The Greenest Part of the Garden

Elena ran four miles every morning, not for fitness but for the privacy of it. On the pavement, no one could ask questions. No one could watch. The rhythm of her sneakers on asphalt was the only honest thing in her life.

She'd suspected Mark was reading her emails for months. Little things—comments about meetings she'd only mentioned in encrypted drafts, knowing glances when she deleted messages without opening them. He'd called it trust issues; she called it being the wife of a CIA contractor, though he'd never admit it aloud.

Then came the Saturday she found the baseball cards in his home office safe. Not his childhood collection, but new ones. Specific ones: 1987 Fleer, the same series his old surveillance instructor had collected. The cards were arranged by position—shortstops, catchers, outfielders—a code she'd helped invent years ago during a drunken training weekend in Virginia. The pattern spelled out dates. Her dates. The days she'd met her contact for the extraction protocol.

He wasn't just spying. He was building a case.

That evening, she sautéed spinach with garlic and olive oil, her hands shaking so badly she almost knocked the pan off the burner. Mark came home smelling like whiskey and cheap cologne, sat at the table, and watched her eat. He complimented the spinach—said it reminded him of how green everything had been when they first met, when the garden behind their first apartment had produced more vegetables than they could eat.

"You've been running again," he said, staring at her bruised toenail. "Training for something?"

She swallowed. "Just clearing my head."

"Heads are dangerous things to clear." He took a bite of her spinach, chewed slowly. "Sometimes they're better left full."

Elena stood up, carried her plate to the sink. She didn't rinse it. She didn't turn around when she heard Mark's phone buzz with a message she knew would be from her handler. Tomorrow morning, she'd pack a bag. Tomorrow morning, she'd run farther than four miles. But tonight, she'd finish washing the dishes, and she'd let him believe he was the one holding the knife.