Counterintelligence

Margaret arranged her vitamins in the plastic organizer—Monday through Sunday, a rainbow of promises she made to herself each morning but rarely kept. At 43, she'd become a spy in her own marriage, conducting surveillance with the precision of someone who'd watched too many Hitchcock films.

The dog, Buster, sensed it first. His golden retriever enthusiasm had curdled into suspicion whenever David's phone buzzed during dinner. Margaret would watch them both—David checking his screen with that practiced casualness, Buster watching David with what looked like disappointed judgment.

"Just work," David said, shoving spinach into his mouth with unnecessary force. Margaret had started making salads because the internet said it was what healthy couples did. Healthy couples didn't sleep in separate bedrooms.

She'd planted a tracker on his phone three weeks ago. Not because she thought he was cheating—though God knows the signs were there—but because she'd started forgetting things herself. The water bill she'd paid twice. The anniversary she'd missed. Maybe she was the one under surveillance, monitored by some undiagnosed neurological shadow.

The tracker showed him at a different address every Tuesday and Thursday. Not an office. Not a hotel. A residential neighborhood on the west side.

Tuesday, she followed him. Buster whined in the backseat, probably betrayed by the car ride that wasn't to the dog park. David parked in front of a modest blue house. He didn't go inside. He sat in his car for twenty minutes, then drove away.

Margaret waited. An elderly woman emerged from the house, carrying a tray of what looked like lasagna. She set it on the porch, looked around, and went back inside.

The truth hit her with the violence of something she should have seen all along: the lasagna. The Tuesdays and Thursdays. The spinach he'd started eating despite hating it his entire life.

Her mother's house. Her mother, who'd been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's last year. The mother Margaret hadn't visited in six months because she was "too busy" running surveillance on a marriage she'd forgotten how to inhabit.

That night, she took her vitamins. All of them. Then she sat on the floor with Buster, who rested his head on her shoulder, and cried until there was no water left in her, just the hollow echo of everything she hadn't been spying on all along.