kids had their own lives now. No one cared if he came home at six or eight. Plus he could always find an excuse, say he was having a beer after work. Not like Rebecca would check up on him. Maybe she didn’t care, or maybe she was just busy. Anyway, if he was being honest with himself, he liked putting one over on her. The great FBI agent didn’t even know what her husband was doing.
Though when the strippers offered to take him upstairs, the anything-goes rooms, he still said no. He couldn’t explain why, but he supposed maybe his vows mattered to him more than he realized.
* * *
The thrill of being part of Tailored Access slowly faded. The NSA was pushing machine learning and artificial intelligence, letting the software do the work, at speeds humans couldn’t comprehend. Writing those programs required an understanding of software theory Brian didn’t have.
Funny part, no one seemed to notice. He wasn’t a star, but he made himself useful on secondary projects, and every so often he had clever suggestions. Still, deep down, he felt like a fraud.
And he started to question the job itself. Sure, the stakes seemed high. Networks ran everything. The Internet was a new battlefield all its own, with skirmishes that moved across countries and nodes at the speed of light.
Still, it was all just code. A lot of NSA guys liked to think of themselves as soldiers. They tossed around the language of war a lot. But Brian figured none of them, including him, would have the stones for real war. The difference between him and the rest of them was that he knew it. If they made a mistake, someone else—on some front line somewhere—would pay the price long before they did.
He kept his opinions about the fake NSA machismo to himself. Not much percentage in talking about it.
* * *
The days went by. Rebecca laid off a little. Mainly they focused on the kids. Brian realized a strange truth: until it exploded, a lousy marriage could make for good parenting. Maybe he and Becks were competing to prove their worth to their children. Maybe, deep down, they hoped to save the marriage through the kids.
As he approached forty, Brian’s life was objectively fine. He had a good job, healthy kids. Yet more and more he hated everything and everyone, except for Kira and Tony. No point in thinking about a divorce. Tony wasn’t even a teenager, and Brian didn’t plan to go anywhere at least until he’d graduated high school.
When he needed to psych himself up, he thought about the speech he’d give Rebecca after he filed the divorce papers. He used to play the same game with his father, imagining what he’d say at his funeral.
He wondered sometimes if Rebecca felt the same as he did. But from a practical point of view the marriage had worked for her. Rebecca was nothing if not practical, he thought. His practico-path wife.
* * *
Then it happened.
One Monday night at Planet Fitness, he noticed a woman reading a programming manual as she pedaled slowly on a recumbent. A female coder. He’d never seen her before. He would have remembered. Even at the NSA they were rare. She was skinny, small, with blond pixie hair and a tiny tattoo on her arm. Twenty-five or so. No wedding ring.
She looked up, caught him staring, smiled. A tiny smile, elven. He was about to take the bike next to hers when his courage deserted him. He chose a treadmill behind her instead and spent his workout watching her from behind. Lame and creepy. Back in the day he would have gone straight to her. Worst of all, he had something to talk about with her. She was reading more than working out, hardly moving the pedals as she paged through the manual. But as he decided to say hello, she finished, tossed her book in her bag, walked straight out. No shower.
He spent the next day waiting for his chance to go to the gym.
She wasn’t there. He was furious with himself. Where had his game gone?
Then, Friday, he saw her. Don’t blow it. He walked over, took the bike next to hers.
“I usually stick to something easy like Python when I’m exercising.”
“You’re a coder?” She sounded vaguely European to Brian, German maybe.
“Maybe.”
“So, Mr. Maybe, can you walk me through this question of error correction?” She pushed the manual at him.
“I’ll need something very important first.”
“Yes?”
“Your name.”
Eve. And they were