Wireless

The hat was ridiculous—a white fedora that made me look like a failed magician—but Elena had given it to me at our first corporate retreat, back when we were just two junior analysts getting drunk at the hotel pool. Now, three years later, that same pool reflected the Vegas sunset like liquid copper, and I was wearing the hat because she'd asked me to. Because I was still that pathetic, still hoping that somehow—

"You going to join me?" She called from the water, sleek and impossible in her red swimsuit.

I almost did. Almost stripped down to my boxers and plunged in, let the chlorine wash away everything I'd learned this week. But then my phone buzzed in my pocket—the secure line.

"She's not who you think she is," the text read. "We found the cable behind her baseboard. She's been feeding everything to their Tokyo office for eighteen months."

Eighteen months. Our entire friendship. Every late night strategizing over takeout, every confession about our marriages, every moment I'd thought was real—all of it had been intelligence gathering. I wasn't her friend; I was her assignment.

"Elena," I said, and she treaded water, smiling up at me with those perfect teeth, those eyes that had lied to me three hundred times without blinking.

"Coming in?" she asked again.

"No," I said, touching the brim of that stupid fedora. "No, I don't think I will."

Something shifted in her expression then—a recognition that I knew. That it was over. But she didn't panic. Didn't splash out of the pool begging for forgiveness. She just sank backward into the water, drifting toward the deep end, and I watched my best friend become exactly what she'd been all along: a spy who'd played me perfectly, and only lost because her employers had decided she was no longer worth protecting.

The fedora went into the trash on my way out of the hotel. Some costumes you don't get to keep.