Blue Light Leaking Through

The cat landed on the balcony railing with impossible grace, its yellow eyes fixed on me where I sat in the bathtub, submerged to my chin in lukewarm water. My iPhone balanced on the toilet tank, screen glowing with messages from him—my handler, my lover, the man who'd spent three years turning me into someone I no longer recognized.

'Swimming in thoughts again?' he'd texted an hour ago, knowing exactly where I was. He always knew. That was the problem with sleeping with the spy who'd recruited you.

I'd been following Elena Chen for six weeks now—journalist, whistleblower, the kind of target that made you question everything you thought you knew about right and wrong. Tonight, I'd watched her through a café window, laughing with someone who might have been her brother, might have been her source, might have been her lover. And for the first time in three years, I hadn't reported in. I'd turned off my phone and come home to this bath, to this cat that wasn't even mine—it belonged to the apartment below, but it visited me almost every night, as if it sensed the particular quiet of someone learning to drown in inches.

The iPhone buzzed again. A call this time.

I let it ring. The cat purred, a rumble I could feel through the water. Outside, Singapore pressed close—humid, relentless, full of people who were exactly what they seemed. That was the luxury I'd traded away, wasn't it? The right to be simple, to be read at a glance. Instead, I was all subtext and coded language, all the things I couldn't say out loud.

When the ringing stopped, silence poured back in. I stood up, water streaming off my skin, and reached for the phone. One new voicemail.

I didn't play it. Instead, I opened the notes app and began to type everything—the operations, the assets, the way it had started with money I'd needed for my mother's hospital bills and ended with me hollowed out from the inside. The cat watched, unblinking, as my fingers moved faster and faster.

The file was almost done when the front door clicked open.

'I thought we could talk,' he said from the doorway, and his voice was gentle, the way it had been the night he'd first approached me at that bar in Bangkok. I could see him in the mirror's reflection—not holding a weapon, just standing there in his crisp white shirt, watching me.

I kept typing. The last word was 'Elena'.

'I know,' I said, and hit send.