Greener on the Other Side

The padel ball cracked against the glass wall, a sharp report that echoed my own fracturing composure. Across the court, Marcus's smile didn't reach his eyes. He'd been smiling like that for weeks—since the promotion, since the late nights, since I'd found the encrypted flash drive in his coat pocket.

"Your backhand's off," he called out, spinning his racquet with practiced ease. "Everything okay?"

Everything was not okay. I was forty-two years old, eighteen years married to a man I'd evidently never truly known, and currently playing padel with someone who might have been selling state secrets to foreign contractors. The spinach incident at dinner—his sudden aversion to a vegetable he'd loved for decades—had been the first crack in the facade. Then the burner phone. The coded language in his emails.

"Fine," I said, smashing the ball into his backhand corner. He missed.

The club was nearly empty at this hour. Just us, the thwack of rubber balls, and the surveillance cameras I'd stopped noticing months ago. Or had I? paranoia was a slow poison, seeping in everywhere. The man at the bar who never seemed to drink. The woman who always chose the court adjacent to ours.

Marcus wiped sweat from his forehead, his motion too deliberate. "Elena, we need to talk."

"About work?"

"About everything." His voice cracked. "About the spinach. About why I really took that promotion."

I stood there, racquet dangling from my hand, as he crossed the net and dropped to his knees on the blue synthetic court. "I'm not the spy," he whispered. "You are."

The ball machine behind us continued its rhythmic firing. PAD-pad-PAD. Like a heartbeat, or a countdown.

"Your real name is Yelena Volkov," he said, tears in his eyes. "You were recruited by the FSB twenty-three years ago. The spinach—it wasn't me. It was you. You forgot who you were supposed to be."

I laughed. Couldn't help it. The absurdity of it, the brilliance. Gaslighting as performance art.

Then I remembered the gaps. The years I couldn't quite account for. The languages I'd learned too easily. The way people sometimes looked at me with something like fear.

"Check your pocket," Marcus said softly.

I reached into my skirt and found it—a small flash drive, identical to the one I'd found in his coat. My hands knew the encryption password before my mind did.

The padel ball machine fell silent. Somewhere, a handler was watching. I looked at my husband—my assignment, my mark, my complication—and realized I had a choice to make.

The spinach had been the trigger, not the symptom. And somewhere in Moscow, someone was laughing.

"Game point," I said, and meant something else entirely.