Scorpion by Christian Cantrell (novel24 .txt) 📕

when they begin downsizing, Quinn knows, but that time is not supposed to be your late thirties. And the objects you shed are supposed to be superfluous purchases and accumulated gifts, not photos of everyone who once gave your life purpose.

As she unpacks various laser-etched acrylic acknowledgments that the CIA prefers to bestow in lieu of raises, bonuses, or even Amazon gift cards, it occurs to Quinn that she is glad to be away from the teletherapy room. When she was downstairs, she could see it every time she refocused her vision through her plasma glass monitor—right there between Hammerstein’s open mouth, blank stare, and douchey spiky hair and Teresa Moore’s ass since she converted from an exercise ball to an obnoxiously loud treadmill desk. It is just opposite the Mothers’ Room, where, long ago, Quinn frequently absconded to relieve the pressure in her breasts.

Back then, Quinn and her husband, James Claiborne, were textbook nine-to-five spies. They commuted together from the subdued and affluent suburbs of Potomac Falls, Virginia, where every structure that wasn’t a mall was a data center; where weekend barbecues were staged by couples who had been reduced to birthday sex and who, when you asked them what they did for a living, replied simply that they “worked for the government”—a euphemism for “you don’t have sufficient clearance to know how I spend my days, but if I wanted, I could pull up chats of your wife flirting with her ex-boyfriends on Facebook and then your marriage would be every bit as loveless as mine. Nice to meet you, too.” Most conversations were redirected toward the constant antics of overprivileged, hyperactive, social-media-obsessed children, impassioned prognostication around whatever sports were in season, the work being done by dubious, sporadic, and incompetent contractors on one’s egregiously overpriced single-family colonial (made all the more infuriating by the dogmatic regime of the HOA), whatever shows everyone was watching that you weren’t because how do people have so much time to watch so much TV?, and, surreptitiously, whoever’s weight had noticeably fluctuated (preferably increased) since they last gathered.

Quinn and James dropped their daughter, Molly, off at daycare in the mornings on their way into Langley, ate dinner together almost every night, and on weekends, when the yard work was done and the minivan was washed, went to the playground, or for a bike ride, or to the mall. Maybe the occasional Pixar movie, or birthday party inside a giant padded jungle gym in a nearby industrial park. Once a year, they went to Disney World in Florida or rented a house at Lake Anna, and at least three times a year, they played with the idea of trying for a second child. Quinn was not what you would call classically attractive, and she was always at least ten pounds away from a weight she imagined her father approving of, but she had long, natural blond hair that other women squandered vast resources attempting to emulate, and she had a shape and perkiness to her that drew plenty of looks when she was out walking or bending down to scoop up a pile of leaves. For years, Quinn and her husband defied the conventional wisdom that spies could not stay married by carving out a successful and predictable domestic existence that was the envy of many of their colleagues and friends.

But when Molly drowned in a neighbor’s pool, and when Quinn and her husband found they could not stop blaming both themselves and each other, it was clear that they would finally become the statistic they thought they would never be. There was a sudden and savage hatred between them that neither had the energy to explore or even try to understand, and they knew that the only way to survive and to move forward was to do so alone. They sold the house, and Quinn found an apartment in Arlington. Her work became the centerpiece of her life, sustained by the perpetual cycle of grocery shopping, laundry, boxes of wine, and antidepressants. She used her CIA discount to buy a subcompact 9mm Glock that she hoped would make her feel safe living alone, and in the evenings, she sometimes imagined what the end of it would taste like, and wondered if the slide would break her teeth as it cycled in a new round and ejected a smoking cartridge out onto the unvacuumed carpet of her empty apartment.

They did try at first, Quinn and James. They couldn’t afford out-of-network marriage counseling, so they signed up for weekly teletherapy sessions. Several different contractors provided the service, but they all worked the same way: cardboard coasters with dynamic-projection-mapping markers were placed on furniture inside spaces equipped with position-tracking cameras. Metaspecs were donned, various parties connected, and for the next fifty-minute hour, rooms were transformed into individual or group therapy sessions.

You tended to get a different facilitator each time. It was like calling Comcast customer support: random representatives, exact same scripts. In their last session, the one that came up was from Kentucky. For some reason, Quinn always wanted to know where the facilitator was located. Without fail, the rote answer was, “While I appreciate your interest, we are here to talk about you,” which was usually enough for her to be able to place the accent. Quinn’s husband was joining from Southern California, where he was on long-term assignment, and she still remembers the artifacts around his arm and fingers as he kept checking his watch.

Quinn can’t remember what they were discussing, but she very clearly remembers breaking down, sobbing, and putting her hands over her metaspecs until she eventually started wondering if maybe she’d been disconnected. But when she opened her eyes and looked up, she saw that the man in front of her was observing her with poorly concealed discomfort, probably wishing he could go back to the good old days of working with opioid addicts and meth heads, and the man beside her—the man she’d married thirteen years ago and shared