The Asset's Wife

Elena stood at the kitchen counter, chopping spinach with mechanical precision. The cable news droned in the background—some scandal in Brussels, allegations of deep-cover operations, men in suits denying everything. She'd stopped listening months ago.

Barnaby—her husband's sleek orange tabby—jumped onto the counter. He regarded her with suspicious yellow eyes.

"You too?" she whispered.

Marcus had been gone three weeks this time. "Regional training," he'd said, kissing her forehead at the door. But his passport sat in the drawer, stamps accumulating like years—Cairo, Prague, Yangon. Places where men did whatever it was Marcus did.

She squeezed an orange over the spinach, watching juice slick the dark leaves. Citrus sharp, bright, cutting through the dull ache that had become her chest.

The cat knocked something off the counter—a small silver device, no larger than a thumb drive. It must have fallen from Marcus's coat when he'd left last night to catch his flight. Elena hadn't even known he'd come home.

She picked it up. Tiny letters: ENCRYPTED.

Her fingers trembled. For three years, she'd told herself the late-night calls were normal for a consultant. The encrypted emails were just corporate security. The way he flinched when she touched him sometimes was just stress, the nightmares just the job.

But this—this was something else.

The news anchor's voice rose: "Sources suggest the breach may have come from within a marriage—a wife unknowingly providing access..."

Elena switched off the television.

Barnaby wound around her ankles, purring. She looked down at him—this creature Marcus had brought home, claiming he'd found the cat as a stray during a business trip. An orange cat. Just like the code word the announcer had mentioned moments ago.

She set the device on the counter, between the spinach and the remaining oranges. Some choices were made slowly, over years. Others happened in an instant.

Her phone buzzed—Marcus's number.

Elena stared at it. She could answer. Could play the wife who knew nothing, who waited, who chopped spinach and watched cable and believed whatever lies he told next.

Or she could finally stop pretending.

She let it ring.