Saturday Afternoon

He’d crossed borders so often that the lines between countries had blurred into something abstract, stamps in a passport, accents that changed with a street corner, currencies folded into the same worn wallet. For fifteen years, Ethan Cole had lived out of suitcases and safe houses, his identity shifting as easily as his time zones. He knew how to disappear in Istanbul, how to listen in Jakarta, how to breathe through panic in the middle of a crowded market in Casablanca.
What he didn’t know anymore was how to be home.
Washington, D.C., greeted him with order. The streets were clean, the signs legible, the rules clear and loudly enforced. There were no shadow deals whispered in cafés, no coded knocks at the door. People stood patiently at crosswalks, waiting for the lights to change. The predictability unnerved him. Overseas, chaos had been a language he spoke fluently. Here, everything felt too quiet, too exposed.
His new assignment placed him behind glass and steel, an office building near the Potomac, badge clipped neatly to his belt. Officially, he was a senior analyst, reassigned to coordinate foreign intelligence streams. Unofficially, he was still expected to notice what others missed, to read between the lines. But the work felt distant, sanitized. He missed the immediacy of the field, the tension that sharpened his senses and made his thoughts clean and precise.
At night, anxiety crept into him uninvited. His apartment was too spacious, too still. He slept lightly, waking at the smallest sound: a car door outside, the hum of an elevator, laughter drifting up from the street. Overseas, noise had meant life, warning, information. Here, it felt like vulnerability. He checked the locks more than once, stood by the window longer than necessary, scanning reflections instead of rooftops.
The worst moments came in ordinary places. Grocery stores overwhelmed him with their endless aisles and casual abundance. Cafés made him uneasy; people spoke freely, openly, unaware of who might be listening. He caught himself memorizing exits, sitting with his back to the wall, his body braced for threats that never arrived. He wondered if anyone noticed the tension he carried, the way his eyes never fully rested.
One afternoon, after a long meeting filled with acronyms and projections, Ethan walked the National Mall alone. The monuments rose around him, solid and unyielding, symbols of permanence. He had spent years protecting ideals from afar, in places where they were fragile and contested. Standing there, he felt oddly disconnected from them, like a guardian who had forgotten how to belong to the kingdom he’d defended.
He sat on a bench and watched families pass by, children chasing each other, tourists posing for photos, and a street musician playing a soft and hopeful melody. For the first time since returning, he allowed himself to breathe without scanning, without calculating. The anxiety didn’t vanish, but it loosened its grip, just enough for him to feel the weight of exhaustion beneath it.
Ethan realized then that adjusting back wasn’t about relearning routines or mastering a new role. It was about accepting that the man who left years ago no longer existed and that was all right. He had been shaped by distant cities and hidden dangers, but those experiences didn’t disqualify him from peace. They simply made the path to it longer.
As the sun dipped behind the Lincoln Memorial, casting long shadows across the grass, Ethan stood and headed home. D.C. was not a battlefield, not a cover story. It was unfamiliar terrain of a different kind. And for the first time since his reassignment, he allowed himself to believe that learning how to live here might be the hardest and most important mission he’d ever undertaken. That was until he received a small package left outside his front door…