The Truth We Keep

The spinach between Marcus's teeth had been there throughout his entire toast. I watched him work the room—his former colleagues, the ones from the biotech firm he'd left under that cloud of suspicion—laughing at his jokes, shaking his hand, none of them mentioning the emerald-green reminder that he wasn't quite as polished as he appeared.

That was the thing about being a corporate spy: you noticed what others missed. I'd spent six months embedded as his assistant, gathering evidence for the whistleblower case that would dismantle his career. The manuscript sat on my desk at home, a hundred pages documenting falsified clinical trial data, ghostwritten safety reports, the whole rotten architecture of his ambition.

Our dog, Buster, whined at my feet under the table. Marcus reached down, palm open, the gesture so tender it made something in my chest twist. He'd adopted Buster for me when my mother died, knowing I needed something alive to come home to after all the funerals and lawyers and endless paperwork.

'You're quiet,' Marcus said, his fingers finding mine beneath the tablecloth.

'Just thinking.'

'About what?'

About how you created a fake patient to mask adverse reactions in the oncology trial. About how that patient died anyway, and you buried the data. About how your palm feels against mine, how you make me laugh until I can't breathe, how you're the first person I've loved since I learned what loss really means.

About how the spinach is still there, a tiny green banner of his fundamental carelessness, and maybe that's the part that hurts the most—that he doesn't even bother to hide his flaws anymore.

'The spinach,' I said softly.

His other hand flew to his mouth. 'God. How long?'

'Since the toast.'

'And you didn't tell me?' He laughed, but there was something wounded in it. 'Some assistant you are.'

The irony was suffocating. I'd signed the NDA. I'd taken the retainer. I'd been hired to destroy him, and instead I'd fallen in love with his easy warmth, his terrible jokes, the way he listened when I talked about my mother like her grief was something he could carry too.

Buster licked Marcus's ankle. I watched Marcus clean his teeth with a napkin, watched him scan the room for anyone who might have seen, watched him smooth his tie and arrange his face back into something confident and assured.

The truth was, I'd finished the investigation three weeks ago. The evidence was complete, devastating, airtight. But the manuscript remained in my desk drawer, a choice I'd been making every morning when I woke up beside him, every night when he brushed my hair back from my face and told me I made his life mean something.

Some lies are worth keeping. Some truths destroy more than they reveal.

'You good?' Marcus asked, his palm warm against my cheek.

I looked at this man who had made a career of deception, who had hurt people I would never meet, who made me happier than I had any right to be. I thought about the spinach, the dog at our feet, the spy who had forgotten which side she was on.

'Yeah,' I said. 'I'm good.'