The Cutout by Francine Mathews

have to do with me?” she repeats.
    “You’re the one woman I could trust in the depths of hell, the woman who would believe regardless of everything. You’re what I need, Caroline. And I’ve never needed much.”
    She closes her eyes, takes a shuddering breath.“Let’s leave tonight,” she says. And steps off some inner tower.

    The one woman I could trust in the depths of hell, the woman who would believe regardless of everything.
    Caroline paces the bathroom floor and considers her options. Had Eric left her behind deliberately in Frankfurt airport, ignorant and faithful and trusting and stupid, while he set off to remake the world? Had she been his ultimate cover, the grieving widow no one would blame? Or was today’s bomb at the Brandenburg an impossible accident, his face in a helicopter a bizarre coincidence, that defied her attempts at rational explanation?
    What was she supposed to believe, exactly, in this particular hell?
    Belief, like trust, isn’t rational , she thought. Belief is blind, a wash of black in a room full of light, a breath suspended at the end of a diving board. She had loved Eric, but she never trusted him with much. There were parts of his life forever closed to her, regions of his soul she could not navigate. She had gone with her gut when she married him, ignored the advice of family and friends, giddy with all she was not considering.
    But the High Priestess of Reason is not easily silenced. Voices had persisted in Caroline’s brain. There were the questions she asked, and answers he tried to give; terms they negotiated like peacemakers at parley.
    Until the final silence of the Frankfurt airport, and the final explosion.

    What are you thinking? Eric asks.
    His body is perfectly still in the cratered grass. Allaround them the Virginia night is thick with pine pollen, with midges, with the musky smell of spent sex; but his skin, where her fingertip traces a rib, is marble cool. Stillness is one of his talents. He keeps the world at bay, he opts out of action, he retreats inside his head where the best secrets always are. Six months at the Farm, in case officer training. And so it begins , Caroline thinks—the life he cannot share. He has traded his fatigues for chinos and oxford cloth, in the classroom he rolls up his sleeves and loosens his tie, he looks like a wolf sleeping by a primeval fire, partly tamed but never domesticated. What do they have to teach him, really, these retired CO’s pensioned off into training? Six months, and he knows what he has always known: how to watch without being seen.
    She feels him watching even while she sits alone in Arlington, a hundred miles away—that silent surveillance like a stroke on her neck. The sense of him burns in her throat as warm as whiskey, and she thinks, He is watching me. Eric’s love, Eric’s too-intent and narrow-eyed passion, her breath catching thick at his touch.
    “What are you thinking?” he asks her again.
    “Have I given you that right, too? The inside of my head? You’ve never given it to me.”
    She sounds deliberately amused. Her way of keeping the world at bay.
    “That’s important, isn’t it? What I give and don’t give.”
    “Only when you want something in return,” she says.
    “You try very hard. To love me without conditions. You think that’s what I need.”
    “Isn’t it?”
    “You’re afraid of losing me. If you build me a cage.” His voice is remote.
    She sits up, pulls her bare knees to her chest, the sticky wetness between her legs nothing more than a mess. She reaches for her clothes.
    “All right,” she says. “I’m thinking about loyalty. Whether it’s possible to give without thought, without conditions. Blind loyalty.”
    His hand closes on her wrist. She stops pulling up her jeans. Slides into the crevice between his side and his arm and lies there, her cheek against the marble skin.
    “Blind loyalty is always possible. And it’s always a mistake.”
    She lets out a little