Whatever she had thought, she had not expected this, some fantastic tale of foster homes and code-speak and God knew what else, and Leah burst out laughing. Maybe the other guys had put him up to it. Maybe she was being punked. Maybe he had turned schizophrenic in the last few years and actually believed his delusions. But she wasn’t stupid enough to fall for it—he was forgetting that she had been there, every Sunday. That she would answer the phone and his dad would ask how she was doing. That she’d seen pictures of his damn brother.
Michael clasped his hands tightly together. “Damn, but this is really a lot harder than I thought it would be,” he muttered, and glanced up again, looking, oddly, very tired. “I couldn’t tell you the truth about me. I couldn’t tell you that I grew up in foster homes and that I didn’t work for an Austrian company, and that I knew, from the time we started dating, until the time I had to leave, that I would leave, because that was my job. At the time, I was more committed to the job than I was to you, and that, I think, was perhaps the biggest mistake of my life.”
The punch line was coming any minute now. Leah polished off her tuna sandwich, waiting for him to say it, to deliver the big laugh.
But when he didn’t deliver, Leah squinted at him. “So? Are you going to tell me what the big ‘mystery’ job was?” she asked, making invisible quotation marks with her fingers. “I bet I can guess. You were really . . . Bond. James Bond,” she said in her best British accent, and then laughed at her joke.
But Michael didn’t crack a smile, just kept looking at her like his puppy had just died.
“Double-Oh-Seven,” she said. “Man of Steel.”
“Man of Steel was Superman,” he solemnly corrected her.
“Oh.”
“But yeah, it was something like Double-Oh-Seven.”
Leah choked on a laugh. “Shut up, Michael, you’re killing me. Come on, what was it really?”
He leaned across the table and said low, “CIA.”
Leah blinked and then burst out laughing. She slapped the table a couple of times in a fit of laughter so loud that several people turned in her direction, and in fact, from the corner of her eye, she could see Trudy’s head crane above the others to look at her. “Oh God, that is hilarious,” she said breathlessly, still giggling. “I don’t know about the game you’re playing—and don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a little sick—but my hat is off to you. That has got to be the greatest excuse ever invented by a guy. It’s a classic! I haven’t laughed this hard in five years.”
He did not laugh, did not even smile. He reached across the table and caught her hand. “I could not possibly be more serious,” he said quietly. “I was an operative for fourteen years. When I met you, I had been called back to New York to consult a foreign government.”
He looked completely earnest, but Leah was beginning to wonder if he really was delusional. She quickly withdrew her hand from his. “Stop it,” she said sternly. “Do you need to maybe take a pill or something? Something to help you manage those hallucinations you’re having?”
“At the time, I wanted to tell you,” he said, doggedly continuing his outrageous tale. “But my boss wouldn’t hear of it—it would have blown months and months of work. And then I got sent back out.”
“Oh. And it naturally flows that because you were a CIA guy,” she said, stabbing the air with both hands to emphasize that ridiculous notion, “you couldn’t commit?”
His frown went deeper. “My job wouldn’t have made it very easy, but it wasn’t impossible. I just got cold feet, and it . . . it was a convenient excuse.”
“A convenient and a completely whacked-out excuse, you mean,” she said, no longer smiling. Frankly, she was seething. “So you basically forced me into this lunch, forced me to hear you out, and you hand me this crap?” She pushed aside her plate. “Thanks, Michael,” she said cheerfully. “Thanks for that laugh and clearing everything up for me. Now if you will excuse me, I am going to go and run a few errands before the afternoon session.”
She stood up. “Oh, by the way . . . I don’t know if you said all that to try and make yourself feel better, or if you really think I am that gullible, or better yet, that I even give a shit after all this time, but that was the best line I have ever heard. And I can’t wait to share.” She marched off in the direction of Trudy’s table before he could respond.
She could not wait to tell them that her extreme ex-boyfriend claimed to have dumped her because he was a big world spy.
Oh God, what a laugh.
Subject: You will DIE
From: Leah Kleinschmidt <[email protected]>
To: Lucy Frederick <[email protected]>
Time: 11:01 pm
When you hear this, you will fall out of your chair laughing and David will have to resuscitate you. So Mr. Extreme Bachelor corners me and makes me have lunch with him today to tell me that the big reason he broke up with me was because he was . . . drum roll, please . . . a CIA SPY.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA!!!
Subject: Re: You will DIE
From: Lucy Frederick <[email protected]>
To: Leah Kleinschmidt <[email protected]>
Time: 7:30 am