What the Cat Knows

The cat watched him with ancient, judgmental eyes. James had always hated cats—too much like the people he'd spent three decades spying on. Clever, secretive, impossible to truly read. But this one, a stray he'd reluctantly named Czar after one too many vodkas, had adopted him six months ago, and James was too tired to resist.

He was seventy now, living in a small apartment in Helsinki, waiting for the pension that never felt like enough payment for what he'd given. The spy game had taken everything: his marriage, his relationship with his daughter, his ability to trust anyone. He'd learned to bear the weight of a thousand secrets, each one heavier than the last, until he'd forgotten what it felt like to be light.

The hardest secret wasn't the identities he'd betrayed or the operations he'd botched. It was the woman in Vienna—Maria, the asset he was supposed to recruit and instead fell in love with. He'd had to choose: betray his country or betray her. He'd chosen his country, and Maria had disappeared into some black site he wasn't cleared to know about. Every morning for thirty years, he'd woken up and had to bear that particular choice all over again.

Czar meowed, jumping onto his lap. James absently scratched behind the cat's ears. The beauty of cats was that they didn't ask questions. They didn't want to know what you'd done during the Cold War or how many people you'd destroyed. They just wanted warmth and food and occasionally to be worshipped.

His phone rang. A number he didn't recognize.

"James?" A woman's voice, familiar and impossible. "It's Maria. I know it's been thirty years, but I need to know—why did you do it?"

The cat purred on, indifferent to history. James closed his eyes. Some secrets, he realized, you bear forever. Others come back to destroy you when you least expect them.

"I had no choice," he said, and wasn't sure if he was lying to her or himself.