“But seriously,” Maya said through the phone. “You’re doing okay?”
“Oh, yeah.” Sara paused and waited for the light. So did the shadow. “I’m doing great.” She could have turned and looked at them, made them aware that she was aware, but she kept her eyes forward and waited for the signal to cross to see if they would follow.
“Good. I’m glad. I’ll try to send you a little something in a couple weeks.”
“You don’t have to do that,” Sara told her. The light changed. She strode briskly across the crosswalk.
“I know I don’t have to. I want to. Anyway, I’ll let you get to work.”
“I’m off tomorrow.” Sara reached the opposite corner and continued on her way. The shadow kept pace. “Call you then?”
“Definitely. Love you.”
“Love you too.” Sara ended the call and stuck her phone back in her purse. Then, without warning, she made an abrupt left turn and jogged a few paces, just to get out of his line of sight. She turned, folded her arms across her chest, and put on her very best stern expression as her pursuer rounded the corner after her.
He practically skidded to a stop when he saw her there waiting for him.
“For a supposedly covert operative, you’re shit at this,” she told him. “I smelled your cologne.”
Agent Todd Strickland smirked. “Nice to see you too, Sara.”
She did not return the smile. “Still keeping tabs on me, I see.”
“What? No. I was in the area, working an op.” He shrugged. “I saw you on the street, figured I’d come say hi.”
“Uh-huh,” she said flatly. “In that case, hi. Now I have to go to work. Bye.” She turned and walked away briskly.
“I’ll walk with you.” He trotted to catch up to her.
She scoffed. Strickland was young for a CIA agent, not yet thirty years old—and, she realized, irritatingly handsome—but he also reminded her too much of her father. The two were friends, going back nearly two years when Sara and her sister had been kidnapped by the Slovakian traffickers. Strickland had helped rescue them, and at that time he’d made a promise that no matter what happened, he would do whatever he could to keep the two girls safe.
Apparently that meant using CIA resources to keep abreast of Sara’s whereabouts.
“So things are good?” he asked her.
“Yup. Peachy. Now go away.”
But still he walked beside her. “That guy in your building still giving you grief?”
“Oh my god,” she groaned. “What, did you bug the place?”
“I just want to make sure you’re okay—”
She spun on him. “You’re not my dad. We’re not even friends. Once upon a time, maybe you were a… I don’t know. Glorified babysitter. But now you’re coming off like a fucking stalker.” She had known that he was tracking her for some time; this was not the first occasion in which he’d suddenly appeared in Florida. “I don’t want you here. I don’t want to be reminded of that life. So how about you tell me what you want from me, and we can go our separate ways?”
Strickland barely reacted to the outburst. “I want you to be safe,” he said plainly. “And, if I’m being honest, I want you to quit the drugs.”
Sara’s eyes narrowed and her mouth fell open a little. “Just who do you think you are?”
“Someone who cares. It would break your father’s heart if he knew.”
If he knew? “Oh, you mean you’re not hand-delivering him weekly reports?”
Strickland shook his head. “Haven’t seen him in months.”
“So you’re just following me out of some misguided sense of duty?”
The young agent smiled sadly and shook his head. “Whether you like it or not, there are still a lot of people out there that remember Agent Zero. I hope the day never comes that you have to thank me for keeping an eye on you. But until then, I’m going to keep doing it.”
“Yeah. I bet you will.” She looked straight up, squinting at the bright sky. “What is it, a satellite? Is that how you watch me?” Sara stuck one arm over her head and flashed a middle finger to the clouds. “There’s a photo for you. Send it to my dad as a Christmas card.” Then she turned and started away.
“Sara,” he called after her. “The drugs?”
Christ, why won’t he go away? She turned to face him. “So I smoked a little weed. Who cares? It’s practically legal here.”
“Uh-huh. And the Xanax?”
The Xanax. Her first question was, how did he know about that? The second that crossed her mind was, why hadn’t it kicked in yet? But she knew the answer to the latter already. Her body was getting too accustomed to a single bar. It wasn’t enough anymore.
“And the coke?”
She laughed at him then, a bitter and caustic laugh. “Don’t do that. Don’t try to make me feel like some kind of criminal deviant because I tried something once or twice at a party.”
“Once or twice, huh? You have these parties every night?”
Sara felt her face grow hot. It wasn’t just because he had offended her; it was because he was right. It had started out as once or twice at a party, but then quickly became a bump after work. A little something to take the edge off. But she wasn’t about to acknowledge that now.
“It must be so easy for you,” she said. “Standing there, clean cut, Boy Scout, Army Ranger. CIA agent. Must be so easy to judge someone like me. You say you know what I’ve been through. But you don’t understand it. You can’t.”
Strickland nodded slowly. He stared directly at her, with those eyes that she might have found charming if he was anyone other than who he was. “Yeah. I guess you’re right. I wouldn’t know what it was like to be emancipated at seventeen—”
“I was fifteen,” Sara corrected.
“And I was seventeen. But you didn’t know that about me, did you?”
She didn’t. But she didn’t give him the satisfaction of reacting.
“I joined the Army right away. A lot of states will let you do that. I had my first confirmed kill two days before my eighteenth birthday. Funny thing about the military. They don’t call it ‘murder’ when you kill someone.”
Sara bit her lip. She knew what it was like to kill someone. It had been a mercenary with the black ops team called The Division. He would have killed them, her and her sister, so Sara shot him in the neck. And though the nightmares still plagued her, she’d never once thought of it as murder.
“At one point I was on four different prescriptions,” Strickland told her. “For PTSD. Anxiety. Depression. I abused them all. It was so much easier to be numb, to pretend that everything I did happened to someone else.”
He smiled sadly. “And man, I was a good addict. No one knew. Or maybe no one cared as long as I was a good soldier. Eventually one of my Ranger pals found out. He started following me, keeping close tabs on me. It was so damned irritating. He even took me to see a therapist. It was really hard. It’s so much harder to quit and deal with all your shit than to just take something. I still see a therapist, twice a week when I’m able.”
Sara stared at a small stone on the sidewalk to avoid looking at his eyes. After everything her dad had put her through, Strickland could have been lying. This could have just been a story. But he told it with a lot of conviction. Just like he was trained.
“I know that you’ve experienced