Morning light streamed through the kitchen blinds, throwing golden lines across the colonial mansion's floor. Noah shuffled into the kitchen in a button-down shirt and blazer, one hand rubbing his eyes, the other running through his still-messy dark hair.
His phone was in his pocket, screen dark and silent. No messages. No calls. No campus security knocking at his door. The normalcy of the morning felt obscene.
What the fuck did I do?
The thought had been circling since he'd woken at 4 AM. Not from nightmares of Kabul or Moscow, or even Rustavi, those he'd learned to handle. This was the cold clarity of having crossed a line he'd spent four years carefully avoiding.
Four years of compartmentalization, of careful control, abandoned because of Troy's email. That had been four months ago. Four months since he'd decided to stop avoiding what he was.
The kitchen smelled of expensive Colombian coffee Rose insisted on buying, mixed with whatever she'd been cooking. The breakfast nook table was set with actual plates instead of the paper towels he used to use, complete with cloth napkins and a small vase holding a single sunflower from their backyard garden. Rose sat cross-legged in one of the wooden chairs, long curly black hair falling in waves over her shoulders, thumbs moving rapidly across her phone screen.
"Look who's alive," she said without looking up, but he could hear the grin in her voice. She was wearing the silk pajamas she'd asked for last Christmas, the ones that always made him look away too quickly.
Her tone changed once she looked up. "You look like shit. Didn't sleep?"
"Not much." Noah forced himself to say. His face arranged itself into a false smile.
Rose studied him with the particular attention of someone who'd learned to read his moods. "The war dreams or something else?"
"Does it matter?" He deflected, running both hands through his hair.
Rose sighed and shook her head with concern clear on her face, "I guess not. Anyways, coffee's fresh, and I made those blueberry pancakes you pretend not to like."
Noah couldn't help but smile as he dropped into his usual chair. The one facing the window that looked out over their expansive backyard, where Rose had planted herbs in mismatched pots along the fence.
Here was Rose, taking care of him the way she always had, while miles away, he could only imagine Mai, staring at her ceiling, confused about what her professor had guided her through. The contrast felt like moral whiplash.
She's an adult. She consented. You didn't force anything.
The rationalizations came automatically, smooth as the manipulations Alexa used on him when she'd trained him in asset cultivation. How to make someone believe they wanted what you were conditioning them to want. He'd used those techniques in Tehran, in Moscow, in a dozen cities where American interests required someone to be compromised, converted, or controlled.
And last night he'd used them on a nineteen-year-old girl who just wanted help with her writing.
"Noah?" Rose watched him, concern creasing her forehead. "Seriously, are you okay? You're doing that thing where you disappear inside your head."
"I'm fine." He forced a smile, the same one he'd used to convince his commander he was stable enough for another assignment. "Just thinking about class today."
"Well, eat something first." Rose slid a plate of pancakes across the counter.
"You know you don't have to do all this, right? I can handle pouring cereal into a bowl."
"Oh, I've seen your idea of breakfast," Rose laughed, setting her phone face down on the table. "Three-day-old pizza and whatever shitty coffee they have for sale on campus. That's not food, that's a cry for help." She reached across the table to pour syrup onto his stack of pancakes. "Besides, I don't mind taking care of you. You might be a grown ass man, but you still act like a kid when it comes to taking care of yourself. I hate the thought of turning into my mom, but I think I understand why she was always fussing over you back at home. Someone has to make sure you don't waste away while you're working, since you won't do it yourself."
The pancakes were perfect. Fluffy and sweet with just the right amount of vanilla, the same way her mom used to make them. Back before his father died and everything got complicated.
Noah took a bite and made that little sound of appreciation that made Rose beam with pride. But in truth, he barely tasted them. His mind was too busy running through scenarios.
Best case: Mai tells no one, processes it as mentorship gone too far, and avoids him for the rest of the semester.
Worst-case scenario: She reports it, there's an investigation, the texts are recovered, and his career implodes.
Most likely: She's confused and doesn't know what to call what happened. Stays silent. For now.
The "for now" was the variable he couldn't control. Alexa had taught him that control was everything: control the environment, control the information, control the target's perception of reality. But you couldn't control what happened after the operation ended, when the target started thinking instead of feeling.
The only thing keeping him from panicking about the chaos he had brought upon himself was his years of experience navigating dangerous and morally questionable situations.
Instead of fear, he flashed Rose a smile, making a show of enjoying her pancakes. "So what's the plan for today?" he asked, cutting another piece while steam rose from the golden stack. "Please tell me you're not skipping again. Your professors already think I'm a bad influence on you."
Rose's face scrunched up in that way it did when she was caught. "But, that's not even your school. How did you… never mind, I don't want to know. Your 'teacher gossip network' is scary." She picked at her own pancakes, avoiding his eyes. "It's just one class, hermano. And it's not like I'm failing or anything. My GPA is still higher than yours was at my age."
"That's not the point, and you know it." Noah set down his fork. His voice took on that older-brother tone that always made Rose roll her eyes.
"Dios mío, you sound like Dad," Rose muttered, but there was no real heat behind it.
"Mine, or yours?" Noah asked curiously.
"The only one that matters," she said flippantly. The old resentment was still clear in her voice.
Their father. Well, his father, her stepfather, had always been the practical one, the one who was concerned about grades and career prospects, and five-year plans. He always worried about whether Rose was "living up to her potential." Noah knew she still felt like she was disappointing him, even though he had been dead for two years.
"Fine, fine, I'll go to class. But only if you promise we can do something fun tonight. And I mean actually fun, not you grading papers while I watch Netflix alone in the living room. Maybe we could watch a movie or play games?"
Noah nodded, a genuine smile spreading across his face. "Yes, deal."
"Ok, that's a promise," Rose laughed, standing up and stretching her arms above her head. The movement made her pajama top ride up slightly, revealing a small tattoo on her hip. A crescent moon she'd gotten on her twenty-first birthday without telling him. "I should probably get ready for class. Professor Martinez gives pop quizzes when Mercury is in retrograde or whatever cosmic excuse she's using this week."
"Mercury isn't in retrograde until next month," Noah called after her as she headed toward the stairs.
"You're such a nerd, Noah. It's a good thing you're cute." Rose's voice floated back from the hallway, filled with affection and exasperation in equal measure.
Cute. Right.
Noah finished his coffee and started clearing the table, listening to the familiar sounds of Rose getting ready upstairs.
Twenty minutes later, Rose bounded down the stairs in her usual outfit: dark jeans that fit her perfectly, a band t-shirt from a group he didn't recognize, and the leather jacket he'd bought for her last Christmas. Her hair was pulled back in a messy bun with a few strands framing her face, and she'd applied just enough makeup to look effortlessly put together.
"Ready to face the world?" Noah asked, grabbing his own jacket and the worn leather messenger bag that held his lecture notes.
"As ready as anyone can be for a discussion of postmodern psychoanalysis techniques at nine in the morning," Rose replied, slinging her backpack over her shoulder. "But hey, at least I'll have something to look forward to tonight. Fair warning, though, I'm picking the music in the car."
"As long as it's not that experimental K-pop / jazz fusion you discovered last week," Noah said, holding the door open for her. "I'm pretty sure that's not actually music. I think it's just sounds."
"That's what makes it art, Noah," Rose said with a grin, bumping his shoulder as they walked toward his car. "You wouldn't understand. You're too mainstream."
The College of New Jersey campus was only a fifteen-minute drive from their home. As they drove, Rose connected her phone to the car's Bluetooth and filled the space between them with the kind of indie rock that had become the soundtrack to their shared life. Noah found himself stealing glances at her as she sang along.
"See you tonight?" Rose asked as he pulled up to the Humanities building, her hand lingering on the door handle.
"Wouldn't miss it," Noah replied, and watched her disappear into the stream of students heading to their morning classes.
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Back at Princeton, the faculty parking lot was its own little ecosystem of academic hierarchy. The department heads and tenured professors claimed the prime spots closest to the building, their luxury sedans and SUVs gleaming under the morning sun, while the adjuncts and graduate students made do with whatever space they could find in the outer rings, their aging vehicles held together by duct tape and determination. Noah pulled his BMW between Dr. Richardson's pristine Civic and what had to be a graduate student's Subaru covered in bumper stickers for lost causes.
October had arrived with that particular autumn crispness that made everything smell like wood smoke and possibility. The massive oak trees dotting the quad were just beginning their transformation, their leaves shifting from green to gold to deep crimson, creating a canopy that filtered the morning light into dancing patterns on the brick walkways below.
Students moved across campus in their usual clusters: pre-med students clutching their oversized textbooks like shields, art majors in paint-stained jeans and vintage band t-shirts, business students in their carefully coordinated outfits that screamed "future middle management."
The sounds of campus life created a familiar symphony: the distant thwack of frisbees from the recreational fields, the hum of riding mowers making their final pass before winter, and the constant buzz of conversation punctuated by the occasional shout of recognition as friends spotted each other across the quad.
Noah grabbed his worn leather messenger bag from the passenger seat, thumb running over familiar scratches and scuffs that mapped his life's journey. A gift from his father during his undergraduate days, it had been his constant companion through three deployments, four apartments, over ten countries, and the countless coffee shops where he'd tried to write his first stories. The bag held more than books and papers. It carried the weight of all the places he'd carried it while pretending to be someone else. He'd always been good at pretending.
And ever since he'd come back to his hometown, he'd carried it while searching for a version of himself that might still be worth salvaging.
The Liberal Arts building loomed ahead, one of those '60s concrete monstrosities that looked like it had been designed by someone who'd heard the word "modern" but never actually seen anything beautiful.
He was walking through a crime scene where the body hadn't been discovered yet. As he approached the entrance, Noah half expected to find campus security waiting to confiscate his faculty credentials and escort him off campus.
His phone buzzed as he approached the building. For a moment, his stomach dropped. He imagined the message on his screen: campus security, Title IX office, Dean of Students. But it was just a reminder about office hours this afternoon.
This afternoon, he also had a class where Mai would be in attendance. Where he'd have to face her, read her body language, and assess whether she was about to become a problem.
She's not a problem. She's a person. A student you violated.
But as he pushed through the glass doors, there were no guards. Only students clustered around bulletin boards, checking grades and arguing about assignments. None of them looked at him twice. He was just another professor. Not a predator.
You're not going to exploit her. It was one mistake. You'll avoid her, let the special assignment fade, move on.
But even as he thought it, Noah knew it was a lie. The moment he'd heard Mai's voice, breathy and desperate on the phone, something had clicked into place.
More than forbidden thrill, his actions last night had awakened something he'd thought Alexa took with her when she died. Not the creative passion that had once fueled his writing. That remained as elusive as ever. But a different kind of intensity, raw and electric, that had temporarily burned through the fog of rage and grief that had been his only constant companion for four years.
Inside, the hallways smelled like industrial cleaner and the accumulated anxiety of thousands of students who'd walked these corridors believing their English degrees would lead to meaningful careers. The familiar scent hit him like a wave, and suddenly he could see himself as they must. Another disillusioned professor shepherding the next generation toward the same quiet disappointments.
Jesus, when did I become so twisted and cynical?
The thought stopped him mid-step. When had he started seeing hope as naivety and ambition as delusion? When had he begun measuring everyone else's dreams against the wreckage of his own?
That was Alexa's ghost talking; she had conditioned him to view every human interaction as a potential manipulation, every emotion as a weakness to exploit. He'd been trying to reject that training for years, but moments like these reminded him how deeply it had taken root.
Bulletin boards lined the walls, layered with announcements for study abroad programs, calls for submissions to literary magazines, and flyers for campus events that promised to be "life-changing" but usually involved bad pizza and forced networking. Noah's office was on the third floor, along with the other adjunct professors. A cramped space he'd managed to make livable with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a decent reading chair bought with his own money.
He shuffled through his notes for Creative Writing 301, a twice-weekly seminar that somehow managed to attract the most interesting mix of students: future novelists, aspiring screenwriters, and the occasional pre-med student fulfilling a humanities requirement, who discovered they actually had something to say about the human condition.
His body prepared for his first class of the day mechanically. His mind was busy running through scenarios. Delete the texts? No, that would create digital evidence of deletion. Block her number? Too obvious, and it might provoke her to talk. Act normal? Probably, but "normal" after what he'd done felt like an impossibility.
You could apologize. Tell her you crossed a line.
The thought lasted maybe three seconds before the darker part of him crushed it. Apologizing meant admitting wrongdoing. Admitting wrongdoing meant surrendering control. And control was the only thing between him and complete dissolution.
Besides, would an apology even help Mai? Or would it just make her feel more violated, more manipulated?
She might not even think it was wrong. She's confused, not traumatized. She texted you first. She admitted she thinks about you.
The rationalizations felt practiced because they were. How many times had he done this in the field? How many assets had he cultivated and then abandoned, telling himself they'd known what they were getting into?
Mai was different because she hadn't known. She'd thought she was getting mentorship for her writing. She hadn't realized she was being groomed until she was already on the phone, already following his guidance, already compromised.
That's not fair. You didn't plan it. It just... happened.
But that was another lie. On some level, from the moment he'd assigned her those "special instructions", he'd known where it could lead. Where he wanted it to lead, even if he wouldn't consciously admit it.
Alexa used to say that was his gift, the ability to want something while simultaneously denying he wanted it, to manipulate while believing he was helping. "You're a natural," she'd told him once, her fingers tracing patterns on his chest. "You don't even realize you're doing it half the time. That's what makes you so effective."
At the time, he'd thought she was complimenting his talent as an operative. But now he understood she'd been referring to something much darker.