I opened the front door to see my wife standing in the foyer holding a thin envelope with a wax stamp in one hand and a letter opener in the other. My reflexes kicked in. This wasn’t a normal letter. It was a special shade of yellow custom to my organization, and in it contained instructions for my next assignment. Of course, Amanda probably wouldn’t be able to decipher the code, but if by chance she did…No, I’m not going to think about that. I’m just going to fly into her arms and slyly grab the letter from her hand and switch it with one of the other ones stacked in a pile on the counter.
So I shout, “HONEY! I’M HOME!” and rush towards her with open arms. Except that she basically has a blunt knife in her hand. So I contort my body to avoid impaling myself, and we both tumble to the ground. That didn’t go as well as I had planned. But, at least in the chaos, the letter had left her hand and was now a good fifteen feet out of her grasp. She was startled, that’s for sure. Not sure of what to do, I went for the kiss. She deftly avoided it through a slight turn of her head. I tried to soothe her, saying “I’ve been wanting to see you all day, and I just couldn’t help myself”. She stared at me, or maybe more accurately, through me. She wasn’t having any of this bullshit. And I was supposed to be the best in the business? I couldn’t even lie to get past my wife.
Damn you Organization. Yes, that’s actually what it’s called. Organization. Couldn’t you find a better way, given that we have email and encryption and all that technology now, to send me an assignment? You’re putting my wife and kids at danger if you give them knowledge of this stuff. So I try a different method – the ol’ change of topic technique. “I had a really bad day today. Can we just go out somewhere and have a nice dinner?” She was paying no attention to me. She was already crawling, maybe even scrambling at the pace she was going, for the fallen letter.
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