Shark at the Pool Table

You never really know someone. Not even after three years of Sunday mornings, shared toothpaste tubes, and the way she always stole the left side of the bed.

I found the bug under the kitchen table on a Tuesday. Small, sophisticated, exactly the kind of thing a corporate spy would plant. Not that Elena was a spy—or so I'd believed. She worked in marketing, for chrissakes. She cried at insurance commercials and collected ceramic frogs.

We met at a dive bar with a single pool table where the felt had been worn down to something resembling regret. I was terrible at the game. She beat me every time, leaning over the table in that way that made my throat tighten, calling her shots with a confidence that felt dangerous then but feels like something else now.

"You're full of bull," she'd say when I tried to claim I'd let her win. But I was the one being played, wasn't I?

The hat sat on the coat rack. Fedora, ridiculous, something she'd bought at a thrift store on a whim. She only wore it when she was leaving—when the calls came that she took in the other room, when she said she had to run out for a meeting or a friend in crisis or whatever story she'd spun that day.

I'm sitting at that same bar now. The pool table's empty. I ordered whiskey, and when the bartender asked if I wanted a double, I said yes. I should feel something more than this hollow certainty.

Three years. Turns out Elena wasn't her real name. The marketing job was cover. The corporate intelligence firm she actually worked for had been targeting my company's R&D division for months. Our anniversary dinner? That was the night before the merger announcement she somehow knew was coming.

I rack the balls. My hands don't shake. I've never played better.

Some businessman in a suit asks if I want a game. I break and sink three solids on the first shot.

"You're good," he says.

"I learned from the best," I tell him.

Outside, the streetlights flicker on. I leave without looking back at the empty rack, at the table where I lost everything without realizing I was already losing.

Her hat's still on the coat rack at home. I'll burn it tomorrow.