“We start with the one person who knew all nine names,” he said. “We start with the person who built the cover in the first place.”
I already knew who he meant. I think I’d known before I even walked through the gym door.
“General Ramsey,” I said.
“She’s still alive,” Marcus confirmed.
“She’s retired. She lives four hours north of here, on a property that used to be a training facility, back when the program was young and nobody had thought to make it disappear yet. She’s the only living person who has the full list.”
“And if she doesn’t talk?”
Marcus picked the photograph up off the desk and put it back inside his jacket.
“Then we do what we were trained to do.”
I stood up. I didn’t say anything for a long time. I just stood there, looking at the whiteboard, at the inspirational quote, at the schedule of classes I would probably never attend.
“You know what I’ve been doing for twenty years?” I asked finally.
“What?”
“I’ve been trying to forget I ever learned any of this,” I said. “I met a man. I loved him. I built a life with no edges and no shadows. I taught myself to garden. I learned to cook things that took hours. I volunteered at a library. I did everything in my power to become a person who could never be called back.”
“And?”
“And it didn’t work,” I said. “Because the woman I used to be is still in here. She never went anywhere. She was just waiting.”
Marcus nodded slowly.
“I know the feeling.”
I looked at him.
“You should’ve come to me sooner,” I said. “Twenty years sooner.”
“I know,” he said. “I couldn’t.”
“Why not?”
He hesitated. And then he told me something else I wasn’t ready for.
“Because I made a promise,” he said. “To your husband.”
The floor dropped out from under me.
“What?”
“Your husband,” Marcus repeated. “Daniel. He found me. About six years ago. He tracked me down through a veteran’s database and he showed up at my apartment in the middle of the night, and he told me he knew who I was and what we’d done together, and he asked me to stay away from you.”
I couldn’t breathe.
“Daniel knew?”
“He knew enough. He knew you had been part of something classified. He knew I was part of the same something. He knew you’d spent years trying to forget it, and he knew the only way you’d succeed was if nobody from that life ever walked back through your door.”
I sat back down. My legs gave out again, but this time there was no chair behind me, so I just sank onto the floor, back against the wall, hands over my mouth.
“He never told me,” I whispered through my fingers. “He never once said your name. He never asked. He never even hinted.”
“He loved you,” Marcus said. “He wanted you to have the quiet life. He knew that if I ever reached out, you’d go back. You’d walk back into it without blinking. Because that’s who you are. That’s who you always were.”
I looked up at him.
“And he made you promise to stay away.”
“He made me promise to stay away as long as he was alive,” Marcus said. “And the day he died, the promise died with him. That’s the only reason I came looking. That’s the only reason I’ve been sitting in the back row of this gym every Thursday for six weeks.”
I covered my face with both hands and cried.
I’m not going to dress it up. It wasn’t dignified. It wasn’t quiet. It was the kind of crying I hadn’t done since Daniel’s funeral, the kind that comes from a place so deep inside you that you forget it’s even there until it splits open.
Marcus didn’t move. He didn’t touch me. He just stood there and let me do it.
When I finally looked up, my face was a wreck, and my cardigan was wet, and I didn’t care at all.
“How long do we have?”
“Before they come?”
“Yes.”
Marcus looked at the door, then back at me.
“Three days,” he said. “Maybe less. The ledger has to be recovered before the audit closes, or it gets filed away permanently and nobody ever sees it. If that happens, everyone whose name is in it becomes a loose end. And loose ends don’t retire.”
“They disappear.”
“They disappear,” he agreed.
I stood up. I wiped my face with the back of my sleeve. I looked at my own hands—the same hands that had ended Tyler Marsh in four seconds, the same hands I had used for twenty years to plant tomatoes and fold laundry and hold my dying husband’s fingers.
“Then we don’t have much time,” I said.
“No,” Marcus agreed. “We don’t.”
I opened the office door.
The gym had emptied out almost completely. The overhead lights were still humming, and the mats still smelled like sweat and chalk, and the trophy case still glowed softly near the front door. But almost everyone had gone home.
Almost.
Tyler Marsh was sitting on the bottom row of the bleachers with his hands folded between his knees. Deja was leaning against the front counter, arms crossed. And in the corner, near the water fountain, a young woman I’d never seen before was standing very still, watching me with eyes that were far too old for her face.
Marcus froze behind me.
“Who is that?” he whispered.
I didn’t answer. Because I already knew. I could see it in the way she stood. In the way her weight was balanced. In the way her hands hung loose at her sides, ready for anything.
She was one of us.
“I think,” I said quietly, “the third one’s already here.”
The young woman smiled.
