Archive of Our Own

All you want to do is something good
So get ready to be ridiculed and misunderstood
'Cause don't you know that you're a fucking freak in this world
In which everybody's willing to choose swine over pearls

And maybe everything is all for nothing
Still you'd better keep it to yourself
'Cause God knows it's not safe with anybody else

- Aimee Mann, “It’s Not Safe”

 
For as long as you’ve been alive, your mind has been what owns you. It’s the best and the worst part of you, and nothing you can do – nothing you’ve ever done – has made it possible for you to separate out good and bad. Being inside of your head is terrifying. This is the thing that nobody will ever understand: that sometimes it feels like you are walking around inside of yourself, that the body that contains you is not your body, that it does not really belong to you. You are your mind, the frantic scrambling chaos of it, the long claustrophobic stretches of depression. Your body is just the prison your mind came in, nothing more or less. Sex has always been something you do because you’re supposed to like it, and you do, in a way, but not the way other people do. You don’t enjoy food like they do, either. It’s all so much clutter in your life. You try to buy nice things, as if that might help, as though that might make you feel more comfortable in your own skin. You know, because men have old you, that you’re technically what passes for attractive, and it’s not really your beauty or lack thereof that bothers you – it’s the feeling that you get when you look in the mirror, that the person you’re seeing isn’t really yourself. That the person you are is trapped somewhere else, with no escape route handy.

He is a bright streak of fire through your life, through every part of you, and you don’t expect anybody to understand this, either. You don’t love him like most people love the people they marry. You love him because he’s crackling with something you recognize, because you can tell from his eyes that he’s lost inside himself, too, and for the first time your mind crashes into your body and it’s love, it’s love, and you won’t ever be able to let that go, to give that up; you may have left him at the border but he’s still the spark of white heat screaming through your veins when you close your eyes and let your heartbeat throb in your ears. That won’t ever change. You’re positive of this. You’re sure.

Saul knows what you did, not the particulars but the general idea, and he says nothing to you about it. He doesn’t ask. That’s just as well, because you’re not sure what you would have told him, but it’s not information he needs to know. You haven’t explicitly discussed Brody at all, though you know he’s been the subject of considerable conversation between Saul and the President. He is protecting you from that, and most of the time you’re grateful. (Sometimes you want to scream at him to stop pussyfooting around you, you’re a fucking adult, you can take whatever he throws your way. But you don’t.)

You get David’s office because Saul won’t leave his even though he’s the acting Chief now. You think you probably won’t ever get comfortable in his chair, behind his desk; you were always more at home down in the situation rooms, looking at computer screens over the shoulders of your analysts, or on the ground thousands of miles away from here. Some part of you is always going to miss the Middle East, not just the dry heat and the food at the claustrophobia of the rambling city streets but the high singing pitch of fear that thrummed in you whenever you were there on assignment. You’ve always felt most yourself when you’re afraid – your fear makes you forget who you are and lets you focus, instead, on what you are supposed to be doing.

Your problem, now, is much less about finding the bad guys than it is about rebuilding the agency from scratch. Everybody who knew anything useful is gone except the two of you and Galvez, of all people, since he wasn’t there on the day of the ceremony, was at the hospital instead. Galvez, who never smiles at you anymore, just levels you with a series of blank stares that vary only slightly. You deserve that; you don’t blame him for it.

That Nazir was responsible for the attack is a foregone conclusion; finding the particular people he used to get it done poses a murkier problem. To aid you in your search you have the following sources of information: a grainy black-and-white video from the security cameras at Langley of a man driving Brody’s car up behind the building and then walking away (he’s white, short dark hair, in his late-twenties or early thirties, but it’s difficult to say – he was wearing sunglasses, and kept his face tilted away from the camera, like he knew where it was positioned), the forensics reports from what was left of the car, and Roya Hammad. The video’s almost useless – nobody reports seeing anybody suspicious in the lot that day, and from what they can see of the man, he looks exactly like any of the other drones running around Langley at any given time. He was wearing a suit and the way he walked was professional, official. The working theory on him is that this was his first and last assignment for al-Qaeda, for Nazir, that he was groomed to be untraceable specifically for this task. There are people working around the clock to try to find him, watching the forty-seven seconds of footage you’ve got of him over and over again, but you know better than to expect that they’ll find anything useful.

Nobody suggests that it was a setup, that the bomb in Brody’s car was planted there. It takes all you have not to argue the point, because this is the most important thing you will ever do, getting him back. You cannot and you will not fuck it up. You will – you will be patient. You will bide your fucking time.

The forensics aren’t helpful, either – the C4 matches the stuff from Roya’s van, whoop-dee-fucking-doo – and Roya herself is an immovable object. Nothing anybody says to her has any effect. Her eyes are hard black glass. You wonder if she sees anything at all, anymore, or whether she’s gone so deep into her mind that what you say doesn’t even register. You go see her from time to time, anyway, try to provoke something out of her, anything. It’s more for your satisfaction than anything else. She’s your own personal punching bag, except that you can’t use your fists on her, wouldn’t want to. You always got more satisfaction out of inflicting the other kind of wound, the ones people can’t see.

You go and torment her until you don’t have the energy anymore, until your anger is broken-down and tired. Let her rot down there, you think, in the ground, away from the sun. You’ve got better stuff to do: teams to assemble, candidates to select for training. You’ve got an entire fucking agency to rebuild. Let her rot.

The first postcard comes two months later. It’s sent to Maggie’s house, it’s not signed, and it’s not in handwriting you recognize. She only tells you about it when she manages to guilt you into coming over for dinner, a week or so after it arrived.

“Oh,” she says. “I forgot about that – does it make any sense to you? There’s no signature or anything.”

It’s a postcard from Oslo, a tacky one with a picture of the waterfront on the front and OSLO in big red letters. You try to remember the last time you sent anybody a postcard, the last time you received one. You were sixteen, you think, spending the summer in Barcelona. It got you away from your mother, your father. Maggie was gone by then, and she wasn’t about to come back from California anytime soon. It was only after your mother left that Maggie got maternal, got guilty.

There’s no YG in Oslo, somebody’s written in red ink on the back of the postcard, in handwriting you don’t recognize – a woman’s handwriting, you think, if you had to guess. And that’s all.

Your heart is beating so hard in your chest that you can almost feel it slamming around in there. It seems impossible that Maggie can’t hear it across the room.

“It’s for me,” you tell her, and don’t say anything else. She’s not getting an explanation from you about this, not ever.

When you look up she’s frowning, not saying anything.

“Maggie,” you say. “It is – it is extremely important that you call me if another postcard like this arrives. Okay? It’s – it is extremely important.”

“Carrie,” she starts, and you just – you don’t have time to deal with it, not now.

“It’s fine, I’m fine,” you interrupt. “But I – I need you to call me. If you get another postcard.”

“Okay,” she says, and doesn’t argue.

You take the postcard home with you, sit up in bed staring at it. You’ve never been to Oslo. You went to Copenhagen once, a long time ago, and your family went on vacation in Finland one year – your father was always wanting to go to strange places, places without tourists, places where nobody would recognize him. That trip you stayed in a cabin in the woods, not much different from the one you own but many thousands’ more miles away, and he got up in the middle of the night and tried to chop down a tree, for firewood, even though it was the middle of the summer, and the cabin was heated.

You wonder what he looks like, now – Brody. He must have dyed his hair, or shaved it off. Grown a beard, maybe. There’s been no word of him at all, in the last few months. Everybody thinks he’s dead, everybody but Saul and you. Scandinavia’s a good place to get oriented, you think. People mind their own business. But they’re informed, there; they’ll pick up on him eventually.

He’ll have moved on by then. He won’t be taking any chances.

You think – and you’ve given this a lot of thought – that he’ll probably wind up in the Middle East again. When in doubt, go back to the source. He understands it – you know that about him. Probably better than he understands anywhere, maybe even America. America was a foreign country for him, when he came back. You could see it in his face from the first minute he walked onto your screen, black and white and pixelated. And – there might be people there, who would take him in. Not good people. But you take what you can get, when something like this happens to you. When you have nowhere else to go.

You lie in bed and think about where he might be now, whether he’s still in Oslo, or whether he left the second he sent that postcard. If it were you, you’d have been on the next train out of the city. He could be anywhere now. His hair could be any color. He could be hiding from the police even now, even at this very moment.

Your only comfort is that if anybody finds him, you’ll be the first person they’ll call after Saul. It is a comfort, but a cold one.

Weirdly, you begin to miss David. David was a predictable motherfucker – a piece of shit, sure, but you pretty much knew everything he was going to do before he did it. You feel like an intruder in his office, still, even though it’s been months and it’s your pictures on the desk, not his. Even though the drawing his daughter had made him had disappeared with the rest of his personal effects sometime before you arrived the next week to take his place, replaced with a card your nieces had made you, a weird amalgamation of condolences and congratulations. That’s your life, now: condolences and congratulations.

The day you stop missing David is the day you find Peter Quinn in your office. Quinn is dangerous – you knew that from the first minute you saw him; he practically bleeds it – but there’s a particular tight set to his shoulders that puts you on edge.

“Quinn,” you say, and close the door behind you.

“Carrie,” he says, without turning around to look at you. He’s peering at the card from your nieces, tacked up to the bulletin board hanging on the wall. You’re messier than David was, sloppier.

“I wasn’t expecting you,” you tell him, because you really weren’t.

“I’m consulting,” he says. “Something in Afghanistan.”

He turns around, finally, arms folded in front of him.

“How’ve you been?” you ask, going for conciliatory.

“Fine,” he says shortly. He’s got something else, something he came here to tell you, and you’re willing to wait it out. He’ll give it up eventually; they always do. So you stay quiet.

“Nice office you’ve got,” he says, instead of getting to the point, and he takes a few meandering steps around the space, except that nothing Peter Quinn has ever done could qualify as meandering.

You shrug. “It’s an office.”

He snorts – quietly, to himself. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, it is.”

You wait. When he looks over at you, you raise your eyebrows. You haven’t sat down.

“You have no fucking clue, do you,” he says, and you do your best to not react at all.

“That depends,” you say evenly.

“Estes was gonna have me shoot your boyfriend,” he says, almost casually, as if he isn’t watching you like a hawk to see how the blow lands. “And I didn’t do it.”

“Why?” you ask.

“Because I’m a sentimental idiot,” he snaps.

He’s not angry with you, you realize – he might think he is; you honestly can’t tell, but he’s not. He’s angry with himself.

“Who else knows?” you ask, and he laughs again, harsh. It’s not a pleasant sound.

“Nobody. Berenson. You.”

“Saul knew?” you ask. Your voice is very calm; it doesn’t give you away at all. (You hope it doesn’t give you away.)

“He made a huge fucking stink about it, yeah,” Quinn says. “You ever wonder where he went those last few days of that operation?”

“Jesus,” you say.

“I guess you wouldn’t be sitting here, if I’d done it,” he says. He’s trying to provoke you; you don’t rise to the bait. You’re not interested.

You’re running through this in your mind, following each trail that presents itself to a possible explanation. This is what your mind is good for: for the fast, crackling snap of analytical thinking, problem-solving coupled with intuition. If Quinn had refused to take Brody out, David could easily have gotten somebody else to do his dirty work. If he didn’t – you assume he didn’t; maybe he just didn’t have time – then Quinn has to have done something to stop him from doing that. It’s not so hard, really, to work it out. It happens in a few seconds, and then you have it.

You watch him for a few seconds before saying anything. He’s in pain; that much is clear. He’s in a lot of pain.

“He didn’t do it,” you tell him. You can’t tell him anything else, but you can’t help yourself from giving him that.

He looks you straight in the eye for a long time. You don’t know what exactly he’s looking for – delusion, believe, whatever. You gaze back, as steady as you know how. He didn’t do it. You don’t have proof – yet, you think, yet yet yet – but you have to make a choice, sometimes, to trust people. You have to do that, in your life. You have to believe in things.

“You actually think that,” he says a long minute later, and you nod. You’re not sure whether it was supposed to be a question, but you answer it anyway.

“Jesus,” he says.

“Thank you,” you tell him. “For not doing it.” If he’d pulled the trigger, hundreds of bodies that are currently in the ground would be walking around, doing their jobs, talking to their families. You don’t care. Brody’s not dead. You would probably blow up cities to make sure Brody stayed not dead. You’re not proud of that, but it is what it is. You do nothing by halves.

“You’re out of your fucking mind,” he tells you, but there’s something admiring in the way he says it, like he’s impressed in spite of himself. You smile, crooked.

“That’s what they tell me,” you say, and he shakes his head.

After that, you don’t feel guilty about being in David’s office anymore. You feel fucking entitled to it. And somehow, within the span of the next few months, it’s not his anymore: it’s yours.

The postcards come every couple of months. Maggie never asks any questions, for which you are grateful. They’re always written in different handwriting, and they never make sense to anybody but you. There’s absolutely nothing suspicious about them, but you know you should burn them anyway. You cut the corners off instead, remove the dates, because you’ve learned them by heart anyway, and shuffle them around regularly. If anybody ever puts the pieces together, they won’t be able to track his movements easily from those postcards.

He goes to Oslo, to Munich, to Kraków, Sevastopol, Ankara, Mosul. If you were a betting woman – which you are – you’d bet he’s headed for Egypt. He doesn’t give anything else away, not that anybody else would know that YG stood for Yorkshire Gold, or that that’s what he drinks. I ate two pretzels, one for me and one for you, the postcard from Munich reads (blazoned across the front: MUNCHEN MAG DICH, München likes you). The one from Kraków just says, It’s been raining for three days. Sevastopol: This is the most beautiful place I’ve ever been, which makes you want to go there. Ankara: I haven’t showered in a week. I miss you. And then, Mosul: I keep dreaming that I can only see the back of you, and you can’t hear me. No matter how much noise I make. No matter how many questions I ask you.

You hoard them. They’re all you’ve got. Because you’re working – you really are working – to clear him, to find some way to bring him back. But there’s just nothing. Until you find the people who did this, there won’t be any proof that gets Brody back onto American soil. And you have no information. You’re all working too hard – it’s been a year-and-a-half, you realize when the postcard from Mosul arrives. It’s been a year-and-a-half, and you’re nowhere. You’ve got other stuff to worry about, all of you, but you’re still making time for this, because even though Roya Hammad is in an underground cell and will be for the rest of her life, there are people out there who blew you all up, and have gotten away with it. You hate them for that, for what they’ve done to you and what they’ve taken from you. But hatred alone is not enough. Hatred is not information, is not knowledge. You have neither.

You and Saul sit up late in his office more nights than you’d necessarily like to admit, drinking whiskey and talking about nothing, or not talking at all. Mira has come and gone again, and Saul is starting to look more and more like a broken old man. He has to make decisions he doesn’t like – you’re perfectly aware of that. David was not a good man, but he was what he was because of the position he was in, and that’s where Saul is, now, and he doesn’t like it. Saul doesn’t kiss the President’s ass like David kissed Walden’s, but he’s powerless before him, just like David was. The President can do what he want, kill whom he wants, and nobody is about to tell him no if he’s determined. Saul tries, you know, but Saul is a kinder and a better man than any elected official you’ve ever met. You don’t tend to trust politicians.

Saul, it goes without saying, is worried about you. He knows what you’re doing, and you don’t pretend like he doesn’t. Neither of you says anything about it, because that way lies madness. You know madness; you’ve looked it straight in the eye. You’d rather not do so again.

Sometimes you still get the urge to flush all your pills down the toilet, let the mania plow through you. The temptation is always the thought that you might be able to ride it, let it crest under you, that it would blow open your mind in some kind of ecstasy, finally wed you to that alien thing that is your body, that it would explode everything you hate about yourself and leave you pure and incandescent in its aftermath.

You know that this isn’t what happens, but it can be hard to remember that on bad days. Not on days when you want to slit your wrists – you don’t get those anymore, not much – but on the dreary, dull days that taste like lithium.

You drink more, instead.

You run into Quinn at a bar one of those nights. He’s working; you can tell. You’re pretty sure he’s not the kind of guy who hangs around bars anyway. He’s not the kind of guy to do anything just because he feels like it. He’s surprised when he sees you, although he doesn’t show it. You can tell not because you know him so well – you don’t – but because you know men like him. You raise your glass at him across the bar and he walks over, eyes flickering everywhere, scoping out his territory.

“Carrie,” he says. He’s holding a glass of beer in his hand. It’s half-drunk, and you’d bet it’s the weakest thing on the tap.

“Quinn,” you reply. He looks at you for a second like he’s not sure what to do, but when he sits down it’s calm, casual. You aren’t fooled.

“How’s tricks?” you ask.

“Fine,” he says, and takes a small sip of his drink.

“I’m doing well, thanks for asking,” you say a minute or two later, when he hasn’t said anything else.

He snorts. “You’re never doing well, Carrie.”

“Nope,” you say, and take another sip of whiskey. You’re on your second drink, nearly to your third. This is probably as drunk as you should get, but you’ll probably order another one. Nothing particularly terrible happened today, but you’re increasingly finding that’s not enough for you, anymore.

“You know, I think you probably never had a normal life,” you tell him. “How long have you been living out of a suitcase?”

He leans forward, rests his elbows on the counter. “Twelve years,” he says, which is considerably more information than you’d expected to get.

“Don’t you get tired?” you ask.

“Do you?” he asks.

“Every goddamn day,” you tell him, and that startles a laugh out of him, though it’s humorless.

“Yep,” he says. “Every motherfucking day.”

And this is how you and Peter Quinn somehow become drinking buddies (you drink too much, these days; it’s your only form of recreation). You don’t lie to each other much, and when you do, you always know. You’re a pair of miserable fucks, and you both know it, and somehow it becomes funny, your misery – somehow it becomes something you can laugh at. He’s out of his fucking mind, you’re relatively sure – not a psychopath; you know them, but borderline, maybe. You wonder idly for a while whether or not he’s bipolar, but it’s nothing in his chemistry that’s wrong; it’s something biologically inexplicable. He’s wired wrong, and the business of killing people only made it worse. This, at least, is your theory. You honestly don’t spend a lot of time trying to figure it out, figure him out – that’s the whole point, that you don’t have to. He likes you, for reasons you can’t even begin to understand, and you think you kind of like him, too, in the way you grow to like the people you can’t avoid, at least the ones you don’t hate passionately. These things happen.

It crosses your mind, because you’re human, that you could probably fuck him, if you wanted. He’s not in love with you – thank fucking god – and you’re sure as hell not in love with him, but it wouldn’t really matter. But you don’t really want to. You don’t really like sex, most of the time – that’s something you can only admit to yourself now that you know what you were missing out on all that time. The electric current that Brody’s hand sent through you when it traveled up your flank, traced along your ribs and shoulder blades. The crook of his fingers inside of you. This is what you’d been promised sex would be like. It wasn’t, before that. It won’t be again, unless he comes back. You’re not trying to be fatalistic, just realistic. This is what has happened to you; these are the cards you’ve been dealt.

Sometimes in the cab on the way home, you watch the streetlights go by and the houses go by and the rain falling, if there’s rain, and you think if you reached out behind you he would be there, the solid warm weight of him, breathing quietly, watching out the other window, going home.

Life goes on, and on, and on. Galvez gets married. You aren’t invited to the wedding – neither is Saul – but he smiles at you when you congratulate him, and you think he means it. There’s a string of suspicious bombings in the provinces in Iraq that you spend a couple of months investigating, but it turns out to be nothing more than a group of stupid twenty-somethings with too much anger and time on their hands. They have no network, no bigger picture – they’re nothing like Nazir, and they’re not fanatical in the way that he was. They don’t want to die, and when your people go in and take them, they roll over immediately. It almost makes you miss him, in a twisted, fucked-up way. Your life was not better when you had a smarter opponent, but it was certainly more interesting.

Maggie’s oldest is in the eighth grade now, and she doesn’t talk to any of you anymore, just stares into the distance with something like disdain or hauteur written all over her features. You find it endearing; Maggie finds it frustrating. Your father barely notices. He’s getting older.

Five months go by without a postcard from Brody, and then six. You take a personal day, the first since you started back up at the CIA, to take the train up to New York, to see Keith Jarrett play Carnegie Hall. You haven’t been to New York in a long, long time – you haven’t been in years. You take the subway downtown and wander around the Financial District, past Ground Zero and down to the waterfront, to the Brooklyn Bridge, across to the promenade on the other side. The glittering towers of lower Manhattan watch you from across the river, somehow both real and unreal, and you think this might be the first time you’ve realized, the first time you’ve really understood that the world has gone on. That when those planes crashed into those buildings, nothing stopped except the lives of the people who were inside. New York went on. America went on. But you – you stopped. You got stuck.

You have to face the thing you’ve been avoiding, the thing you’ve been dreading: the fact that you’re probably never going to get anything on the people who did Brody in, that he’s never coming back. That he might be dead, anyway. You have no way of knowing. You wonder whether you should have fought harder two years ago, in the direct aftermath, whether you should have pushed Saul much harder than you pushed him, if you should have sacrificed yourself to the cause. But you wanted to live. Some instinct in you tripped a wire, and you kept yourself alive.

It’s only once you’ve thought about this – once you’ve laid awake in bed thinking about it, once you’ve had dreams of him, of the flash of his red hair in the bright, hot Middle Eastern sun, of him disappearing around corners, behind doors, of him vanishing – that Galvez sticks his head into your office and says, “You need to see this.”

These people aren’t sloppy, like everybody else you’ve been dealing with these past two years; these guys were trained by Nazir and they’re careful, they’re ruthless, they’ll do anything to keep from being found out. But nobody is perfect – not even you – and things happen, things get out. Packages get lost, licenses get forged, e-mails don’t get properly deleted. And this is where you come in, because this is what you do: you make something out of almost nothing.

You don’t think – but can’t be sure – that they’re actively planning another attack. You think, based on the evidence in front of you and the radio silence for years, that they’re mostly concerned with their own asses, with keeping themselves safe. But there’s no way of knowing, really, whether they might be planning something, or in the stages working up to planning something. You have no way of knowing whether these people are tied up with Brody – you don’t even technically know if they’re linked to Nazir. You made that connection before anybody else did, and you’re not a fucking moron, you caught the looks on their faces when you suggested it. You’re crazy, you won’t let things go, yada fucking yada – you know what they think of you, even though it’s been two years and you haven’t fucked up substantially, not once. You’ve worked so hard not to be obsessive about this, because you knew if you went in for the wrong thing, that your chance of getting Brody back would be gone, wasted. You’ve bided your time. You have been very, very patient.

But here’s the thing: this? This is going to take time. This is going to take a long time, because these people are careful, they’re good, and you’re not going to rush them. You’re going to wait until you’ve got each and every one of these motherfuckers by the balls, and then you’re going to rip their lives out from under them so quickly they won’t know what hit them. And then you’re going to get Brody back. Because something in here is going to explain that, explain what happened. Something is going to lead you to the man in the security camera footage, or lead you to somebody who can give him to you. And you will not be denied.

You go down to see Roya for the first time in over a year, tell her what’s going on, what you’re planning. She’s lost a lot of weight; she looks almost skeletal, now, nothing like her former self. And when she looks at you her eyes don’t betray one shred of recognition. She’s long gone, inside her head, and it sends a long, unpleasant shiver down your spine, to see yourself reflected in her.

There was a time, not so long ago, when you wouldn’t have allowed yourself to think that this could end badly. That Brody could be dead. That anything might have happened to him, out there in the desert, in the mosques (you’re not proud of this). Who’s taken him in? Who would be willing to take that risk? You have to believe he changed, by the end of the time you knew him – and you do, you do still believe it – but you have no way of knowing whether he’s changed again. It’s been a long time.

Seven months pass without a postcard. Eight. The stack of six is getting worn at the edges, so you haven’t looked at them in months, either. You’re working. You’re waiting. You’re thirty-five. You’re not getting any younger.

On all the days you don’t have to stay late working, or don’t go out and meet Quinn – which amounts to considerably fewer days than you would like – you drive home from Langley and drink a glass of red wine, put on a record, try not to think about anything for at least a little while. Nobody ever bothers you during this time – Maggie calls you on the weekends, when she calls you – and so when your doorbell sounds your first move is to get your gun out of your side-table, without event thinking about it.

Your heart is pounding in your chest and your mouth feels dry, all of the sudden. Charlie Parker is playing in the background but you can hear everything you do perfectly clearly. You cock the gun and creep as quietly as you can to the door, keep it pointed in front of you when you lean in to look through the peephole.

Dana Brody is standing outside, looking unsure, looking older. You lower your gun and lean your forehead against the door for a second, breathing heavily, trying not to admit to yourself all the people you’d thought – you’d hoped – it might be.

You put the gun away, turn the music off, and hurry back to the front hall. She’s rung the doorbell once again; you don’t want her to leave. Sure enough, by the time you’ve opened the door, she’s halfway down the stoop, but she stops when she hears you.

You try to get your breathing under control. You don’t want her to think – to think you’re crazy. She must be – what, eighteen, now? It’s late summer – she’s probably going to college in a couple of weeks. The thought makes you kind of sick.

“Dana?” you ask, and you’re proud of how steady your voice is. She turns around slowly, and yes, now that you’ve got a long, good look at her face: she looks older.

“Uh,” she says, twisting her hands together. “I, uh. I was wondering if I could… come in.”

“Yeah,” you tell her. “Of course.” Neither of you move for a beat, and then you stand back, let her pass you. Her car’s parked on the street, next to your mailbox.

“How did you know where I live?” you ask once you’ve closed the door behind you.

“You’re in the phonebook,” she lies. You’re not in the phonebook.

“No, I’m not,” you tell her, and she shrugs, uncomfortable.

“I asked Mike to find out,” she says. “He didn’t want to, but I kind of – made him.”

“Oh,” you say, and lead her into the sitting room. “Um, you can – sit,” you tell her, waving at the sofa. “Do you want something to – to drink, or –?”

“No,” she replies automatically, and then, after a moment, “actually, I – water? I mean – please.”

“Yeah, sure,” you say, and try to smile at her. You have no idea what your face looks like, but an uncomplicated smile is probably not it, so you flee to the kitchen, lean against the counter breathing heavily for a long moment before pulling yourself together and getting her a glass of water.

“Here,” you say as you give it to her, once you’re back in the room. You sit in the chair to the side of the couch and watch her. She doesn’t look anything like Brody, not really – she’s a dead ringer for her mother – but you can see him in her anyway, in the way she looks around, watches things, gives nothing away. She didn’t used to be like that, so much, not if you’re remembering correctly. You remember a girl with a face that broadcast everything she felt to the world. She’s turned hard, in the past two years. Having a terrorist father will do that to a person, you suppose.

“I’m sorry to, to bother you,” she begins, and her voice is small, so: not so grown-up after all. She swallows, sits up a little straighter. “I wanted to talk to you about my dad.”

“Okay,” you say.

“I wanted to – a while ago,” she says. “But my mom wouldn’t let me.” There’s a glint in her eye, now, that’s something other than regular teenage rebellion. It runs deeper than that.

“That’s understandable,” you tell her. You haven’t thought about Jess much – there’s no point – but you certainly feel bad for her. What she’s had to endure is not something you’d wish on many people.

“No, it’s not,” Dana says. “I wanted to – I wanted to know, to understand, I wanted to – it was important. It is important,” she corrects. “And you – you –” She stops, takes a breath, take a sip of water. She’s so nervous she looks like she’s about to crawl out of her skin.

“He told me you weren’t crazy,” she says finally. “On the day – you know. That he had – that he was really going to – do all that, b-blow those people up. The day that Elizabeth Gaines died.”

“Yes,” you tell her.

“He said he wasn’t going to do anything like that again,” she says, voice wobbling just a little.

“No,” you say. “He didn’t.”

She’s staring at you, desperate, like there’s something she needs from you, and you’re not sure how to give it to her.

“Everybody said he did. They said – it was his car.”

“It was. They framed him.”

“They – what?”

You rub at your forehead before you speak. You realize that this is insane, that you should be saying none of these things to this girl. But you’re going to; you can’t help yourself. You know it’s just because you’re projecting, that you can’t help but see yourself in her. But that knowledge isn’t enough to make you stop.

“They knew we had the video he recorded,” you tell her, “and they knew we were focused on him and Roya – the woman who was his contact. They didn’t – once Nazir was dead, they knew we wouldn’t be prepared for… anything else.”

“So… he didn’t know?” she asks, tentatively, like the answer you give her is going to change the course of her whole life, one way or another.

“No,” you say. “No, he didn’t know. He didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“How do you know?” she asks.

“I just know,” you tell her.

She stares at you for a long moment. “He was going to leave us,” she says, and her voice is small but hard now, too; determined. “For you.”

“For a while,” you say.

The way she looks at you reminds you painfully that she’s her father’s daughter, something like a kick to the chest. “You loved him,” she says slowly. “Even though you – even though you knew –”

“Yes,” you tell her.

“He loved you,” she says, still staring at you, desperate, and you look away, look out the window at the dark street.

“I think he thought he loved me,” you tell her, and the words hurt coming out; rip something out of you that will never be healed again. This is the thing you haven’t been able to admit to yourself, these past two months; this is the thing that is true. “I think he needed to believe that he did.”

She’s still watching you; you can feel it, though you don’t look back to see what her face looks like, now.

“Why?” she asks, finally.

“Because he was afraid,” you tell her. People will do so many strange things when they are afraid. You know. You’ve been afraid your whole life.

You look back over at Dana and she looks lost, young, and you wonder whether there’s anybody in her family who understands her, who knows what she’s had to deal with, the weight she’s had to bear these last two years. They can’t have any idea.

“They never found his body,” she’s saying. “If they had just – if we even had something to bury, maybe – maybe that would have –”

You know what you should do. You should tell her you’re sorry, that her father loved her, that maybe someday she’ll be able to forgive him, and maybe not; you should send her home. You should close the door behind her and not think about her again, go back to trying to work your way inside this cell you’re in the process of discovering so that you can rip it apart. You should go to bed. You should sleep, and then go to Langley in the morning, and say something nice to Saul, to remind him of how grateful you are to him for being there.

“Dana,” you say instead. “Dana, he’s not dead.”

That last drive, all the way up to the border, time streaming out of your fingers, the knowledge that you were going to let him go, that he was going to break apart into nothing like so many of your dreams, that the warm body next to you was going to be gone, replaced by a memory, a shadow, a ghost; the last time he touched you, the shrill cry of your heart on the wind as he walked away, as you wiped your tears away and turned the car around and drove, and drove, the stillness of your mind in those moments, so unfamiliar to you – the brief reprieve, brought to you by grief, from the chaotic nightmare of your life. How, in that one moment, you would have given anything to be your jumbled, miserable self again, if only the passenger seat were not empty, if only the subtle smell of him were gone from the air you were breathing, so you didn’t have to think about him anymore. But you would keep on thinking about him forever.

“What?” Dana says. She’s shaking. You shouldn’t be telling her this, but she’s hard, hard like her father was, hard like you were, at that age – like you still are now.

“He wasn’t dead eight months ago,” you correct, because you don’t want to give her false hope, when your own is running out.

“That’s not possible,” she says.

“Dana,” you say again, to ground her, to bring her back. “Neither of us was in that room when the bomb went off. We were upstairs. I got him out. I drove him up to the border and my people got him out.”

“Where is he?” she asks.

“I don’t know. I think maybe Egypt.”

“How do you know he’s alive?” Her voice is tight, a little shrill – like it’s walking on a high-wire.

You shouldn’t do this – you really, really shouldn’t – but you’re going to. Fuck it, you’re going to.

You walk over to the desk on the other side of the room, open the top drawer, reach into the back and pull out the stack of postcards. You thought for a long time about whether you should hide them, but ultimately that would only make them look more suspicious than they already do, corners cut off. Nobody’s coming to search your house anytime soon, anyway. You’ve thrown caution to the wind.

You walk back over to where Dana is sitting on your couch and hand her the postcards, shuffled around to be in the right order. She takes them automatically, stares at them like she doesn’t really understand what she’s seeing.

“That’s my sister’s address,” you tell her. “They’re written in different handwriting each time. But they’re from him.”

“What’s YG?” she asks. She sounds like she has no idea what she’s saying.

“Yorkshire Gold,” you tell her, and she starts. You see her fingers tighten, a little, as she begins to believe.

She reads them slowly – there are so few words, there, to stretch out over all these years – but it’s when she gets to the last one that you see her heart stop. “That’s his handwriting,” she says, shakily, and you don’t know how you didn’t know that. Maybe you weren’t really looking, anymore. Her eyes go across the lines over and over again. “That’s his handwriting,” she says, hollowed-out and stunned.

“He never wrote,” she whispers a moment later. “He never – he never sent word, he never – he never –”

“I got rid of his phone before he could call you, when we were leaving,” you tell her. “If he had called you, they would have known he was alive. They would have found him in an instant.” You pause. “I’m sorry, Dana.”

She’s crying a little, and she reaches up to wipe her hand across her face. “I thought he was dead,” she says. She’s in shock; you recognize the signs. “I thought – I thought –”

“He loves you,” you tell her. “He always loved you the most of any of you. Of anybody.” That’s true: if he could be sending her postcards, and not you, he would be doing it. You have no doubt about this.

She’s really crying, now, and her fingers crumple the postcards a little before she puts them down on the coffee table like she’s been burned, and stands up, backs away from them. “Then why – why didn’t – why didn’t he –”

She can’t keep going, interrupted by thick, hiccoughing sobs, and you don’t know what to do, so you do what you always wished your mother would do for you, but never did: you wrap your arms around her and let her cry on you and wait her out. This is a much smaller thing than you wish you could give her, but it’s something. It’s something. You press your hand against her long, curling hair, and you know that it’s going to feel like a cruelty when the universe pulls her away from you and sends her out your door.

She goes not long after that. “Can I come back to see you, sometime?” she asks. Her eyes are red but she’s looking at you like she’s not ashamed.

“Any time you want,” you tell her, and it’s true.

“I’m going to college soon,” she says.

“Where?” you ask.

“NYU,” she tells you, and you think that makes sense, that she’d want the anonymity of the city.

“Congratulations,” you say, and you mean it, but she just shrugs, uncomfortable. “He’d be proud of you, you know.”

“I guess,” she says, all teenager again, but when she glances at you one last time before walking away, she doesn’t look like a teenager at all. She looks old, and tired. You watch her drive away from the front stoop, and then go back inside.

You putter around the house for a while, not doing much of anything, just trying to keep your hands occupied while you think. You would be proud of her, you think, and just like that it’s like he’s there next to you, helping you wash the dishes, following you around as you close all the windows – there’s a storm coming tonight. You would be proud of how much like you she is, in all the right ways. You’d be proud of how she’s grown up.

But he didn’t see it, he didn’t see so much of her growing-up years. Even if he does come back, he’ll always have lost that: his daughter’s childhood.

You’d be proud of her because she seems like a good person, you think, and you can imagine – fuzzily; it’s been so long – him smiling to hear that, can imagine the feeling of his hand squeezing yours, glad.

You do fall asleep for a little while, to the sound of the rain slamming against your windows. But by the time you wake up in the morning, the storm is gone, and everything outside is soft and yellow in the pre-dawn light, the shadows clearer than usual. It’s warm, and the humidity that’s been plaguing you all week has broken. The bottoms of your feet get wet when you walk outside to fetch the paper, and you spread your toes in the puddle that always forms in the one dip of your front walk. The pavement is rough against your skin, and for some reason this makes you smile for a moment before you walk back up the steps into your house, and close the door behind you.