“What about you?”
A brief, sad silence answers all of my questions before he speaks. I wish he wouldn’t say it. I wish he wouldn’t. We could let the waves answer for us. I have a silly hope that we could walk away together right now. Disappear into the shadows. But no—that wouldn’t work. This whole incident is proof of that. Someone always comes along and finds you if you’re trying to hide.
“I’ll have to go with them,” Sam admits. I hug him tighter, as if a hug could keep him in Eben Cape with me instead of watching him disappear into one of those helicopters. “They have questions. It will take some time to give them answers.”
Because, of course, if his handler was a rogue agent, then Sam could be one, too. I don’t know much about government agencies, but I do know that anyone who was involved with the handler will have to talk about what happened.
“How much time?”
He huffs out a breath as if this question is the one that has finally gotten the better of him. “I don’t know.”
It could be weeks. It could be years. It could be forever. It feels like goodbye, and that hurts more than the cold or the fear. Goodbye always hurts the most.
Chapter Eighteen
Sam, one month later
The one positive to the situation is that I don’t have to worry about finding a place to stay. The CIA puts me up in a room in what could be a well-maintained hotel from the 1990s. It’s not a hotel. It’s a CIA property for agents who have been involved in something fucked-up, which I have.
Until this year, I wouldn’t have cared. Now, after Marjorie, the beige paint on the walls tests my patience after three days. I have to use all my training to keep myself from losing my shit. I never do. Not in front of my interviewers, anyway. Some late nights I pace back and forth along the industrial carpet and try to remember every goddamn detail of the Lighthouse Inn. Every thoughtful decoration Marjorie found at one antique shop or another. The light through the window in my guest room.
Marjorie in my bed. Marjorie in my arms. Marjorie sighing as her lips met mine.
I’ve been captured as an undercover agent in enemy territory before. This is a special kind of torture.
They follow the usual procedure when it comes to the debriefing. Every possible question is put to me every possible way over the course of the full month. Different interviewers take different stances across the table from me. Some of them act like longtime friends. Some of them want to play the bad cop.
All of them get the same answers.
The mission came down from my handler.
He did a bunch of suspicious shit.
I never had instructions from anyone else.
There was no evidence at the inn.
The final interviewer isn’t an interviewer at all. He’s three steps up in the chain of command, and he flips through my file while he sits across from me. It’s half an inch thick. Opaque records of the work I’ve done for the CIA. Commendations and code-word summaries, one after the other. None of those papers comes close to Marjorie’s bed and breakfast. “Anything else you wanted to disclose?”
“Before you fire me, you mean.”
He closes the file and looks at me over his glasses. “Several of your answers suggested that the mission was compromised.”
“It wasn’t my mission in the first place.”
“There was an entanglement.”
Yes, there fucking was. My heart has been entangled with the pretty little innkeeper since the first moment I saw her. The feelings didn’t fade over the course of the debriefing. If anything, they’ve gotten stronger. Marjorie sleeps next to me in my dreams. I can’t stop replaying my memories of the time we spent together. It was hardly any time at all. One of my shortest missions. But it changed everything. She showed me what I needed, years after I stamped out any hope of that.
It’s over for me. The job. Even if he doesn’t fire me, I’ll never be able to go another minute without thinking of her. She’ll always be in the back of my mind. That’s why agents aren’t supposed to have families. It takes away your ability to think rationally. Love overpowers everything else.
“If you want to stay on the force, there can be no further contact.”
I can keep my job if I stay away from Marjorie Dunn. They’ll make it simple. I’ll be overseas, on missions that force me to be out of contact for weeks at a time. They’ll keep me running down the more dangerous foreign actors and put me in increasingly difficult situations.
I’ll never see her again.
Going back to Eben Cape means leaving my life behind. Everything I’ve worked for over the years. Everything I’ve done. It’s nothing in the outside world. No one can ever know the details. I’ll have to start over from scratch.