The life of a spy is one lived through a perpetual fog. It is a game of deception, a livelihood made chasing shadows and learning to find those things that would prefer to stay hidden.

There are rules, rules that the agency gives her, rules that she sets for herself. Yet, there is no clarity, no black and white; good and evil; right and wrong. There are missions and targets, assets and enemies, but there are no perfect answers, no absolute truths, save one, which Joan has come to know by heart: trust no one but yourself.

Trust yourself.

It had been hard, at first, back when she'd been new and green, when she still wobbled in her high heels and hesitated, if only for a fraction of a second, before she pulled the trigger.

But trust had come with age, with experience, with days in the field and nights in Arthur's arms.

From her hospital bed, Joan closes her eyes and wonders how she will ever learn to trust herself again.

How can she trust the body that has betrayed her; the body that has failed her, failed Arthur, in what should be the simplest of tasks?

Joan Campbell is the head of the DPD. She is fluent in four languages and conversational in three others. She knows how to defuse a basic IED and can pick a lock with a bobby pin. She reads people like books and holds her own against even the most intimidating of Senate committees.

Joan Campbell is strong.

Joan Campbell cannot carry a child.

Joan Campbell is weak.

Somewhere behind her Arthur holds her son. (A boy, it was a boy). Their son.

He is small, too small, with a tuft of brown hair. She imagines that behind the tiny eyelids that will never open, his eyes are blue. She dreams that they are azure like the Chesapeake, like the room at the end of the hall in the big white house that he will never live in.

A nurse whispers faintly about a name, for the birth certificate.

For the death certificate.

Life. Death. Life.

Joan wonders what kind of name you give to a child whose clenched fists will never open; whose lungs will never fill with air; whose life is over before it ever began. What do you call a boy who will never learn his alphabet; whom no one, save his parents, will remember; who will be lost amidst the sands of time when they are gone? What sort of name do you give to a boy who was never really here?

A hand on her shoulder. (I'm so sorry). A hand sliding down her arm, reaching for her clammy fingers.

"We might call him Edward, after your dad," Arthur says in a watery voice.

"Edward." It's a big name for such a small boy, a big name for a boy who will never grow into it. "Teddy," she negotiates.

"Teddy."

Before they take him away, she holds him, just for a moment. She doesn't want to, at first, but as Arthur settles him into her arms, she knows that she will cherish these seconds for the rest of her days. She cups his downy head and draws her fingers down his cheeks.

Hello.

Goodbye.

Someone once said, "The loss that is unknown is no loss at all."

Joan has never been a mother. She has never pressed a cloth to a feverish forehead or soothed a child's nightmarish fears. She held her stillborn son for only a moment, and yet.

She is keenly aware of his absence. Her heart, her arms, her entire being aches for the boy, the family, the life that was not to be. It pulls at her limbs and weighs her down like a heavy chain.

She sits in the middle of the floor in the blue room at the end of the hall and closes her eyes. In her mind, she sinks. She bids adieu to the air in her lungs and lets her sins drag her down to the sandy bottom of the Chesapeake. Drowning like this is so much easier.

When Arthur comes home from work, he finds her like that, in her red dress, sprawled across the white carpet of the unfurnished room.

He has always appreciated Joan's ability to surprise him, but now he curses it. Arthur Campbell is a man of action, a man with a plan. He is a practiced chessman, but here, from the doorway, he can't see the next move. He doesn't know how to help her, how to make it all go away.

Arthur Campbell has read all of Amy Tan's novels, but he does not know how to save fish from drowning.

Tick Tock.

Time stops for no man. No woman, either. And as darkness falls, they close the door, together.

And the little blue room at the end of the hall stands vacant. It is a reminder. It is a mockery. It is a tribute. It is a tomb. It is what was won and what was lost.

And what was won again.

After a day filled with Columbian rebels, secret love-children, fake affairs and aced polygraphs, Joan Campbell sits again in the middle of the little blue room, a hand on her abdomen; a hand over her heart.

And for the first time in six years, she breathes.