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been promised when she’d signed on.
    But Tess was never going to be promoted into the field.
    Diego Nash had been right.
    Somehow that made it sting even more. She didn’t want Nash to be right—not about this, not about anything. But most of all, she didn’t want to do so much as even
think
about him ever again.
    Fool.
    Not him—her. She was the fool. Not for letting him in that night. No, she knew exactly what she was getting—a one-night stand—when he’d asked to come up and she’d said yes.
    She was a fool for thinking they’d actually connected. Somehow, something had happened to her brain after he’d kissed her in her kitchen. God, what a kiss. But sometime after that kiss and before the next morning, when she’d woken up, alone—and moronically surprised that he’d vanished with no word, no note—she’d fallen prey to Stupid Woman syndrome.
    She’d slept with a man who was known as a player. She’d known that about him before she’d unlocked her apartment door. She’d accepted as fact that they were going to have nothing more than a fling.
    And yet somehow she’d ended up thinking that this time it had been different. This time it had been meaningful. This time it had been special. This time he’d still be there in the morning—in fact, he’d be there for thirty-five years of mornings to come.
    Yeah, right.
    Fool.
    And she was an even bigger fool for the way her heart still raced when the phone rang. What did she really think? That after two months of dead silence, Nash was suddenly going to call?
    Flowers had arrived the very next morning. But they were from Deck. The card had a short message, in Decker’s own neat handwriting: “Thank you for going above and beyond the call of duty.” Tess knew his handwriting well. She’d processed many of his requisition sheets over the past few years. And in case she’d had any doubt, he’d signed it, “Lawrence Decker.”
    On Monday, there was an email in her inbox that Decker had sent to the assistant director—a glowing recommendation that Tess be promoted to a field position. He’d written a brief note at the top of the copy he’d forwarded to her. “I’m not sure how much this will help.”
    She’d sent a reply, just a short “Thank you,” but the email had bounced back to her—a sign that the system was freaking out again. It bounced a few days later, too, when she’d tried to resend.
    At that point, she’d actually become scared, thinking that Nash and Decker might be dead. They hadn’t been into the office since that night. No paperwork had come through with their names on it either.
    As the days continued to pass, she’d done some digging and found out to her shock that they’d left the Agency. Resigned. Just like that. They were gone and they weren’t coming back. Like most of their work in the field, their departure had been quiet. Covert.
    Tess had dug farther, actually hacking into accounting, to find out that a rather substantial severance payment had been sent to Nash, care of a small hotel in Ensenada, Mexico, on the Pacific coast.
    He was not just gone, he was
gone
. As in thousands of miles away.
    And he hadn’t bothered to send her so much as a postcard with an insincere “Wish you were here.”
    That had been a bad day, too. One of her all-time worst ever. Although today was coming pretty close to matching it.
    It wasn’t even nine a.m., but Tess had to get out of here. She grabbed her purse from the bottom drawer of her desk. Most of her colleagues were still arriving, but her workday was over.
    No. Correction. Her Agency career was over.
    She took the framed snapshot of her nieces and her piece of the Berlin Wall—too small to be effective as a paperweight but heavy with importance and laden with history—her favorite pen, and her Jean-Luc Picard, Psyduck, and Buffy action figures from her desktop. That was all she wanted—the stupid lemon mints that Nash had liked so much could stay for the next naive