Orange Sunset Over a Broken Marriage

Marcus stood in the kitchen doorway, watching his wife Elena prepare dinner. The **orange** sunset flooded through the window, catching the stray **spinach** leaf between her teeth as she laughed at something on her phone. She looked beautiful, radiant — and completely foreign to him now.

Three years undercover as a corporate **spy** will do that to a marriage. He'd infiltrated her company, stolen their proprietary research, and destroyed everything she'd built from the ground up. The promotion they'd given him had been his reward. The divorce papers she'd found yesterday were hers.

"Marcus?" She'd stopped laughing. "You've been standing there for five minutes. Are you okay?"

He felt like a **zombie** — dead inside, going through the motions of a life he'd already betrayed. This wasn't even the worst part. The worst part was that he'd fallen in love with his target somewhere along the way.

"Remember our first date?" he asked suddenly. "That **baseball** game?"

Elena's expression softened, then hardened again. "I remember you bought me a stale hot dog and told me you worked in nonprofit logistics. That was a lie too, wasn't it?"

Marcus nodded slowly. "Everything was a lie. Except how I felt about you."

"Feelings don't erase what you did." She turned back to chopping vegetables. "Feelings don't give me back three years of my life."

The sun dipped below the horizon. The orange light faded to gray, matching the deadness in Marcus's chest. He'd won the corporate war, but looking at Elena's stiff back, he understood perfectly: some victories cost more than they're worth. He'd destroyed the only real thing he'd ever had.

He walked to the door. "I'll pack tonight."

"Don't bother," she said without turning around. "I changed the locks yesterday."

Marcus stepped into the twilight, realizing too late that in this game of espionage, he'd been the one played all along.