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lied to me.”
    “I didn’t have a choice. You, of all people, should understand—”
    “Don’t you
dare,
” I say, because I know where he’s headed.
    I picture us, so long ago, the little table in the corner of the coffee shop, oversize mugs in front of us. “What do you do for work?” he asked.
    “I just finished up grad school,” I said, hoping that would suffice, knowing it wouldn’t.
    “Do you have a job lined up?”
    I nodded. Took a sip of coffee. Stalled.
    “Doing what?” he pressed.
    I looked down at my mug, the little puffs of steam that were rising from it. “Consulting. A small firm,” I said, the lie tasting bitter. But he was a stranger, and I wasn’t about to tell a stranger I had been hired by the CIA. “How about you?” I said, and thankfully the conversation turned to software engineering.
    “It’s not the same at all,” I say now. “You’ve had ten years. Ten
years
.”
    “I know,” he says, contrite.
    Now Caleb’s squirming, too. Squirming and smiling at me, no doubt wondering why I won’t smile back. He stretches his arms out toward me, and Matt holds him up and out over the table at the same time I reach for him. He settles into my lap, calm.
    “Do you do that kind of thing? Pretend to be someone’s relative?” I ask. I don’t know why it matters. Why that, of all things, is what I want to know.
    He shakes his head. “They wouldn’t want me taking a risk like that.”
    Of course they wouldn’t. He’s more valuable than that, isn’t he? Because he’s married to me. And I work for the CIA.
    God, the Russians really scored big with him. They must be thrilled. How lucky is that, a deep-cover spy married to a CIA counterintelligence analyst?
    And then a jolt of cold runs through me like electricity.
    I picture the two of us, in my apartment a few weeks after we’d met. Sitting across from each other at the folding table in the corner of the studio, pizza on paper plates in front of us. “I haven’t been completely honest with you,” I said, wringing my hands, worried how he’d react to my admission of untruthfulness but relieved to be clearing the air, putting myself in a position where I wouldn’t have to lie to this man ever again. “I work for the CIA.” I remember his face clearly, unchanged at first, like the news didn’t surprise him. Then something flickered in his eyes, and I thought the information just took a moment too long to register.
    But it didn’t, did it? He knew all along.
    My chest is tight. I close my eyes, and I see myself in the grad school auditorium, the presentation from the CIA recruiter. The realization that
this
is what I could do with my life, a way to make a difference in the world, to serve my country, to make my family proud. Time flashes forward, past the application process, the background investigation, the battery of evaluations. To the day, a year later, after I’d all but given up, when I got the letter in the mail, generic government return address. Plain white paper, no letterhead. Just a start date, salary, directions. And the office to which I’d been assigned: the Counterintelligence Center.
    That was two weeks before I moved to Washington. And met Matt.
    My breath is coming fast now. In my head I’m back in that coffee shop, sitting in that corner, reliving our first conversation, the one where we discovered how similar we were. He didn’t just play along, create a persona as he went.
He
was the first to say he was raised Catholic, that his mom was a teacher, that he had a golden retriever. He said it because he already knew it about me.
    I raise a hand to my mouth and am vaguely aware it’s shaking.
    The Russians weren’t lucky. They were thorough. Everything was intentional, planned. It wasn’t serendipitous at all.
    I was his target.

Matt leans forward again, the creases deeper, the eyes wider. I’m convinced he can read my thoughts, that he knows the truth that just dawned on me. “I swear everything I