The Woman on the Other Side
向こう側の女
Lena Volkova opened the door as if she had been expecting him for years.
She did not gasp, did not step back, and did not reach for the telephone.
She simply looked at him the way one looks at a debt that has finally come due.
Five years had passed, yet she wore the same , knowing smile he remembered too well.
"You look terrible," she said in English, as if they had parted only yesterday.
He stepped inside, and the warm room smelled of coffee, old books, and cigarette smoke.
Lena was a now in the very service that would gladly hang a man like him.
Even if she chose to him, Hale had walked in knowing the risk completely.
He told her almost everything, watching her face as though it were a message.
She listened without a word, turning her cup slowly, as if weighing each thing he said.
When he finished, she rose and looked out at the street as if checking for watchers.
"Your own people want you dead," she said, "which, oddly, makes me trust you more."
Even if that were a lie, it was a clever one, and cleverness had always been her nature.
Hale reminded himself that she had lied to him before, beautifully, for months on end.
Yet she had also, once, warned him of an that would have cost him his life.
She behaved as if the years apart had changed nothing between them, and everything around them.
"Why help me?" he asked, and for the first time her smile faded from her face.
"Because someone in your service is selling us more than you ever did," she answered quietly.
That single sentence told Hale that the traitor was real, , and still busily at work.
Even if he could not yet trust her fully, he could no longer to leave.
She offered him the couch, a meal, and a silence that felt almost like the old days.
He slept badly, waking often, listening to the building as if it might him.
In the morning she placed a folded slip of paper beside his cold cup of coffee.
"A name and a code," she said. "Prove it yourself. I will not do your thinking."
Even if the paper led him into a trap, it was the only he now held.
He looked at her, unsure whether he was seeing a or the cleverest of all.