Glass Coffin

Elise found the text at 5 AM, the blue light of her iPhone illuminating the sagging skin under her eyes. She'd been running every morning for six months—punishment, penitence, pilgrimage—but the person she used to be had already calcified into something unrecognizable. Her hair had started falling out in clumps three weeks after Mark disappeared. Stress, the doctors said. Grief, her mother said. Neither knew the half of it.

The message wasn't from him. It was from her: 'Target acquired. Phase one complete. Don't contact me again.'

She sat on the edge of the bathtub, the cold tile seeping through her sweatpants. All those years she'd thought they were building something—a marriage, a home, a life that mattered—and instead she'd been the mission. The realization hollowed her out until she was just skin and hollow bone, walking through rooms that no longer felt like hers.

zombie-like, she moved through the morning: brush teeth, shower, dress for work she couldn't remember caring about. Her coworkers called her 'the resilient one' at the funeral—the one who kept it together when everyone else fell apart. They didn't know she was already dead inside. They didn't know she'd been performing this version of herself for longer than she'd been married to it.

The spy agency had recruited him young, she learned later. Fresh out of law school, idealistic, broke. She was supposed to be cover, a prop in the suburban fantasy he sold to whoever watched their suburban street. But cover became life, or something like it, until the mission called and he vanished like smoke.

She deleted the message. She laced her running shoes. She stepped into the gray dawn and started moving, not toward anything but away from the person she'd been pretending to be. Some wounds don't heal. Some stories don't have endings worth writing. Some mornings, you just keep running.