Chapter 31
Hadley didn’t bother coming up with a good excuse to talk to Stella. They didn’t have time for that. So, she marched right up to the woman’s front door and rang the bell.
She’d have to be a little delicate in how she brought up the whole sleeper agent thing, though. Carefully manipulate the direction of the conversation so she didn’t scare the woman away.
As soon as Stella answered, Hadley blurted, “I know your husband is a Russian spy.”
Well, shit. So much for delicacy.
The welcoming smile slipped off Stella’s face. “I…have no idea what you’re talking about. Is this some kind of joke?”
She held up her hands in supplication. “Look, don’t worry. I’m not turning you guys in or anything. We’re looking for a way to help you.”
If she was a trained spy like Eric and Cole, Hadley was pretty sure Stella would stall or get angry or try to talk her way out of the accusation.
But she clearly wasn’t any better at subterfuge than Hadley was, because she merely sighed in an exhausted, world-weary kind of way, and ushered Hadley into her house.
“Might as well come in so that you don’t ruin my whole life in front of the neighbors,” she muttered.
Hadley took a seat on Stella’s sleek, Scandinavian-style sofa, which was way nicer than the overstuffed, bargain basement piece of crap Franklin’s team had furnished her home with. Shocking that he’d cheaped out like that.
“I’m sorry for blurting it out like that,” Hadley admitted as Stella sat down on the loveseat facing the sofa. “I had every intention of being tactful.” She frowned. “The intention got lost between my brain and mouth, though.”
“Happens to me sometimes, too,” Stella said. “So, Eric was right, wasn’t he? Clark is a spy.”
“His name is actually Cole. Mine’s Hadley. And, yeah. He was sent to get proof there was a sleeper agent in this neighborhood. He spotted Eric right away. And vice versa, I guess.”
“Takes one to know one, I suppose.”
Wasn’t that the God’s honest truth? “I got roped in to make Cole’s cover more legit.”
Stella snorted. “Good plan. That guy alone in this neighborhood would’ve caused a big stir.”
Hadley could only imagine. “Cole didn’t want to come here at all.
He got blackmailed into it. Me too, if I’m being honest. But once we talked to you both and got the feeling that maybe you’d been dealt a bad hand like we had…
well, turning you in lost its appeal. My gut tells me even if Eric was a sleeper agent, he doesn’t intend to do anything bad here now. ”
“Your instincts are good,” she said quietly. “Eric escaped the agency before we even met. Now, he’s the most patriotic American I’ve ever met. He’d never betray this country. Or me.”
“The fact that he’d never betray you was never unclear,” Hadley said with a chuckle. “That man is crazy for you.”
“It’s mutual. I’d do anything for him.” She let out a deep breath. “So, if you don’t feel good about turning my husband in to the government, what do you feel like doing with us? We’re kind of at your mercy at this point.”
“Well, what we’d like to do is dig up some dirt on the jackass who blackmailed us into this, then blackmail him back into leaving all four of us alone.”
Stella slow blinked a couple of times before saying, “That’s…a lot of blackmailing.”
“Yeah,” Hadley admitted. “It’s a little intimidating. But Tenley says that’s the way to go and I trust her about that stuff.”
“Who’s Tenley?”
“Long story. Point is, the only way all four of us won’t end up in some black ops site is if we do the blackmail thing, and the only way to do the blackmail thing is to pool our knowledge.”
“What knowledge? I don’t know anything.”
Hadley had felt the same way when she got dragged into this mess.
Now she understood that her knowledge wasn’t about spy stuff, it was about people.
She was a good judge of character. She understood what motivated people and moved them to act in certain ways.
She was a good observer, and in the spy game, observation seemed to be at least 50% of the gig.
“You might know more than you think. For example, who else knows about Eric, and would any of them have reason to rat on him to the CIA?”
“As far as I know, no one knows about him other than the person who created his new ID, and that person is someone he trusts implicitly.”
Well, so much for the mystery being solved easily, she supposed. “Did Eric do anything this past year to draw attention to himself? Is there another sleeper agent in this neighborhood that we don’t know about?”
Stella rubbed her temples. “Eric has lived completely under the radar for as long as I’ve known him. He doesn’t even have a real social media presence. And I’m sure there isn’t another agent in this neighborhood. We would’ve noticed.”
Considering how easily Cole had picked Eric out as the secret agent, she imagined that was true. But…
“This is going to sound weird, but what about you?” Hadley asked. “Do you have any enemies?”
She gave a humorless chuckle. “I’m a teacher. Any enemies I have are twelve and if they can’t even handle middle school English classes, I sincerely doubt they’re sophisticated enough to uncover the fact that my husband was a former Russian sleeper agent.”
Yeah, that tracked. When she was in junior high, she couldn’t have planned her way out of a Waffle House, let alone gotten involved in espionage. She supposed they could rule her students out as suspects.
“Can I ask you a personal question?” Stella asked.
“I think we’re well beyond formality at this point.”
“You’re not an agent, right?”
Hadley snorted. “No way. I just got caught up in this whole spy thing. Just like you.”
“But your relationship with Clark—I mean, Cole—is real, right?”
Her heart beat a little faster. Were her feelings that damn obvious? Tenley being able to see how she felt didn’t count. She was still half convinced that woman was psychic. But now Stella was calling her out? “What makes you say that?”
Stella rolled her eyes. “I think we’re beyond bullshitting each other at this point, too.”
Hadley blew out an exasperated breath. “I’m crazy about him.
But I promised him I wouldn’t catch feelings.
And I promised myself I’d never fall first again.
Now we’re stuck in this weird kind of romantic limbo where the attraction is there, the friendship is there, but the whole happily-ever-after of it all seems…
farfetched. I don’t know. It’s complicated, OK? ”
Stella leaned forward in her seat, her expression warming up several degrees. “Look, after getting out of a truly terrible marriage and re-marrying the love of my life, I can tell you one thing with absolute certainty.”
Hadley mimicked her posture, eager for all the wisdom she could get. “What’s that?”
“It’s never that complicated. If you love him, tell him. Even if he can’t love you back, you still tell him. Hiding your feelings doesn’t lead anywhere good. And honestly, if he can’t love you back, you leave and find someone who can, because you deserve that, Hadley.”
That was the most logical thing she’d heard since this whole mess started. Could it really be that simple? It must be. Especially since Stella was sitting here in all her glowing, happy, head-over-heels-in-love glory after leaving her shitty…
Wait. Just. A. Minute.
“Stella…are you on decent terms with your ex?”
Her nose wrinkled up. “Hell no. I had to threaten to go to that man’s boss with photos of the black eye he gave me just to get him to sign the damn divorce papers.”
Fucking bingo! “So, technically, you do have an enemy out there.”
The look of absolute horror on her face spoke volumes about what kind of man her ex was. “Technically, I guess,” she said. “But…no. There’s no way. It couldn’t be…could it?”
As Hadley had learned in her short tenure as a spy, anything was possible.