Wilson opened the pages of his wife’s journal, looking for answers. She had always been a woman of mystery—tall, slim, disarmingly attractive with that sly smile of hers and those saucer-like blue eyes—and a ten-year chunk of her past that was—even to him—unaccounted for and never spoken of. She called it her “hiatus from life,” and Wilson—who was well aware that he had married several notches up on the rating scale—wasn’t one to pry…until now.
But why now?
Well, there was the small matter of her disappearance—gone three days now—with no communication whatsoever. While this had happened before for stretches of a few hours—and once an entire day—there had never been three full days of complete radio silence. The odd thing was, he didn’t really miss her. He and Jenny—if that was indeed her real name—weren’t that close. They did live in the same house, sleep in the same bed, sleep with each other fairly regularly—with three children to prove it—but their relationship lacked the kind of real intimacy—the sharing of gossip, the pillow talk, the ability to finish one another’s sentences, and of course, the sexual chemistry, that some of his friends clearly enjoyed with their (he had to say) much less attractive wives. So Wilson was both lucky and unlucky—and while his friends, colleagues, and the world at large looked at him as if he’d won the trophy, he felt the sting of loneliness more than anyone could have known.
On the first day, he looked at the journal—which she had forbidden him to touch—and did nothing. His conscience wouldn’t let him raise his hand to where it sat on her office bookshelf, wedged between a copy of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.
On the second day, he touched the blue leather-bound volume, even took it from the shelf and moved it from hand to hand, but he didn’t open it. After all, he’d made a promise—as important to her, she’d said, as their vows.
On the third day, after two scotch and sodas and a hemp gummy from the new store in town, he lost his resolve—or rather found it—and, feeling something give deep in his center, opened the book.
The first line blew him away.
I am not who you think I am.
Then who was she? A spy? That’s what he’d always suspected. But he did not receive confirmation. What he learned instead shocked him to his core. Jenny was not her real name. It was…Svetlana. She was Russian—born in an orphanage—and rescued at age 3 by the parents who had raised her in Dallas and later moved east to Pittsburgh where he had met her at Carnegie Mellon. Her entire life story—what she’d learned, extracted really, from her parents, to whom she bore a remarkable resemblance for an adopted child, what she’d researched from publicly available sources, and what she’d forced out of government officials using her considerable charm—was there in the journal. Her biological parents had been Russian dissidents—freedom fighters, rebels, resisters—and they had given her up so she could have a life of freedom in the west. It was a stunning sacrifice. And…they were both still alive! She had contacted them and was, as Wilson now surmised, in Russia RIGHT NOW.
He thought of the English paper he’d written in eighth grade on Shakespeare’s Richard III—and his theme: outer appearance and inner reality rarely coincide. He’d gotten an A, but the lesson apparently hadn’t stuck. If it had, how could he have missed EVERYTHING?