The Summer We Spied

The corporate spy gig was supposed to be temporary—just surveillance on a pharmaceutical executive suspected of leaking formulas. But three months in, I'd become intimate with Dr. Eleanor Vance's routines through her iPhone backups, accessed via a compromised cloud account. I knew her vitamin regimen (B-complex at breakfast, D3 with dinner), her Tuesday baseball games with colleagues (she played third base, aggressively), and her grocery orders (papaya every Friday, like clockwork).

The papaya orders fascinated me. They appeared in her delivery logs religiously, same exotic fruit stand, same time each week. No other fruit. Just papaya, like some ritual or longing. Corporate espionage doesn't typically involve fruit psychology, but I'd been alone too long, reading patterns where none existed.

Then came the photo in her drafts folder: a baseball field at twilight, papaya halves arranged like home plates, vitamin capsules scattered like chalk dust. A love letter to someone named Julia in the notes app, unread since 2018. The leak wasn't formulas—Eleanor was funneling research to Julia, now dying somewhere tropical, fighting something the vitamins couldn't fix.

I'd spent months watching a woman care for someone she'd lost, baseball games becoming therapy, papaya a memory she kept alive. The client wanted evidence; I'd given them a story. That night, I deleted the backup. Some betrayals shouldn't be documented.