The Seventh Inning

The baseball stadium lights hummed above us, casting long shadows across the empty section where we sat. Mike and I had season tickets, third base line, fifteen rows up — the best retirement gift two former CIA case officers could give themselves.

"You ever think about Istanbul?" Mike asked, his voice gravelly from too many cigarettes. He wasn't looking at the field. He was watching the concession workers close up their stands.

"Every Tuesday," I said. "Usually when I'm making coffee."

Mike laughed, but it didn't reach his eyes. He'd been my handler during the worst of it, the year I spent embedded as a military contractor in three different countries, gathering intelligence on weapons movements. The agency called it being a spy. I called it losing myself, piece by piece, until I forgot what was real and what was performance.

He'd pulled me out after Istanbul. Found me in a safe house, staring at a wall for three days, unable to remember my own daughter's middle name. He'd sat with me then, just like he was sitting now, patient and present while I reconstructed myself from the jagged fragments left behind.

"They want me to come back in," Mike said quietly. "Consulting. Training the new ones."

The baseball game had ended hours ago. The grounds crew was grooming the dirt, those perfect concentric circles that would be destroyed tomorrow and remade again, an endless cycle of order and chaos.

"And?"

"And I don't know if I can do it. I don't know if I can look at them and not see ourselves at twenty-five, thinking we could save the world, one betrayal at a time."

I thought about all the things I'd done in the name of friendship. The lies I'd told for him. The covers I'd maintained. The way we'd saved each other's lives in Prague, and then the way we'd slowly, methodically destroyed everything else that mattered — marriages, relationships, children who grew up wondering why their fathers were never really present.

"You don't owe them anything," I said. "You gave them thirty years."

Mike nodded, staring out at the perfectly manicured field. "I gave them everything else, too."

We sat there for a long time as the stadium lights flickered off, section by section, until we were sitting in darkness, two old men who had spent their lives pretending to be other people, finally comfortable with the truth.