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“My dad was never around. Not really. He was a quality control inspector for a company with a bunch of vegetable canneries. His territory ran from Virginia all the way up to Wisconsin. When he was home, he didn’t say much. About anything.”

Yardley had never met KC’s father. She knew he lived in the Florida Panhandle in a modest retirement duplex. He rented out one side for income. At the holidays, he sent KC a card with a fifty-dollar bill taped inside, but he never called, and KC didn’t call him.

She wondered if the things she and KC couldn’t tell each other had hurt them more than the lies.

“My mom died of an amniotic embolism when I was born,” KC said.

“I told you that, and it was true. But they weren’t married, even.

They’d met in a bar. Her mom fought with my dad for my custody for a couple of years, I guess.

I have a vague memory of her. But then my dad moved in with his mom, and having her around plus his salary meant my mom’s mom lost out.

Or maybe she just lost interest. I’m not sure.

She never reached out again, and I always felt like I couldn’t ask. ”

Yardley had listened to a lot of stories from colleagues in this field that started like KC’s. Stories that told about how a person became self-sufficient and observant. Often they were stories of neglect.

Once, when she and KC cleaned out the garage together, Yardley had found an envelope of miscellaneous snapshots.

There was a picture of KC in jean shorts and a Power Rangers T-shirt, just old enough that her permanent teeth had come in and looked enormous, her hair bright as a new penny, sitting on the concrete steps with a pair of sunglasses on.

Another showed KC’s grandmother in a recliner in the living room, the oxygen tank for her COPD parked on the green shag next to her.

There were no pictures of KC’s father. No friends or relatives.

Yardley had never seen those snapshots again. Probably if she hadn’t been the one to find them, she never would’ve seen them at all.

“My grandma was a nice woman, and I think she did okay for a long time. But when I was in sixth grade, I started finding the door to the house unlocked, or no food in the cupboards, or the stove left on. I’d get called down to the office because there had been a paper sent home that parents were supposed to fill out and return that never got done.

Bills were coming in the mail with my grandma’s name in red through the plastic window.

When I was in eighth grade, she hit a kid on a bike with her car.

Broke his leg. She lost her license. We were supposed to be using the city bus, but it didn’t go everywhere we needed it to. My dad was… more gone.”

“You became the grown-up.”

“I figured it out.” The way KC said this did not invite pity.

“I started driving because I was good enough at it that a kid driving attracted less attention than an older woman making too many mistakes. By the time I got a license, I’d gotten as interested in driving as I was in other kinds of machines.

Tech. Finances, even. I can drive anything.

I figured out how to get what I needed.”

Everything she needed, she had supplied for herself. That was what KC wanted Yardley to understand—that she was someone who’d drawn on her own resources to figure out a way that she could meet all of her needs and the needs of her grandmother.

Never mind that she never should have had to do that.

Yardley held her body still, hoping to get more from KC by suppressing her reactions to what was, objectively, a much smaller, sadder story about KC’s experiences of home and family than Yardley had ever been told.

“It was because of the counterterrorism investigation into our EPA project that Dr. Brown found me.” KC’s speech was precise now.

This, too, was a sensitive subject, but also, Yardley guessed, a difficult one.

“He did his job and secured me as an asset. He offered me a way to take care of everyone at a time when I didn’t know how I was going to keep doing it, which had the bonus of being an attractive alternative to federal prison.

Helped me find a nice assisted-living apartment for my grandma.

All through my last few years of college, he was the one who’d call to see how my exams went. If I needed anything. He was there.”

He was there. It wasn’t the same thing as He loved me . It wasn’t I adored him , or He made me feel safe , or His mentorship meant the world to me.

He was there.

Yardley didn’t love that KC’s primary person, for so long, had been an officer of the CIA, or that he’d been introduced into KC’s life when she was so young.

She also didn’t love that Dr. Brown hadn’t been in the Situation Room, deflecting the heat from KC, who was his direct report.

As soon as Yardley had stashed KC back at Langley, she’d chased down Atlas and asked them directly about Dr. Brown’s whereabouts.

The only thing they’d been able to tell her was that the counterterrorism director was in the field and could not be contacted at the moment.

Yardley had been able to hear that what Atlas meant was the agency was keeping tabs on Dr. Brown, but they weren’t about to share information with her.

That could mean almost anything.

She studied KC’s tight body language in her jump seat. She could tell that KC was trying to keep her expression extra neutral.

Yardley didn’t blame her. They were exes, brand-new exes, and Yardley was asking her personal questions after the fact. But she needed to know.

“Tell me,” she said, and the words came out more desperate than she’d meant for them to.

Tell me every single thing you never told me.

That’s what it sounded like she was asking.

Tell me everything I deserved to know, everything that could have built bridges between us where our secrets made chasms.

Her poor, stupid heart.

KC raised an eyebrow. “That’s what I’m doing.”

“I’d like to hear more about what your dynamic with Dr. Brown is like now.” Yardley forced herself to inject indifference into her voice. “I don’t know him well. When it comes to counterterrorism, he exclusively works with tech. I would have thought he’d be on Maple Leaf.”

Something minute and extremely terrible happened behind KC’s face—a suppressed emotion that, if Yardley hadn’t known KC, hadn’t loved her, she would have missed.

But a question like that shouldn’t have made CIA officer KC Nolan uncomfortable.

When KC shrugged, her arm lifted with her shoulder, indicating the gesture was false. “He’s on medical leave.”

Yardley’s throat squeezed. That was a lie.

Before she could take a breath, a hard wall of pressure pushed her into her seat. The impossibly young pilot’s voice came over the comm to let them know they were descending and would be wheels to ground in five.

KC pulled out her tablet and tapped it awake, as though their conversation had reached its natural conclusion.

Yardley spent the five minutes to landing deep inside her head, racing through everything she knew and didn’t know about KC Nolan, Tabasco, Dr. Brown, Kris Flynn, and Project Maple Leaf.

She pictured the way KC’s back had stiffened in the Situation Room when the president made it clear she’d come into possession of game-changing information.

She considered how much bravado KC had shown in that meeting, which seemed to disguise significant fear.

But fear of what?

When they landed, she unbuckled her harness and stood up at the same time KC did. A soldier opened the cabin door. On the tarmac, two men wearing black fatigues with no visible insignia maneuvered the stairs into position. A black BMW sedan sat twenty feet away, the engine idling.

Freezing-cold air rushed through the opening in the plane, blowing through KC’s fiery hair. Yardley thought again of the snapshot she’d seen of her on the steps of her grandmother’s house.

What KC had been through were the kinds of experiences that made a person hypervigilant, careful, observant. The kinds of experiences that made spies.

And traitors.

The cold air was blissfully numbing. Where they’d landed, on an isolated runway at the Air Target Sweden AB, could be anywhere with scrubby trees and a few armored military vehicles parked in tidy rows in a covered lot.

As KC climbed into the car beside the driver, Yardley tried to remember the last time they’d really kissed.

She couldn’t.

That was a tragedy. She’d loved KC Nolan. She hadn’t known everything, but she’d known enough to love the girl who KC had been, with skinny legs and knobby knees, big teeth and huge sunglasses, sitting on the concrete steps of her grandma’s house and smiling big over the loneliness in her heart.

She’d loved that pint-sized twelve-year-old sitting on a cushion, steering a Lincoln slowly through the streets of Reston, Virginia, and she’d loved the teenager who’d taken up service to her country when what she’d really needed was support, mentorship, and a chance to relax and actually be her age.

They’d kept too many secrets—that was obvious—and the agency had put KC in the basement, maybe for too long.

Maybe for long enough that bad actors had reached her or she’d reached out to them in order to solve a different problem.

Yardley didn’t know why KC was afraid and concealing information, but her instinct told her KC was in more trouble than the mission was.

The CIA would do anything to its officers it suited them to do. Her granddaddy had been more than clear about that.

So it was a good thing Yardley was the Unicorn. KC needed someone willing to get to the bottom of things before anyone caught on—either the bad guys or the good guys—and fix it.

Keeping KC safe and out of the line of scrutiny so that she could thrive would be the kind of parting gift that might make it possible for Yardley to put her broken heart back together.

She just needed to come up with a plan.