'The man knows way more than he's letting on, don't you think?'

By chance, Thomas glimpsed the dome of the Capitol above the sliding streetscape. It seemed impossible that the soap opera on the nightly news was playing out right now, there, with real people who had hangnails and itchy asses just like everyone else.

Neil had said it himself: whether it was Washington,

Beijing, or the human brain, spies were drawn to the smell of decisions.

'Men like him always do,' Thomas said.

The drive back seemed far longer. They floated down the freeway, trading this cohort of vehicles for that. In the lulls between topics, Thomas found himself staring out the window, wondering whether he really had fumbled the ball with Mackenzie, and thinking about Nora… about the crash of anesthesia that had accompanied her confession, about the mechanical insincerity of his rage.

Revelations were strange things. They rewrote consequences, sure, but what really distinguished them from garden variety insights was the way they revised the past. True revelations never came all at once. No, they gnawed, and gnawed, working their way through the soft tissue of memory, redigesting everything relevant. Not an hour would pass, it seemed, without some memory of Nora returning, like some old piece of machinery requiring a retrofit in light of the latest technical information.

In the wake of Neil, everything about their relationship had been transformed. Nora had always been critical. After their divorce a number of his male and female friends had admitted thinking she was something of a bitch. But for whatever reason, he had never seemed particularly troubled by her complaints, perhaps because he had fooled himself into thinking he knew where they came from. There was nothing quite like 'understanding' when it came to plastering over character flaws for the sake of emotional convenience.

There had been no catastrophic turn in their relationship: it had seemed to shake itself apart rather than spiral down from the skies. But even before the divorce, in one of those rare, honest reveries that punctuate any marital breakdown, Thomas had put his finger on a crucial change in the character of her complaints. At some point, her criticisms had shifted from things he did to things he was. And now that Thomas knew she was using Neil as her measuring tape, the inventory of her accusations, which at the time had so bewildered him, became sinister with implication. Of course he couldn't 'make her feel desired'. Of course he was 'incapable of meeting her emotional needs'.

How could he be when she was bobbing for apples in his best friend's pants?