Trade Secrets

The baseball game was irrelevant—just noise in the background as Marcus adjusted his telephoto lens. Three rows down, a man in a gray suit slipped a folded document to his target. Corporate espionage paid the bills, but lately, Marcus had started noticing everything. Including the vitamin bottle on his own kitchen counter that wasn't there last week.

His wife Elena had started taking them religiously. Prenatal vitamins, she'd said, swallowing them with a glass of orange juice each morning. Marcus wanted to believe her, wanted to believe the exhaustion in her eyes came from planning their future together. But the private eye he'd hired—professional paranoia, he'd called it—had photographed her entering a fertility clinic alone. Twice.

The scope to his eye, Marcus captured the handoff at the baseball stadium. The corporate secrets would net him fifty thousand dollars. But his palm felt clammy against the camera body, and it wasn't the summer heat. He'd spent seven years building a career on other people's secrets, on selling pieces of lives he had no right to. Now his own life was crumbling, and he realized too late that some information, once known, can't be unseen.

Elena had tried to tell him something yesterday. He'd interrupted her with a story about the baseball game he wasn't really watching, about corporate mergers that didn't matter. She'd closed her mouth, and that was when he saw it—the way she'd stopped trying to reach him.

Marcus packed his equipment. The spy game had suddenly lost its appeal. He drove home, past palm trees swaying in the twilight, and found Elena sitting at the kitchen table. The vitamins were lined up in precise rows—folic acid, iron, DHA. She wasn't pregnant. She was sick.

"I didn't want you to look at me like a patient," she said quietly. "I wanted you to look at me like your wife."

The documents from today's job sat heavy in his pocket. Worthless. All this time, Marcus had been stealing other people's truths while his own slipped away, vitamin by vitamin, silence by silence, until there was nothing left to spy on but the wreckage of his own making.