AN: Updates for Meet Cute and If at First You Don't Succeed should be coming soon. Hopefully actually soon, not "The Pretender: Island of the Haunted is coming soon after The Pretender 2001" soon.

Carla wasn't supposed to know anything at all about Raymond's dealings with the KGB. As far as the official story went, he was a naval officer being groomed for admiral and, while his focus was naval intelligence, no one outside of his superiors knew anything more specific about his work.

The reality wasn't as clear cut as that.

It wasn't entirely Raymond's fault that she knew. He was supposed to keep her in the dark, and he did his best, he really did, but he was at a distinct disadvantage. She paid close attention to international chatter as part of her job and she could connect the dots better than most people. She wouldn't have been an analyst worth her salt if she didn't recognize the pattern that emerged around Raymond's assignments.

(Raymond wasn't supposed to find out she was CIA when he met her, but he figured that out quickly enough, too. She supposed it made them even.)

His work became an open secret between them, spoken about only in private, and even then, in the vaguest possible terms. She knew when things went well, and she knew when they started to go bad, when he began to sink deeper and deeper into the muck and the mire.

There was nothing Carla could do about it, no words of encouragement she could offer. Raymond started out with a sort of unsentimental idealism, believing that his work was doing some good in the world, no matter how ugly it was on the surface. Dirty jobs and all that. Over time, he began to recognize that things were rotten to their very core, and gradually he transformed into a miserable, tormented man. He couldn't hide the change from her, not at home, the only place left where he could let his guard down.

Carla kept Raymond's conflicts and doubts to herself. No one asked, she didn't offer. She could have gone to Alan with her concerns, but that would open a can of worms she wasn't ready to open. She didn't think she ever would be. Facing the consequences of it was too much to contemplate.

It wasn't that she didn't trust Alan, but she knew enough about Raymond's problems to break him if word somehow got back to the wrong people, so she said nothing at all. Not even when he returned from an assignment with his back covered in third degree burns and his conscience so heavy with guilt she thought he was more likely to collapse under the weight of it than from his injuries.

She cared for Raymond as well as she could while he was on the mend. He drove away more than one nurse in sheer frustration. He was a terrible patient, but then again he always had been—anything worse than a case of the sniffles and he might as well have been dying. Which was ironic, because Carla knew he'd been trained to withstand torture. It was a slow, exasperating journey for both of them.

He spoke sometimes in his sleep while he recovered, just jumbled nonsense, mostly, but Carla soon pieced together the gist of what haunted him about the night he was injured. About the girl and her father, the gun and the fire and the burns, and all those hushed, urgent phone calls with Raymond's old friend Sam.