Chapter 1

In my sixth year working at NSA, it was the 99th time my husband had refused to visit.

I decided to take a 36-hour train ride to surprise him.

As I wrote my husband's name on a greeting card at the florist, the clerk jumped out and accused me of trying to seduce her boss.

I looked at my husband's photo and name with suspicion, only to be told that he already had a child, and that I was his deceased sister.

I laughed. I was treated like a relative, walking into my husband's house, waiting for their true colors to be fully revealed…

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I stood at the door, waited the clerk picked up her phone. I heard her murmur into it. A few minutes later, the shop door swung open and a woman walked in pushing a stroller, a little girl trailing behind her.

She was pretty. Soft-featured. The kind of effortlessly warm-looking woman who shows up in insurance commercials.

She looked at me and then at the roses, and something in her expression sharpened.

"You're the one who wants to send my husband flowers?"

The small crowd that had started drifting in from outside shifted, curious.

Someone called out: "Don't be too hard on her, Maggie — Professor Mercer would never. You know how much that man adores you."

Another voice: "Maybe she's here for his research. Just ask her."

The woman — Maggie — tilted her head and studied me with a cooler expression.

"Is that it? Work?"

I was still processing the marriage certificate on the wall. I grabbed the first thing that came to mind.

"His journal submissions," I said. "I need access to his latest work."

Something loosened in her posture. She laughed — easy and warm, like we'd just gotten past an awkward misunderstanding at a dinner party — and pulled out the chair beside her.

"Oh my God, I'm so sorry. I completely overreacted." She sat down and gestured for me to join her. "I'm Maggie. Daniel's wife."

"You're probably here about the neutron radiation research, right? That's the one everyone wants lately."

"Neutron attenuation modeling," I said quietly.

She beamed. "You even know the name. I never could keep the projects straight. I barely got through high school." She laughed again, the self-deprecating kind that women use when they want to be liked. "Daniel doesn't mind. He always says I understand people better than anyone he's ever met."

I managed a smile.

Daniel and I had both earned our PhDs from the same program, the same year. He'd gone into academia. I'd been recruited — quietly, the way those things happen — into a classified division of the National Security Agency. I'd spent six years inside a compound with restricted communications, caring about the work, missing him, and wiring money home every month to cover his mother's memory care facility.

And he had been here.

Building this.

An older woman appeared in the doorway, recognized Maggie, and stopped to chat.

"Did he actually let you out of the house on your own?" the woman teased.

Maggie pressed a finger to her lips and grinned. "Don't tell him. He'll worry for a week."

The woman shook her head, fond and indulgent. "I have never in fifty years seen a man so devoted. He picks the jalapeños out of her food at restaurants. He walks on the traffic side of the sidewalk, every single time." She sighed. "Where do they make men like that?"

Each word landed like a small, precise puncture.

Maggie slid a pastry across the table toward me. "You look like you've been traveling. Eat something."

I ate it.

"And listen to me." She leaned forward with the earnest warmth of someone giving advice they wished someone had given them. "I know women like you — driven, career-first — and I respect it. But don't wait too long to find your person. Find someone like Daniel. A man who actually shows up." She smiled. "Otherwise, honey, you're going to be very lonely."

The irony was so complete it had become something else. Something without a name.