She looked at Gareth.
The sleeping architecture of him — the long frame slumped in the kitchen chair, the jaw slack, the eyelashes against his cheek — and the memories arrived the way they always arrived when she looked at him long enough.
Gareth at four, running to show her a prize ribbon from a school event, the paper crumpled because he'd been holding it the whole walk home.
Gareth at nine, asleep on the couch with a basketball tucked under his arm like a stuffed animal, and she had stood in the doorway and looked at him and thought: I would burn the world for this.
The man whose code name she had never known, dead in a hotel room in a city she would not name, while she sat on the edge of the bed afterward and discovered, six weeks later, that the mission had left her with something she hadn't planned for.
