The Empty Registry

You don't expect your marriage to end with a spy novel spread across the kitchen table, but here we are.

Three years of Sunday mornings, and I never noticed Elena never slept soundly. Always up before me, already running by the time I woke, coming back flushed and bright-eyed with some excuse about insomnia and early meetings. I thought it was her metabolism. I thought it was the vitamins she took religiously every morning — that elaborate routine of supplements and capsules that seemed so eccentric, so charmingly neurotic when we first met.

Now I know the vitamins were her covers. The B12 for when she hadn't slept in 48 hours. The iron for when she'd lost blood on a job. The little oval yellow pill I could never identify — probably not available at CVS.

The detective they sent to explain things said she'd been working for the Russians the whole time. Industrial espionage. Something about aerospace contracts and my company's proprietary guidance systems. He said it like he was reading a grocery list.

What he couldn't explain was how she looked at me when I proposed. How she held me when my mother died. The way she whispered my name like it was the only real thing in her world.

I'm living like a **zombie** now, moving through the apartment we picked out together, touching things she chose with such care. The throw pillows that perfectly matched the curtains. The coffee maker she researched for weeks. The goddamn vitamin organizer on the counter, each little compartment neatly labeled with days of the week in her precise handwriting.

I've been **running** every morning at dawn. Not because I want to, but because it's the only time I can't feel her ghost pressing against my back. The physical pain of it — the burning lungs, the aching muscles — is the only thing that feels real anymore.

The truth is, I don't know what hurts worse: that she lied, or that some part of me doesn't care. Some part of me would take the liar back if she walked through the door right now. Would take the spy, the traitor, the woman who used me to steal secrets from my employer.

Would take her with all her vitamin-pill secrets and her pre-dawn runs and her love that I can still feel everywhere in this empty, empty apartment.