The Salad Days

Elena stood at the kitchen counter, chopping spinach with rhythmic precision. Green flecks scattered across the marble like forensic evidence she'd spent years learning to plant—and remove. The timer on the stove beeped, and she turned down the flame beneath the salmon. Domesticity, she'd discovered, required the same discipline as tradecraft, just fewer dead drops.

Her cat, a scarred tomcat she'd named Bond after a particularly disastrous operation in Istanbul, wound through her legs. He'd appeared on her fire escape three months ago—the same night she'd burned her go-bag in the bathtub and sent her resignation via encrypted message to a handler who'd never cared whether she lived or died. Bond had taken up residence with the presumption of a creature who understood that survival sometimes meant choosing the warmest available lap, regardless of its owner's sins.

Outside, lightning fractured the November sky, illuminating the photography studio across the street for a split second. She tensed, the old reflexes kicking in—assess threats, plot exit routes, check for surveillance. The photographer who worked there had been asking questions. Innocent ones, about where she was from, how she spent her days. Elena had given him practiced answers, the kind that sounded true because they contained only the smallest lies. But innocent questions from attractive men with kind eyes were how operations began. She knew this better than anyone.

The spinach wilted in the pan, steam rising like a prayer she didn't know how to say anymore. She'd been out for six months. No surveillance, no dead drops, no anonymous letters in unmarked envelopes. Just groceries that didn't require code names, and evenings that could be spent however she chose. The Agency considered defectors worse than enemies—at least enemies had the decency to stay enemies. Defectors kept options open.

Another flash of lightning, closer this time. Thunder shook the windows, and Bond bolted from the room. Elena turned off the stove, her appetite gone. Some habits, she realized, weren't habits at all—they were survival instincts. And maybe the real spying hadn't been the betrayals she'd committed for flag and country, but the greater treason she was committing now: learning to want things that could be taken away.

She watched the spinach turn dark in the cooling pan and wondered, not for the first time, whether the salad days ever really ended, or if you just kept finding new ways to pretend you deserved them.