“We have been following your work. You’ve gotten really good at it. And we think you can help the cause in new ways. Especially with your access to people in our network who have been detained. People with whom it is very hard for us to communicate.”

“Are you recruiting me, Joyce?”

She just smiled, and fed him George Washington’s brain.

They ended up a little later in a room upstairs, sating other hungers, ones that had been building up over a much longer time. She said it was where she stayed when she was in Mexico City. It was a studio apartment, spartan but comfortable, with a bed just big enough for the two of them to fit in at the same time, watched over by a cheesecake Aztec warrior woman in the calendar on the wall. Donny wondered whether that guardian would be enough to protect them, but not enough to restrain himself from reuniting with the only woman he had ever really loved, even as he knew that politics and the pain it can cause had pulled them apart in irreconcilable ways, and neither of them could any longer be trusted to be true with the other.

They stayed up late that night talking, sharing confessions with each other about the lovers they had had since they broke up. Donny had more, but Joyce’s were more real. Joyce told him what nature was like in Nicaragua, where the decades of war had kept the developers at bay. She described some of the birds she had seen, with juvenile wonder in her eyes and invented words rolling off her tongue. Donny told her the developing taxonomy of lies he had invented to get people free, from a society that no longer really believed in the idea of freedom, unless freedom could be like a team mascot that everyone identifies with as the trademark of their tribe, without ever even giving any thought to what it is really supposed to mean. Like the American city, said Joyce, that has a picture of an Indian on its ball caps.

It was only when they woke up late, but not late enough, that they talked more about what Joyce had brought up at dinner. About how Donny could help the cause, with his contacts inside. He made promises. The kind of promises you make in code that lets you deny they were any such thing later. At least if they are read back to you from a surveillance transcript, at a deposition, or an interrogation.

The kind of promises a lawyer makes.

Donny was at the airport the next night, waiting for his flight back to Houston, when he saw the news of Joyce’s arrest and extradition. Hooded perp walk, with Mexican Marines and American agents on either side as they took her to her own flight home.