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I hear the television, the show about monster trucks, the one Luke likes. The faint melody of one of the twins’ toys.
    Matt comes over, pulls out his chair, sits down. He’s watching me, concern on his face, waiting for me to speak. I need to say something. I need to know. The alternative is going directly to Peter, to security, telling them what I found. Allowing them to begin investigating my husband.
    There must be an innocent explanation for all this. He hasn’t been approached yet. He has been, but he doesn’t realize it. He didn’t agree to anything. He certainly didn’t agree to anything. I drain the last of my wine. My hand is trembling as I set the glass back on the table.
    I stare at him, no idea what I’m going to say. You’d think in all these hours I would have come up with something.
    His expression looks totally open. He must know something big is coming. I’m sure he can read it all over my face. But he doesn’t look nervous. Doesn’t look anything. Just looks like Matt.
    “How long have you been working for the Russians?” I say. The words are raw, unprocessed. But they’re out now, so I watch his face closely, because his expression matters far more to me than his words. Will there be honest confusion? Indignation? Shame?
    There’s nothing. Absolutely no emotion crosses his face. It doesn’t change. And that sends a bolt of fear through me.
    He looks at me evenly. Waits a beat too long to answer, but just barely. “Twenty-two years.”

I feel like the floor has dropped out from under me. Like I’m falling, floating, suspended in some space where I’m watching myself, watching this unfold, but I’m not part of it, because it’s not real. There’s a ringing in my ears, a strange tinny sound.
    I didn’t expect a yes. In saying those words, accusing him of the worst possible transgression, I thought he might admit to something lesser.
I met with someone once,
he’d say.
But I swear, Viv, I’m not working for them.
    Or just righteous indignation.
How could you think such a thing?
    I never expected a yes.
    Twenty-two years. I focus on the number because it’s something tangible, something concrete. Thirty-seven minus twenty-two. He would have been fifteen at the time. In high school in Seattle.
    That doesn’t make any sense.
    At fifteen he played JV baseball. Trumpet in the school band. Mowed lawns in his neighborhood for extra cash.
    I don’t understand.
    Twenty-two years.
    I put my fingertips to my temples. The ringing in my head won’t stop. It’s like something’s there, some realization, only it’s so awful I can’t wrap my head around it, can’t acknowledge it’s real, because my whole world will come crashing down.
    Twenty-two years.
    My algorithm was supposed to lead me to a Russian agent handling sleepers in the U.S.
    Twenty-two years.
    And then a line from an old intel report runs through my head. An SVR asset familiar with the program.
They recruit kids as young as fifteen.
    I close my eyes and press harder against my temples.
    Matt’s not who he says he is.
    My husband’s a deep-cover Russian operative.
    —
    SERENDIPITOUS. THAT’S HOW I always thought of the way we met. Like it was something that belonged in a movie.
    It was the day I moved to Washington. A Monday morning in July. I’d driven up from Charlottesville at dawn, all of my possessions crammed into my Accord. I was double-parked, hazards flashing, in front of an old brick building laced with rickety fire escapes, close enough to the National Zoo to smell it. My new apartment. I was on my third trip from car to door, maneuvering a large cardboard box across the sidewalk, when I bumped into something.
    Matt. He was dressed in jeans and a light blue button-down, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and I’d just spilled his coffee all over him.
    “Oh my God,” I said, hurriedly placing the box down on the sidewalk. He was holding out a dripping coffee cup in one hand, its plastic lid now at his feet, and