Saturday Afternoon

No return address. No delivery slip. Just a plain brown box, neat and deliberate, as if it had been placed there with care rather than dropped off. His chest tightened. He scanned the corridor, then the stairwell, then the faint reflection of himself in the brushed steel elevator doors. Nothing. No footsteps retreating. No cameras are angled oddly. Still, the unease settled deep.
He crouched, studying the package without touching it. It was light, too light for anything mechanical, too small for anything overtly dangerous. But overseas had taught him that expectation was the most dangerous assumption of all. After a long moment, he nudged it with his shoe. Nothing. No ticking, no shift in weight.
He finally brought it inside, locking the door behind him with a solid, reassuring click. On his kitchen counter, under the stark white light, the box looked almost harmless. He opened it carefully. Inside was a book.
Worn at the edges, its spine creased from use. He recognized it immediately, his breath catching before he could stop it. A foreign-language paperback one he hadn’t seen in nearly a decade. He’d bought it from a street vendor in Prague, back when he’d been using a name that no longer officially existed. He’d underlined passages in pencil, made notes in the margins during long waits in safe houses. He had left it behind deliberately, abandoning it with everything else when the assignment ended abruptly.
Yet here it was. Tucked inside the front cover was a folded piece of paper. No message, just a date and a time written in his own handwriting. Tomorrow. 7:00 p.m.
Ethan sank into the chair at his kitchen table; the anxiety he’d been trying to outrun all day flooded back with sharp clarity. This wasn’t a threat. It was worse. It was personal. Someone knew who he had been, where he’d been, and what he’d chosen to leave behind.
His phone buzzed on the counter. No number, just an alert from a secure channel he hadn’t accessed since returning stateside.
You’re not done adjusting yet.
He stared at the screen, then at the book, feeling the walls of his carefully constructed normal life press inward. Washington, D.C., suddenly felt no safer than any foreign alleyway. The past hadn’t followed him home by accident. It arrived right on time.

Ethan didn’t reply to the message. He never did, at least not right away. Silence had kept him alive longer than skill ever had. Instead, he slid the book back into the box, closed it, and placed it in the freezer behind a bag of ice and frozen vegetables. Old habits. If someone had gone to the trouble of leaving it at his door, they’d gone to the trouble of planning for impatience.
Only then did he sit at the small desk by the window and open a laptop that wasn’t registered to anyone, not in any system that mattered. The connection routed through half a dozen places he’d once memorized like prayers. He hadn’t used them in years, but his hands remembered.
There was one person he trusted to recognize the book for what it was.
Marek.
They’d worked together in Eastern Europe, back when the lines between ally and asset had been blurred by necessity. Marek had been many things: a fixer, translator, occasional liar, but above all, he’d been careful. Careful people survived. Careful people remembered.
Ethan typed a single sentence into an encrypted channel that looked like an abandoned message board for antique radios.
Do you still drink the dark ones?
The phrase meant nothing to anyone else. To Marek, it was a door.
Minutes passed. Ethan watched the street below, counting red brake lights, measuring the rhythm of his own breathing. Just as he began to consider alternate contacts less reliable, more dangerous, the screen flickered.
Only when the night seemed to linger longer than usual came the reply.
You’ve been quiet, my friend.
Ethan exhaled slowly.
“They found something,” he typed. “Something that shouldn’t exist anymore.”
There was a pause longer this time. Marek had never rushed answers. Finally, a new message appeared.
Is it paper, or is it memory?
“Paper,” Ethan wrote. “With my handwriting.”
Another pause. Ethan could picture Marek now, somewhere far away, leaning back in a chair, eyes narrowed, not afraid, but calculating. When the response came, it carried weight.
Then someone wants to remind you that you never truly left.
Ethan’s jaw tightened. “Any idea who?”
The cursor blinked. When Marek finally responded, the words were fewer, sharper.
The book was never important for what was written inside it, Marek typed. It was important for where you carried it. You were seen with it by only three people.
Ethan’s pulse quickened. He remembered now the late nights, smoke-filled rooms, a coded exchange hidden inside literary debate. He had assumed that chapter of his life had been sealed.
“Two of them are dead,” Ethan typed.
Yes, Marek replied. This leaves one who has learned patience.
Ethan leaned back, staring at the ceiling. Washington’s faint sirens drifted through the window—distant, orderly, almost comforting. Not enough.
“Why now?” he asked.
Marek’s response came faster this time.
Because you are visible again. Because you stopped moving. And because whoever placed that package wanted to see if you would reach out.
Ethan’s gaze drifted toward the freezer, toward the book waiting in the dark.
“Did you send it?” he asked, though he already knew the answer.
If I wanted to speak to you, Marek wrote, you would already be on a plane.
Ethan almost smiled at that.
“Tomorrow. Seven p.m.,” Ethan typed. “Ring any bells?”
The typing indicator appeared, disappeared, then returned.
It’s not a meeting, Marek finally replied. It’s a test.
“A test for what?”
Several seconds passed.
To see if the man who survived overseas still exists, Marek wrote. Or if Washington has made him forget how.
The connection went dark.
Ethan closed the laptop and sat in the quiet of his apartment, the anxiety no longer shapeless but sharp, familiar. Whatever life he’d been trying to build in D.C., it had just been interrupted by someone who knew him better than anyone here ever could.
Tomorrow at seven, he would find out whether coming home had been a beginning or a mistake.
Seven o’clock came too cleanly.
Ethan arrived early, of course. The location had been easy enough to decipher once he stopped thinking like an analyst and started thinking like the man he used to be. Not a bar. Not a café. Too obvious. Instead, it was a small, overlooked courtyard tucked behind a row of brownstones in Georgetown, private enough to feel accidental, public enough to avoid suspicion. The kind of place people passed without seeing.
He stood near the low stone wall, hands in his coat pockets, eyes tracking reflections in darkened windows.
“You were always early,” a voice said behind him.
Ethan didn’t turn right away. He didn’t need to.
“I learned that from you,” he replied.
When he did turn, the breath caught anyway.
Anna.
Time had touched her gently. Her hair was shorter now, threaded with silver at the temples, her posture straighter, less cautious, more deliberate. She wore a dark coat, practical and elegant, the kind that blended in anywhere. But her eyes were the exact same: observant, amused, carrying too much history for a single glance.
“I wasn’t sure you’d come,” she said.
“That was the point,” Ethan answered. “You always liked tests.”
A faint smile crossed her face, then vanished.
They stood there for a moment, the weight of years pressing into the small space between them. Traffic murmured nearby. Somewhere, a door closed. Life went on, indifferent.
The sight of her pulled him backward, without warning.
Prague, nine years earlier.
Rain streaked the windows of the apartment they weren’t supposed to use anymore. Ethan sat on the floor, maps spread out, radio humming low. Anna stood at the counter, translating intercepted documents with the precision of someone who understood that words could kill.
She wasn’t supposed to matter. She was a source of intelligence, embedded, careful. He was supposed to collect information, protect her identity, and leave.
Instead, they shared coffee at dawn. Arguments about books. Long silences that felt like safety.
The night everything ended, he’d been halfway through telling her they were moving the operation. New city. New cover. New risks. He hadn’t been allowed to bring assets with emotional attachments.
“I’ll be gone by morning,” he said quietly.
Anna didn’t plead. She never did.
“You won’t come back,” she replied.

He hadn’t answered. He’d packed, burned what needed burning, and left the book behind, left her behind—because staying would have cost both of them everything.
“Do you ever think about that night?” Anna asked now, her voice cutting cleanly through the memory.
“Every time I shouldn’t,” Ethan said.
She nodded. “Then we’re even.”
They walked slowly along the courtyard path, side by side but not touching.
“You shouldn’t have sent the book,” Ethan said. “That was reckless.”
“So was disappearing without a word,” she replied. Not angry. Just factual.
He stopped walking. “Why now, Anna?”
She looked at him then, really looked, as if measuring what time had done to him.
“Because you’re back in D.C.,” she said. “And because the work you thought was finished followed you home.”
Ethan felt the familiar tightening in his chest. “Followed how?”
“I work here now,” she said. “Not officially. Not the way you do. But close enough to see patterns.” She hesitated. “Someone is reopening old channels. Names that were buried are surfacing. Including yours.”
“That’s not possible.”
She met his gaze. “It is if someone wants to remind the system what it owes.”
Ethan thought of the book in his freezer. Of Marek’s warning.
“Why involve you?” he asked.
Anna’s voice softened. “Because they know I was the one thing you didn’t erase.”
Silence settled between them, heavier than before.
“I didn’t reach out because I missed you,” she continued. “I reached out because whoever is doing this thinks you’ll protect me again.”
“And will I?” Ethan asked.
Her lips curved slightly. “You already did. You came.”
He looked around the quiet courtyard, the polished calm of D.C. pressing in from all sides. This wasn’t the field he remembered—but the stakes felt just as real.
“What happens next?” he asked.
Anna took a small envelope from her coat and pressed it into his hand.
“You decide,” she said. “But this time, if you leave, it won’t just be geography.”
She stepped back, blending into the evening foot traffic, leaving Ethan alone with the past he’d tried to outrun—and the unmistakable realization that coming home hadn’t ended his old life.
It had reactivated it.
Ethan stood where Anna had left him, the envelope still warm in his palm, as if it carried a pulse of its own. For a moment, he couldn’t move. The courtyard felt narrower now, the air thicker, sound sharpening into something brittle and overwhelming.
His heartbeat climbed slowly at first, then faster, crowding his chest, thudding against his ribs with a force that made him aware of every breath. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. Techniques he’d taught others, once. They didn’t come as easily anymore.
Get a grip.
He forced himself to look up.
The brick walls that moments ago had felt incidental now seemed deliberate. Windows six visible. Two dark. One with a television flickering blue. Three with blinds partially open. He tried to catalog them the way he used to, but the rhythm was off, the sequence slipping through his fingers like water.
Footsteps passed behind him. He tensed, pivoting just enough to see a man walking a dog, earbuds in, oblivious. No eye contact. No pause. Probably nothing.
Probably.
Ethan swallowed and shifted his weight, suddenly conscious of how long he’d been standing still. Stillness used to mean control. Now it felt like exposure.
He scanned again, slower this time, forcing patience. A sedan idled at the curb beyond the courtyard entrance. Engine running. Driver visible? The windshield glare made it hard to tell. His pulse spiked again, and with it came irritation at the uncertainty, at himself. Once, he would’ve known. Once, his instincts would have spoken clearly instead of stuttering.
You’ve been out too long.
A memory flickered unbidden: a rooftop in Beirut, years ago, where he’d sensed danger before he could articulate it, an off-beat step, a shadow where there shouldn’t have been one. He’d trusted that feeling without question. It had saved his life.
Now, all he felt was noise.
He exhaled shakily and forced his hands to unclench. The envelope crinkled softly, the sound unnaturally loud. He slid it into his inner coat pocket, then adjusted his posture, adopting the loose, unremarkable stance of someone waiting for no one. His reflection in a nearby window looked wrong, too rigid, too alert for a city that rewarded indifference.
Another glance around.
Trash cans. A security camera mounted high on a corner, its red light steady. Was it live? Or just a deterrent? He couldn’t tell, and the not-knowing scraped at him.
His heart hammered harder now, a near-panic crescendo that threatened to pull him under. He pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth, grounding himself in the small, physical sensation. One step forward. Then another. Movement helped. It always had.
As he walked toward the street, his senses began to reassemble themselves—not sharp, not yet, but functional. He caught fragments: the uneven rhythm of traffic, the smell of rain on stone, the subtle shift in air as someone passed too close. No one followed. Or if they did, they were good.
That thought didn’t calm him.
By the time he reached the sidewalk, the panic had ebbed just enough to leave behind something colder and more familiar: resolve edged with fear. Whatever Anna had handed him wasn’t just information; it was a signal. A reminder that the part of him built for this world hadn’t disappeared.
It had just gone dormant.
Ethan merged into the flow of pedestrians, heart still racing, mind struggling to catch up, knowing one thing with absolute clarity as the city swallowed him whole—
Someone was watching.
And he wasn’t ready.
Yet.