Red Widow by Alma Katsu (good books to read for beginners txt) 📗

she’s gone through. Theresa always was thin but in a healthy way, fashionably so. Now she is positively gaunt. Frightening, what grief can do to you.

Theresa watches steam rise from her cup. “I’m so sorry about yesterday. I’m not normally like that. I try to be friendlier. It’s been hard since Richard’s disappearance. Especially at work.” Theresa lets out an ironic laugh. “I blame the Director, I really do. They broadcast the service for Richard at the Memorial Wall. The Director did it for ratings. He was new at the time, a political appointee. Nobody liked him, so he did it to score points with the workforce.” Her smile is grim. “That was two years ago and still everyone knows my face. You’d think there are wanted posters of me in the restrooms.”

She isn’t exaggerating. Even though they are hidden away in the corner, Lyndsey notices the stares. What must it be like to have whispers follow you everywhere? That’s her. The Widow.

Theresa seems to withdraw into herself, not wanting to be noticed. “This isn’t how I thought it would be. There are days when I want to quit. After the incident, they told me to take as much time as I needed. But after a while it felt like I was hiding. I was only forty. I had to figure out how to live in the world again.”

Lyndsey won’t be forty for some time, but her reckoning has come earlier. There are times when she wants to hide, too, to go back to the way things were. To pretend that things haven’t changed.

Theresa pushes a pair of narrow gold bangles over her bird-boned wrists. “I had a son to take care of. Brian was only five at the time. He was watching me to make sense of his world. That’s when I realized I didn’t have the luxury of feeling sorry for myself or being mad at Richard for putting duty before his obligation to his family. So, after two months, I asked Eric if I could come back. He said I could if that’s what I wanted. I found a woman to take care of Brian after school, and here I am. It hasn’t been easy. But the counselor said the return to normalcy would be good for Brian. And for me.”

“You’ve come a long way,” Lyndsey says, trying to sound cheerful.

“There are still days when it feels like yesterday.”

“I remember Richard. I had just started in the office. I couldn’t get on his team because everyone wanted to work for him.”

“He had a great reputation. They thought he’d be running this place one day.” Theresa turns the paper cup of coffee in her hands as she turns her thoughts. “Richard and I met here. It was still common, then, to meet our future spouses at the office. He was nine years older than me. I had a schoolgirl crush on the boss.” She buries her face in her hands in mock embarrassment.

Plenty of women in the office had crushes on Richard, Lyndsey remembers. At first glance, you wouldn’t think he was the kind of guy women fell for. He was on the slight side. He wasn’t what you call handsome; he had a craggy face, lines etched into it too early. He could be stern. But he was fair, and he always wanted to see the right thing done. He was one of those rare managers who were loved and respected by everyone who worked for them.

Theresa tosses her head. “I found our attraction rather thrilling, but as things started getting serious between us, Richard insisted I transfer to Eric’s branch. ‘If we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it by the rules,’ he said.” Lyndsey is impressed; there are plenty of supervisors who openly dated subordinates, thinking no one would dare to challenge them.

She couldn’t think of Richard without thinking of Eric, too. Everyone knew they had come up in the system together, their careers mirror images. Yet they had been opposites in many ways. Eric was good looking in the conventional sense, like a prep school boy, with a thick head of hair and square jaw. He was the appeaser, the one who knew how to cajole and negotiate. Who knew how to tell a joke to ease the tension and could make everyone who worked for him feel good.

In some ways, Eric seems the more natural choice for a woman like Theresa. She had been the “it” girl in the office at the time. Still, she chose Richard. Perhaps she had been drawn to his intellect: he was easily the smartest man Lyndsey had met at the Agency at that point. If you were asked to predict who would be running things in a decade’s time, everyone would’ve said Richard. Eric would be the deputy, the one who smoothed feathers Richard had ruffled.

Theresa’s eyes glow. “He was just so different from the men my age. Do you know what we did on our first date? We hiked up Old Rag in Shenandoah National Park. Another man probably would’ve booked a table at L’Auberge Chez François, but there we were in the Virginia countryside on a fall day, getting to know each other during the hours it took to climb up and back. It was glorious, and typical Richard.”

The good times are seductive, Lyndsey thinks. You believe they’re going to last forever.

Theresa picks up her debris, packing crumpled napkins into the empty cup. “More than anything, I wish Brian could’ve known what his father had been like here, at the Agency. He had a brilliant mind for our line of work. He made amazing deductions, saw possibilities that no one else did. He engineered these really smart exploits that led to great coups, and ultimately provided for the security of the nation. But Brian will never know—unless he gets a security clearance of his own one day, but I am dead set against that.”

“Really?” Lyndsey is surprised. Most parents who work at CIA