“It’s just all so goddamn sad,” she said, tears bursting out alongside the words.
Carter turned onto a side street, drew to a stop and cut the engine. She heard a click as he released his seatbelt. “Come here,” he said, drawing her in tight.
“We shouldn’t be stopping.”
“Just take the damn hug.” He tucked her head into the nook under his chin. “I get that you want to keep a brave face around Kimberly, but you don’t have to around me. It’s not just Kimberly going through this.”
She breathed deeply, as if she could suck up some of his strength, his confidence, and allowed herself to melt into him. In the car’s muffled interior, she could both hear and feel his heart beating—a primal comfort. Maybe Kimberly was wrong about Alice being the anchoring influence. Maybe it wasn’t until you found an anchorage that you realized how adrift you were.
“I’m sorry to see you so sad.”
“No, this is good, actually. At this point—with my mom, with Poppy, with Nika… I usually feel empty, and I desperatelywantto feel something, but I’m just numb or my brain can’t compute. Kimberly’s giving me permission to start the grieving process early. I just don’t want to grieve her. I don’t want to lose her.”
“They’re getting married?”
“She wants a wedding instead of a funeral. A celebration. I just hope she’s going to be well enough to enjoy it. Poor Malik—they were so stupidly happy, before this. He’s been her rock these last few years. It’s hard to watch his heart slowly breaking. Weddings are supposed to be all about the future, about beginnings.”
“Yep.”
“But you know what? It puts even all of this craziness into perspective.” She waved her hands toward the windshield, as iftheir various assailants were gathered in front of them. “And we need to get going.”
“Death has a way of doing that,” he said, releasing her gently but hovering his hands around her for a second as if she might fall.
“I guess you’d know about that.”
“I really don’t know if I do,” he said, starting the car and moving off.
“How so?”
He was silent for a long time, and she thought she’d pushed too hard and lost him. But then he took a big breath and started speaking. “It’s like you say about the last-minute rally. Not being able to accept the obvious. Part of me is still there, waiting for the rally. I don’t know if my entire brain has truly clicked over to ‘she’s dead.’ Some of it’s there, some of it’s not.”
“It must be hard when you’re not there at the end—I mean, it’s hard enough when youarethere. So Vanessa just disappeared, like in the book? You never got any answers?”
Alice waited for the “it’s a long story” or some other fob-off, but it didn’t come. Instead, he said, “I don’t even know what country she was in. Her file is sealed because whatever she was working on was such a secret. Sometimes I think I should have tried harder, got a lawyer to challenge it, but… That would have meant facing up to it, and I wasn’t ready to do that. And now… I dunno if I want to go back and churn it all up again.”
“So you met in training, married within the year?” She shuffled in her seat to face him, and he glanced at her with an almost undetectable smile—an expression she hadn’t seen before. He looked away again before she could dig to the bottom of it.
“Fast, I know,” he replied, “but getting married made things easier in some ways. Everyone says it’s hard if you marry someone outside the Agency. When you’re in the clandestineservice, half your life becomes a lie. It’s way easier when you both have security clearances, and you understand what the other one is going through.”
“You make it sound like a purely practical decision.”
“Nah,” he said with a sad smile. “It was crazy romantic.”
“It was?”
“There was an assignment coming up where we were to pose as husband and wife—I can’t tell you where, or what, but it was just for a few months—and she just said it in an offhand way, ‘Maybe we should get married for real?’ And I thought, ‘Why not?’”
“I can’t imagine making the biggest life decision you’ll ever make spontaneously.”
“That was Vanessa. And it was a no-brainer. She once said that we were basically the same person and that was why it worked so well. We got married the following week, super quietly, and shipped out on assignment the next day. We joked that it was our dream honeymoon—and it was a great cover because of course we were all over each other, for real.”
“Sounds like the perfect partnership.” Alice got that strange rush of buoyancy and envy she’d had at the cabin. To have found a man like this, known he was yours forever, and then…
“Yeah, we were good together. But I don’t think two people have to be exactly the same to work. Yin and yang and all that. I mean, take you and me!”
He said it jokingly, and Alice didn’t know how to respond—she was way too much of a coward to ask what he meant, even though inside she was screaming to know—so it remained hanging there between them.
“How long were you married?” she said eventually.
