was right, too. She paid the price with the kids for the late nights. Kira was in school now, and Tony kindergarten. Both were old enough to know she was shorting them. She had one ironclad rule. She reserved Sunday afternoons for family. But they needed more.
The second-worst part was that Brian barely seemed to care. She had steered him to a new job as a systems administrator at ConocoPhillips, which would happily hire anyone with an FBI connection. When she asked him if he liked it, he said, “Installing and maintaining enterprise software, every boy’s dream.”
But they both knew he couldn’t quit. They lived basically paycheck to paycheck. Working for the FBI was surprisingly expensive. The bureau expected its agents to dress professionally. Good women’s clothes didn’t come cheap. Rebecca was stuck buying five-hundred-dollar Theory suits. Plus, yes, she had one indulgence. She’d bought a 330i, the BMW one model down from the M3. It was a sedan, so she could haul the kids in it, though after one too many spills on the leather she tried to keep them in Brian’s old Jeep Cherokee.
Should she have spent thirty-eight K on a car? Maybe not. But the M3 had spoiled her, and she did drive a lot. Everyone in Houston drove a lot.
Anyway, she was the primary earner, wasn’t she? A man in her position would have bought himself a nice car and not felt guilty. She knew, because the FBI garage was filled with equally flashy vehicles. The feeling in the office seemed to be that a million-dollar house was impossible—and would make everyone wonder how you’d paid for it—but a thirty-five-thousand-dollar car was achievable.
She didn’t just spend on herself, either. She wanted the kids to have nice clothes. Maybe because she felt guilty about not spending enough time with them. A predictable feeling, but its predictability didn’t make it less real. Not to mention taxes, and babysitters, and trips back to Massachusetts to see her parents, and groceries, and making sure she picked up her share of the drinks when she went out with the AUSAs, and everything else—no, Brian couldn’t quit. They needed the thirty-four thousand he made just to stay on top of the bills every month.
“So you don’t like the job?” she said.
“Does it sound like I like the job?” He used the Socratic method with her a lot these days.
“I just want you to be happy, Bri.”
“That what you want? For me to be happy?”
So often their conversations now slipped into the thrust-and-parry of a swordfight. Or maybe more accurately the cape-waving of a bullfight. She wasn’t sure who was the matador.
She wanted to scream at him. Maybe she should. Maybe a good screaming match would break the glass wall that was rising between them, a millimeter a day, slow and certain. She could still see him. He still looked the same. But she couldn’t reach him. Even their sex life had withered. They weren’t in a dead bed, not yet. But they rarely got together more than a couple of times a month. He’d wanted the lights off recently, another first. She wondered what porn star or model he was thinking about, because she knew it wasn’t her.
She couldn’t help but laugh. “Do you know how annoying you are these days? Professor Unsworth?” She looked over, hoping the joke had broken through. Not that she particularly cared. If the second-worst part of her dereliction of duties at home was that Brian hardly cared, the worst part was that she didn’t either. Yes, she missed the kids. She wanted to do more for them, with them. But all her guilt didn’t get her home a minute earlier.
Being an agent was still her dream job. Especially now that Brian’s advice had put her career in Houston back on track. Maybe one day she’d get cynical, tired of the bureau. Not yet. Every morning she woke up in awe of her responsibility. She put criminals in prison.
And, yeah, she liked showing all the bureau’s Jims and Johns that she could make cases better than they could, find the pressure points in interviews, the hidden bank accounts, the extra video camera that had the clear angle.
Anyway, if she and Bri were asking rhetorical questions, how about this one: What had he expected when they met? If she hadn’t gone to a big law firm, she’d be a young partner at this point, working nights and weekends. Or she wouldn’t have made partner, and she would have