The lobby outside the director’s office was emptied of everyone but KC and Yardley. Still, KC felt distinctly like she was being observed.
Maybe it was the ring of eleven-by-seventeen portraits of white men hanging in a long, unending line on the dark paneling. KC wouldn’t be surprised if the portraitswereobserving them, via concealed monitoring devices. She wouldn’t be shocked, even, to learn they were being observed by the subjects of a few of these portraits from beyond the grave.
This was the CIA, after all.
Yardley sat with her arms crossed in a leather armchair with Ashley Sterling-Chenoweth Thompson’s wig like a small dog beside her. She was determinedly studying the line of portraits. A tech had taken her bra for analysis, and she’d buttoned her jacket to the collar for modesty. She wore her black hair pinned in a crown of braids against her head, a style that KC thought of as very Yardley and had never—not one time—put in the category ofuseful hairstyle to wear under a wig.
KC still couldn’t reconcile everything she’d heard about the Unicorn—everything she’d observed firsthand about the Unicorn this afternoon—withYardley.
Yardley and her soft palette of soft clothes, and how she squealed when she found a spider in the shower. The way she shoved her cold feet under KC’s ass on the sofa when they watched a movie together and loved rom-coms, the more rom the better. The way she took care of KC, bringing her something to drink when she was working. The way her eyes used to flutter shut as she sighed and pushed up her hips when KC gently held her wrists above her head,justpressing them against the pillow, and kissed her neck with a little bit of teeth.
“How bugged do you think this lobby is?” Yardley’s voice sounded thick, like it did when she was upset.
“The usual amount.”
“So they’ll know I sneezed before I do.”
“And why.”
KC wanted to smile, but the mutual acknowledgment ofspying, making a joke about it, had swamped her with a new wave of disbelief and… yes. Betrayal.
Hers. Yardley’s.
She’d imagined this day would come, the day she confronted the enormity of the lies she’d told Yardley once and for all.If I just told her, she’d thought, like a mantra. If I told her, she’d have to believe me. She’d have to forgive me. She’d have to still love me.But KC had never once imagined the enormity of the lies Yardley had toldher.
It was not fair to hold Yardley to account for those lies. KC could acknowledge that. But her heart was a fickle bitch, and it was holding Yardley to account regardless. Her heart was relivingtheir entire relationship, sifting through it for what was actually true.
The venom of hurt inside her made her knees unsteady. She wondered if Yardley had ever respected or loved her for real. If any of it, any of what they’d shared in three years, had beenreal.
KC tried to stop herself, but the spiral had well and truly pointed itself downward. The Unicorn was known to be able to convince anyone of the veracity of their cover. So what had Yardley convinced KC of? Who was Yardley when she was with KC? Why was she with KC at all?
Yardley suddenly turned to face her. “I don’t care if they can hear us. We have to talk about this.” Her voice broke on the last word, not with tears. Probably with the same hot, dry disbelief that KC was currently swallowing over.
“Okay,” she said. Or didn’t say. Her feelings were so loud inside her body, it was hard to maintain her connection to reality.
Yardley leaned forward. Her eyes were brown, not their natural blue, rimmed by false eyelashes and sparkling shadow. Yardley almost never wore makeup. “Because we haven’ttalkedabout this.”
“We’re not supposed to!” That was what burst out of KC’s mouth. And then, appallingly, without warning, she had so many words, she couldn’t stop them. “We’renot supposed to, Yardley, and I don’t mean because of the agency, I mean because that’s how it is with you and me. I’m not supposed to ask you why you’re crying in the shower. I’m not supposed to tell you the real reason why I can’t sleep. We’re not even supposed to talk about why we’re not talking anymore or why you’re sleeping in the guest room or moving out, not beyond ‘this isn’t working,’ ‘I miss us,’ ‘maybe we moved too fast’”—KC stopped just long enough to suck in a shallow breath—“which, if I ever said it or agreed when you did,that was a lie. I would’ve moved in with you after the first day we spent together. The first time you talked to me at that party. I felt like we had everything with each other, and then everything wasn’t enough.” She shoved her hands into her hair and pulled to keep herself from crying. “Yes, I held myself back because I had to keep the agency’s secrets. Yes. Yes. But then I think I just got in the habit of holding myself back. Maybe you did, too, I don’t know, but I don’t think I knowhowto talk to you, Yardley, not anymore. If I ever did.”
When she stopped, another thought sheathed her skin in icy prickles. Had Yardley been pretending in the van? The Unicorn would be able to do that as easily as breathing. “Did youknow?”
“No! I didn’t. Did you?”
“No.”
“Buthowdidn’t you?” Now Yardley’s disconcertingly incorrect brown eyes searched her face. “Doesn’t Tabasco know everything, isn’t that their whole deal? Whenever I had a problem and Atlas told me,Tabasco’s got it, I would relax. Tabasco could solve any problem, figure anything out. But you didn’t know it was me? I can’t square that.”
“Says the superspy.” KC’s heart was pounding in a way that made her think it could stop any moment. “You’re the expert in body language and observation. Though it bothers me less to think you might havemademe than the idea that everything we had, you made up. Isn’t that what you’re good at? Convince people to believe what you tell them, like some kind of Jedi mind trick?”
KC knew that wasn’t fair. She’d felt her entire soul shy away from her mouth as soon as she said it. Butgod, the hurt. It was an entirely different magnitude than what she’d felt in the middleof the night, burying her face into Yardley’s side of the bed for a single breath of her.
Yardley stood up, then sat back down again. She looked away from KC for a long minute, and when she looked back, KC knew for sure that the passionate furor in her face was one hundred percent real.
“My heart has beenbroken.” Yardley pulled off her false eyelashes and snapped off her sparkling earrings. Her hand dove into her pocket, emerging with a tissue she used to roughly erase her lipstick. “I have stayed up into the middle of the night with you, crying, begging, talking, arguing, holding your hands and trying to find the words to give us a chance. I knew I couldn’t show you my entire self, and I had gotten in too deep, just like my granddaddy, but the fact is that every single lie I told you wasn’t aboutyou, KC. It was about the cruel sacrifice required by duty to my country.”
KC couldn’t avoid thinking of the nights Yardley was talking about, nights of circling, desperate conversations she tried to leave behind when they came to nothing. She’d been close to telling Yardley the truth so many times, wanting nothing more than to boil down those tangled and confusing talks to a single problem they could tackle together.If I just told her. If I told her, it would fix us.
“But we know everything now,” she said, wildly, “so that means no problems anymore, right? Because that’s how I thought it would work.”
