The Last Call Home

Miranda watched the streetlights blur through the rain-streaked window of her Tokyo apartment, her iphone glowing with another encrypted message from Langley. Three years deep undercover as a corporate asset, and she'd forgotten what it felt like to not be lying to everyone she met.

Her cat, Banshee, curled against her leg, the only creature on earth who knew her real name—or at least, the only one who didn't seem to care. Banshee had been a rescue from a Shibuya alley, just another broken thing Miranda had scooped up during those first lonely months when the silence of her apartment had threatened to swallow her whole.

The message on her screen burned with instructions: extract the target by Friday. But the target was Kenji, the man who'd somehow become the closest thing to family she'd allowed herself in years. The bull she'd been feeding him—fabricated stories about her past, her family in Chicago, the reasons she could never visit them—had accumulated into a mountain she couldn't climb anymore.

Kenji had taken her to his childhood home last weekend. She'd met his mother, eaten his grandmother's recipes, felt the terrible weight of belonging to something real. When he'd looked at her across the dinner table, eyes soft with that terrifying affection, she'd nearly confessed everything.

Now she stared at the iphone, at the message that would end it all. She could complete the mission, disappear like smoke, leave him confused and heartbroken but safe. Or she could go off-grid, burn every bridge, become nobody in a world full of somebodies.

Banshee stirred, purring against the emptiness Miranda couldn't name aloud. Outside, the Tokyo rain fell on both of them, on the spy who'd forgotten how to be real, and on the man who'd never know the woman who loved him was a ghost before she'd even left.