The Last Asset

Emma had been a corporate spy for fifteen years, stealing trade secrets from pharmaceutical companies while pretending to be a mid-level accountant. She was good at it—good enough that the hollow feeling in her chest had become background noise, like the hum of an office HVAC system.

That morning, she'd watched through her telephoto lens as Marcus—the target—walked his bull terrier along the Charles River. The dog was the only genuine thing about him. Everything else was performance: the perfect marriage, the corner office, the impending IPO that would make him a fortune. Emma's employers wanted the proprietary research data encrypted on his home server. They wanted to undercut his company's cancer drug by six months.

Her apartment was pristine, unlived-in. She owned nothing that couldn't fit in a carry-on. No plants. No pets. No lovers who stayed past midnight. She moved through life like a zombie, consuming experiences without tasting them, relationships without feeling them.

The bull market had been raging for a decade, and Emma had ridden it without investing anything of herself. She was forty-two, and she'd forgotten who she'd been before she became someone else.

That night, she broke into Marcus's house while he slept upstairs. His bull terrier, Barnaby, watched from the kitchen doorway, tail thumping a slow rhythm against the floor. Emma paused, her hand on the laptop that contained everything her employers needed. The dog's eyes were ancient and knowing.

She thought about the drug—about the people it might save, the years it might give them. About Marcus's daughter, who'd been in the background of hundreds of surveillance photos, bald from chemotherapy at age eight, now fifteen and healthy.

Emma sat on the floor, and Barnaby trotted over to rest his heavy head in her lap. She stayed like that for an hour, then left without taking anything.

The next morning, she resigned. Not from the job—from the life. She bought a one-way ticket to a small coastal town in Maine, where no one knew who she'd been. Three months later, she adopted a retired racing greyhound named Homer. He was anxious and gentle, and he looked at her like she was the safest place on earth.

Some nights, waking from nightmares where she was still stealing other people's futures, she'd walk Homer along the harbor under a moon that hung bright and indifferent over the black water. She was starting to remember what it felt like to be real.