Dead Cats and Corporate Ladders

The morning her cat stopped eating—the same morning Elena discovered her husband had been a corporate spy for three years—she understood the metaphor she'd been living inside.

"You're like a zombie," Marcus had told her six months ago, over takeout Thai they couldn't afford. "You work your way up that pyramid at Delphi Corp, and you don't even remember who you were at the bottom."

She'd laughed. Now, sitting across from him at their kitchen table, his packed duffel at the door, she realized he hadn't been talking about himself.

"It wasn't personal," Marcus said, not meeting her eyes. "The information helped my firm. You know how it is."

"I don't," Elena said. "I actually don't."

Their cat, Cairo, had stopped eating the day after Marcus started his "new job"—the one that required him to keep his laptop encrypted, his phone face down. The vet had no explanation. Some animals just knew.

They'd met playing padel. She'd been decompressing after a twelve-hour day preparing for Delphi's IPO; he'd been charming, quick on his feet, exactly what she'd needed. The sport had been their language—strategy disguised as recreation, aggression masked as play.

"You were gathering intelligence," she said now. "About the IPO. The merger. The—"

"Yes."

"For how long?"

"Three years next month."

Her life with him had been constructed on a foundation of professional espionage, and she'd been too exhausted, too focused on climbing to notice. The corporate pyramid had required her sacrifice, and Marcus had simply been collecting.

Cairo let out a thin sound from his bed by the window. Elena had an absurd thought: *If the cat dies, at least the espionage stops. At least I'm not betraying an animal who trusted me.*

"What happens now?" Marcus asked.

"Now?" Elena stood up. "Now I resign. I testify. I burn every ladder I spent ten years climbing. And you—you disappear."

Marcus flinched.

"Oh," he said. "You're not a zombie anymore."

"No," Elena said. "I suppose I'm not."

Cairo lifted his head, watching her. For the first time in months, he looked interested in his food. Something about the air in the apartment had shifted. The threat was leaving. The spy was leaving. And she—she was finally, terrifyingly, awake.