17. Three Covers and a Confession #2
Reese: The mailbox was unnecessarily close to the road.
Miles: Six.
Reese: Fine. But I’m choosing the tacos.
By five thirty, I leave the CSA carrying a slim folder containing three retired cover photographs that the director approved from a sanitized archive. No passports. No operational details. Just the faces. I stop at Reese’s at six.
She opens the passenger door before I can get out. “You’re late.”
I glance at the dashboard clock. “It’s five fifty-nine.”
“But I’ve been ready since five forty-two.”
“That sounds like poor time management.”
She gets into her seat. “Nope. It’s straight-up enthusiasm.”
For one second, neither of us says anything.
The last time she sat in this seat, she’d just toured the CSA.
Before that, she had interrogated me in a mustache.
Now she is wearing a yellow sweater beneath denim overalls, a bee-shaped clip in her hair, and the expression she always gets before doing something she considers fun and that I might be a bit wary about.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hi.”
Her smile appears, and something in my chest loosens. Her smile continues to grow as she points toward the folder on the center console. “Are those the passports?”
“They’re photographs from retired cover identities.”
She reaches for the folder, but I put my hand over it. “After tacos.”
Her eyes narrow. “Are you using classified materials to manipulate my dinner choices?”
“I’m using unclassified materials to keep salsa off government property.”
“Okay, I’ll give you points there for being responsible.”
She buckles her seat belt, and as I pull away from the curb, she glances toward my wrist. “No watch with hidden explosives?”
“No.”
“Cufflinks that fire tranquilizer darts?”
“No.”
“Car equipped with missiles?”
I shake my head, chuckling softly. “So, this is how it’s going to be now?”
She looks entirely unapologetic. “Absolutely. I have five years of missed opportunities to make up for.”
“That’s… a lot of material.”
“Don’t worry. I won’t do it around listening ears.”
I glance at her. Her voice is light, but the promise underneath it isn’t. “You don’t know how to identify listening ears.”
“Then you should probably train me.” Her words have an unexpectedly flirtatious edge. My attention drops for half a second to her mouth before I force it back to the road. Reese seems to hear it at the same time I do, and her gaze moves toward the windshield.
We get tacos from a restaurant in Cloakwood and take them to my house, where Reese spreads napkins across the coffee table as if preparing for a surgical procedure. I place the folder beside me on the couch. She eyes it while unwrapping a taco.
“Are there rules?”
“Yes. You can look at the photographs. I will tell you the age, public occupation, and maybe the name. Nothing related to locations, mission objectives, or people connected to the identity. You can ask questions about anything visible.”
“Can I invent locations, mission objectives, and people connected to the identity?”
“What fun would it be if you didn’t?”
She grins. “Then your rules are acceptable.”
As soon as we finish eating, I pull out the first photograph of me. It was taken four years ago, and in the picture, I have darker skin, closely cropped hair, heavier eyebrows, and a beard that changes the shape of my jaw. I’m wearing a gray suit and no tie.
Reese takes the picture, and her eyes widen. She leans closer as she studies it, her shoulder pressing into mine, and I have to remind myself that I’m supposed to be watching her reaction to the photograph, not the way a strand of hair has fallen across her cheek.
“Oh, this man has secrets. What’s his name?”
“Dominic Shaw.”
“Age?”
“Thirty-three.”
“You were, what? Twenty-two?”
“Yes.”
“Bold.”
“Occupation: private security consultant.”
She studies the image, then shakes her head. “No. He teaches competitive ballroom dancing.”
“He does not.”
“He was once nationally ranked, but his partner left him three days before the championship for a man who specialized in the paso doble. The betrayal left behind some emotional damage.”
I can’t help the smile spreading across my face.
Reese just gives a decisive nod. “Ballroom dancer with trust issues.”
I hand her the second photograph. In this one, my hair is several shades lighter, I’m clean-shaven, and I’m wearing thin metal glasses and a brown jacket I remember hating.
She gasps. “This man owns Pomeranians.”
“He’s a financial compliance auditor.”
She tilts her head. “Those are not mutually exclusive.”
“He doesn’t own Pomeranians.”
“That you know of. This man inherited seventeen from a distant aunt and now uses them as a tax shelter.”
“That would be exceptionally poor tax strategy.”
“He knows that, and he’s ashamed, because it’s his entire tax strategy. But he really loves Pomeranians.”
I laugh.
The third photograph shows an older version of me—a forty-six-year-old art broker with hair going silver at the temples and a small scar near the mouth. Reese stares at it for so long that I begin to feel self-conscious.
“What?”
“He’s attractive.”
“It’s me.” It shouldn’t matter that she finds a forty-six-year-old fictional version of me attractive. But hearing Reese say that about any version of me does something to my pulse.
“He looks like your sophisticated uncle who has been divorced three times and owns a vineyard.”
“He was never married.”
She shakes her head. “He kept falling in love with the same woman under different names. She was a spy.”
I crack a bit of a smile. “There was no woman.”
Reese studies it for a moment longer, then looks at me over the photograph. “That sounds lonely.” The humor in her voice softens.
She’s close enough that I can see the tiny crease between her brows. The one that shows up when she’s worried about someone. I have the sudden urge to smooth it away with my thumb.
I clear my throat. “It can be.”
My cover identities were never meant to have full lives. They have histories, habits, residences, employment records, and acquaintances. Enough details to survive scrutiny.
But the connections are temporary. A date arranged for access. A friendship created for proximity. A person who believes they know you until the mission ends and you disappear. Reese places the photograph on the table more carefully than she handled the others.
“Do you ever miss being them?”
“No.”
“Any of them?”
“I miss certain abilities the cover gave me. Access. Freedom to move through a place unnoticed. But I don’t miss the identities.”
“Why not?”
“Because none of them are real.”
She leans back against the couch. “Parts of them have to be. You can’t build a convincing person out of absolutely nothing.
Dominic’s posture came from somewhere. The accountant’s expression came from somewhere.
Vineyard Uncle’s tragic romantic history apparently came from my imagination, but the rest of him came from you. ”
I look at the photographs spread across the coffee table. She’s right. Abraham builds the external details. The agency builds the records. But I supply the person. A cover can’t survive if every reaction is rehearsed. It needs pieces that are true enough to become instinctive.
Reese looks around my living room. “I thought everything would feel different once I knew.”
“Does it?”
“Yes.”
The word makes my stomach drop before she continues.
“But not in the way I expected.”
“What way did you expect?”
“I thought I might sit across from you and wonder whether every story was fake. Whether every habit was part of an act.”
I swallow. “And now?”
She gives me a sly smile. “Now I mostly wonder how I missed the fact that you reflexively locate exits everywhere we go and notice the tiniest details about everything.” She picks up the photograph of the accountant. “I know these men aren’t real. But you are.”
Something shifts inside me. Our old rhythm is still here. Tacos. Teasing. Reese constructing elaborate lives for strangers. But for the first time, all of me is sitting beside her.
She knows why I leave, even when I can’t tell her where I’m going. She knows why I can’t answer certain questions. She saw my desk, my mother’s authority, my father’s portrait, and the people who depend on me. For the first time, it feels like all of me is here with her.
The truth did not destroy us. But it did change things, and not only does going back to the way things were before feel impossible, but I no longer want it to. After telling her so much, I can’t keep hiding the one remaining truth between us.
“You look serious,” she says, and I can see her shoulders have tensed.
She’s sitting only a few feet away, one leg tucked beneath her, her hair slipping loose around her face.
I know every version of Reese—laughing, furious, exhausted, crying, covered in beekeeping gear—and somehow, I still have moments when looking at her hits me like I’m seeing her for the first time.
I’ve spent years training myself not to let wanting her show. Tonight, I’m about to stop pretending entirely.
“There’s one more thing I need to tell you.”
Her eyes widen, and she shakes her head. “No. You are banned from that sentence.”
“Reese—”
“The last time you said there was something important you needed to tell me, I nearly developed a stress-induced facial twitch before discovering that you’re a government spy.”
“This one isn’t classified.”
“That is not improving my heart rate.”
“And I didn’t have to get anyone’s permission to tell you.”
She presses both hands against the couch cushion she’s sitting on. “Somehow worse.”
“I’ve only been afraid of what it might change.”
She goes still. The humor in her expression remains, but it’s thinner now. Like it’s a shield she hasn’t decided whether she needs.
I take a breath. “When I told Emerson that I was ready for what Ledger and Zoe have, I didn’t mean I was ready to go find someone.”
Reese still hasn’t moved.
“I meant I was ready to stop pretending I hadn’t already found her.”