For as long as I can remember, Matthew Goode has been a messy person. The same goes for Rebecca Baxter. Put the two together in the same apartment and the results are in line with what you’d probably expect.
Bags and purses were scattered along the wall. Coats and scarves were strewn across the couch, covering miscellaneous passports that didn’t belong to either of the residents. Mugs lined the coffee table, most of them still half full of settled tea, and I could hear the faucet dripping into the pile of dishes in the sink. There were no pictures hanging on the walls and no plants that needed watering, but the smell of leftover Chinese was more than enough to create that distinct lived-in feel. This place was, however temporary, their home.
“Honey,” Matt called, swinging the door open and adding to the pile of mismatched shoes just inside the door. “I’m home. And I brought guests.”
Aunt Bex called back from somewhere in the kitchen, an amusement in her tone. “Morgan Ann, your father is positively going to kill you.”
The words settled on my shoulders, all that guilt finally catching up with me, and I spun on my brother, pointing a very aggressive finger in his direction. “You said no one would know.”
Matt looked to the kitchen and then back to me, squinting more and more as each second passed. “They’re not supposed to. The only way they’d know is if they—”
“Your father’s a spy, kids,” Aunt Bex reminded us, stepping out of the kitchen and taking a seat on the raggedy sofa. The two of them were living like a pair of college kids. They probably hadn’t eaten anything more substantial than Ramen in weeks. Who had thought that letting these two live together would be a good idea? “There’s only so much mischief you can get away with and sneaking off to Romania doesn’t make that list.”
“Speaking of Romania,” Matt said before I even had a chance to wonder how long I’d be grounded for. “We might have to move again.”
Aunt Bex threw her head up to the sky, letting out a dramatic groan. “Do you know how hard it is to find a three-month lease?” she moaned. “Just once, I’d like to actually make it until the end of the three months. Just once, Matthew.”
“It’s not my fault this time,” Matt defended, plopping himself down in an armchair that he looked absurdly comfortable in.
Aunt Bex just kept dipping her tea bag, utterly bored with the news. “Well go on then,” she said with a sigh. “Let’s have it.”
He looked up at Collins and I, both of us still standing in the doorway like two kids on an awkward play date—invited inside, but not sure where we were supposed to sit. “I don’t know, actually,” Matt admitted. “I wasn’t there when it happened.”
This seemed to grab her attention and she snapped her gaze in our direction. “Weren’t there when what happened?”
Collins just sort of stood there, his usual confidence gone as the memory of the hotel replayed in our minds. Rustling papers and shattering glass. The voices. The threats. “We had a tail in Romania,” I blurted. “Or, I guess, Collins did.”
Aunt Bex looked between the two boys, trying to determine if they were telling the truth or if this was just a really lame practical joke. “That was a clean mission,” she said. “No one knew you went and even if they did, there was no reason for anyone to put a tail on you.”
Matt drew in a breath, but Collins spoke before he could. “Well, due respect ma’am,” he said. “They weren’t tailing us. They were tailing me.”
Collins was shifting his weight from foot to foot and I realized that he hadn’t known Aunt Bex from the day he was born. To him, she was Agent Rebecca Baxter. Aunt Bex must’ve seen this too, because her tone switched from cool aunt to strict superior. This seemed to put him at ease. Superiors, he could handle. “I see,” she said, her eyes thin. “You seem pretty certain about that.”
His expression was hard. The idea of a poker face seemed like child’s play compared to Luke Collins in that single moment. “I’ve got plenty of reasons to be certain.”
Aunt Bex studied him then, the trained eyes of a woman who had long ago learned how to read people. “What’s your name?”
“Luke Collins, ma’am.”
“That’s what I thought,” she said and I looked up at him, wondering just how many secrets were hidden behind all those truths and just how many of them Aunt Bex knew. No one offered up this information as she held her mug up to her lips, blowing on the steam. “What next?”
“We ran the op, ma’am,” Collins said. “We agreed that it would be safer to follow through with the mission than to risk another trip back.”
“Good. Good,” she said calmly, her entire body moving with each of her steady nods.
It was Matt who spoke next. “Then I brought them here,” he explained. “Figured it was as good a safe house as any.”
She sipped her tea, the low, even pops of her slurp cutting through the conversation. “The point of a safe house is so that you can avoid moving before your three-month lease is up,” she told him and Matt practically melted with guilt. “This is why I told you to buy a safe house before you ran the Romania op.”
Slumped over in his chair, Matt looked like some bizarre combination of a grumpy old man and a spoiled toddler, both coming together in the body of an eighteen-year-old boy. “Sure,” he grumbled under his breath. “Let me just use all that extra money I have sitting in my bank account to buy myself a house I’ll never use.”
But, being Aunt Bex, she heard every word. “Maybe you could use all that money that you’re saving on rent,” she suggested, a slight hint of passive-aggression peeking through her tone.
At this, Matt flung back up in his seat, pointing a finger in her direction. “I offered to split the rent with you,” he reminded her. “But you refused. In fact, I believe the exact words you used were—”
“Don’t be a half-brained idiot,” she finished for him. “Yes, I remember.”
“And then you burned my check in the sink,” he said and I had to smile. Aunt Bex probably didn’t even let him pay for their pizza. I could just picture him setting out money for the tip, only to find it sitting in his back pocket hours later, exactly where Aunt Bex had put it.
“Good god,” called a voice from somewhere down the hallway. It was a voice I knew well, but it wasn’t supposed to be in that little apartment. That voice was supposed to be far, far away. “We’re not getting into this argument again, are we?”
I looked down the hallway, a smile greeting me. I knew those dark eyes and that dark hair. I knew that tall boy who was walking closer. The first time I had seen him, he’d been on a bench in Roseville. Now, he was in my brother’s apartment and coming out of what was presumably my brother’s bedroom.
“You know, Jasons,” Aunt Bex said, completely unfazed by his presence. “You’re here often enough. I should make you chip in with rent.”
Scout yawned and scratched at the back of his head, making his way straight towards the fridge. “You wouldn’t let me if I tried,” he said, pulling out an orange carton labeled Scout in thick, black Sharpie. He drank it straight and wiped his lip clean. “Don’t worry. I’ll only be one more night.”
“That’s what you said last night,” she said, not hiding her doubt. “And the night before that, and the night before that…”
“What can I say?” He shrugged and stuck the carton back in the door with far more clattering than you would think a spy could make. “I like the company.”
Matt wasn’t looking at the boy and I could tell that he was trying not to smile. Both of them were. Then Scout looked up past me and did that weird half-nod thing that seems to be ingrained into the very DNA of all boys. “Hey Collins.”
“Jasons,” Collins greeted, giving away a half-nod of his own.
I looked between the two of them and then to my brother, feeling like I was missing something. Wasn’t this a problem? Didn’t anyone notice that Scout had spent the night—or, apparently, spent multiple nights—with my brother? I wondered if the secret was out because as far as I knew, Matt and Scout definitely weren’t.
Matt seemed to read my mind. “Collins knows,” he told me. “And so does Aunt Bex.”
“They know?” I asked, making sure that we were on the same page. The last thing we needed right at this moment was a miscommunication.
Scout nodded. “They know.”
Matt had been waiting for years to tell someone about his boyfriend. Even Scout seemed a little relieved to have the secret start trickling out, despite his arguments against the idea. Something in my chest felt warm and gooey as I looked at the two of them, but still a question formed in my mind. I knew the deal that had been made. The ultimatum that had been passed. Either Mom comes back or a year passes, but neither of those things had happened. “How do they know?”
“Well,” Matt said, drawing out the word. He was biting his lip and turning bright red. “With Aunt Bex it was a particularly tipsy game of truth or dare.” A hundred images of Aunt Bex playing truth or dare flashed through my mind. Awesome.
“And I’ve known for about a year now,” Collins told me.
Scout nodded, lounging out across the couch. He looked more comfortable there than even the two people with the names on the lease, making Aunt Bex roll her eyes in disbelief. “He figured out before you did,” Scout informed me.
I looked over my shoulder just in time to see Collins shoot me a cocky smile. It was that I-know-something-you-don’t-know grin and even though it was a few months late, it still made me burn.
Aunt Bex added her mug to the collection on the table in front of her, standing up with a sigh and turning towards the kitchen. “Where are you going?” I asked her.
She looked right at me and I realized that she still hadn’t switched back to cool-aunt mode. That I was looking at exactly the same version of MI6’s Rebecca Baxter that Collins had been and that, more than anything, made me want to disappear. “I’m off to ring your father. Let him know that your brother has you and that you’re not dead.”
The way she glowered at me was almost enough to make me wish that I’d been found in that Romanian closet because I knew that anything that mystery woman could have done to us stood no match to what my father had waiting for me on the other side of the world.
“You know,” Aunt Bex went on, rounding the corner into her tiny kitchen. “Even your mother left notes when she ran away.”
That was the real punch in the gut. The icing on the guilt-trip cake, spelling out Morgan Goode is a terrible daughter in thin, curly letters. There wasn’t anything in the world that could’ve hurt more right in that moment, which I probably deserved. Dad had called me every night when he spent the summer running. I hadn’t even told him that I was leaving.
Aunt Bex stepped behind the thin wall and Collins asked Matt where the bathroom was. “Don the hall,” he said and Collins followed the instructions.
We could all hear Aunt Bex’s murmurings in the silence that followed. She was trying to be quiet about the whole thing, but there are only so many secrets that can be kept in an apartment as small as theirs. “Matthew,” she called, significantly louder than the rest of her conversation. “Your father would like a word with you.”
Scout and I both looked at Matt like he’d just been sentenced to death row. Really, I don’t think we were that far off. “It was nice knowing you,” I told him, only half joking.
Matt stood, accepting his fate. “If I go down, I’m taking you with me,” he promised. Scout was biting back a laugh, prompting Matt to raise his eyebrows at him. “I wouldn’t be laughing if I were you. If I die, you’re a single man again.”
Scout had made himself comfortable by stretching out on the couch, legs crossed and just a few bon-bons short of the dream. He shrugged at the words. “Good thing your sister’s available then, isn’t it?” he teased, shooting me a wink. It was funny. He was funny. I laughed and blew him a playful kiss, which he snagged out of the air.
This didn’t seem to bother Matt much. His mouth turned to smile and he leaned in to kiss the flirtatious boy who held his heart, cutting off Scouts laughter almost immediately. When Matt pulled away, Scout went with him, forcing it to carry on for just one more second longer before they were two separate beings again. They were only inches apart when Matt asked, “Still want to date my sister?”
But before Scout could come up with an answer—before he could even remember where he was—Aunt Bex was calling out again. “Matt!”
“Coming,” Matt responded, shooting Scout a look that was the exact opposite of kid-friendly as he started towards the kitchen.
When it was just the two of us in the room, Scout threw his hands over his face, covering up that bubbly grin. “I hate that guy.”
“No you don’t,” I reminded him. I could hear Matt’s voice from the kitchen. He wasn’t as good at being quiet as Aunt Bex was. Boys have voices that carry farther, and Matt, though a natural at blending in, was crap at whispering. He always had been.
Scout sighed. “I know,” he said, his smile stretching as wide as I’d ever seen it. When he finally looked up at me, that smile faded. It was a special talent of mine, dissolving smiles. Might as well call me the Great Goodini, because when ever I was around, I could make a grin disappear without a trace. Every. single. time. “How are you, Goode?”
It wasn’t really a question. I could hear it in his tone. “Why does everyone keep asking me that?”
My focus kept jumping back to the kitchen, the sound distracting my ears. Matt’s tone had taken on a new life. Something I didn’t know.
“Because you look like crap,” Scout replied, momentarily tearing me back to where I was supposed to be.
But I didn’t last long in that living room, my ears trying to crack the conversation in the next room over. I was vaguely aware of Scout’s eyes on me, but didn’t realized he was watching until he said, “Well, go on.”
“What?”
“You want to eavesdrop, right?” he said, throwing his head towards the sound. “That’s kind of your whole shtick.”
“It’s not eavesdropping,” I said, but I was already halfway across the room, crouching down in the carpet until I could see my brother’s refection in the face of the oven.
His voice was strained, his eyebrows tight. I couldn’t make out the other end of the call, but even still, I knew that he was being yelled at. “Look, I’m not an idiot, Dad. It was a low-risk assignment—she wasn’t even on the same floor as the target.”
Aunt Bex stood just beside him, arms crossed and leaning up against the counter. It was like she could hear everything—like she knew every word that was being said, even though she obviously couldn’t. I found myself wondering how she always knew anything and everything that was put in front of her.
“No, I know,” Matt went on. “I just needed an asset. She fit the age.”
There were a few more pops from the speaker next to Matt’s ear, to which he replied with solemn, yesses and nos. “I get it, Dad. Okay? No more late-night escapades.”
The protest from the other end of the phone was much louder now. Loud enough that Matt had to pull it away from his ear and I was just barely able to make out my father yelling, “Do you? Do you get it, Matthew?” in a way that made it sound like Matt was missing something. Something big.
“Yeah, okay? I do. It won’t happen again.”
I couldn’t hear them, but I’m pretty sure the next strand of words was something along the lines of, “You’re damn right it wont happen again.”
Matt huffed and I saw him bite his lip. “Honestly I don’t even know how you found out. I had it all worked out, right to the—”
Dad cut him off and almost instantly, Matt expression shifted. He went straight from son to spy as he spun on Aunt Bex and said, “Another one?”
Aunt Bex just nodded and I knew that she had been waiting for this bomb—whatever it was—to drop. Matt kept looking at her as Dad explained whatever was happening and I tried, but failed, to pick up on what was being said.
“Well do they have any idea who—?” Matt stopped again as more words scratched across the skies, none of it seeming to make sense to him. “Yeah,” he said finally. “Yeah, I get it. Scout takes a flight back to the U.S. tomorrow. First thing in the morning. I’ll send her with him.”
Dad said something I didn’t catch and Matt just smiled. “No, Dad. I think that the last thing you need to worry about is Scout making a move on her.”
Despite everything, Aunt Bex smiled too.
“Yeah,” Matt went on. “First thing—and Dad? I’m sorry. If I had known…” I heard my father’s voice, but not his words, and Matt nodded like he thought he could be seen. “Yeah, okay. Do you want to talk to Maggie?”
My heart leapt, but I didn’t know if it was out of excitement or dread. On one hand, I was in no mood to be yelled at for the next four hundred hours, but on the other, I really did miss my father. A part of me really did want to talk to him—maybe beg for forgiveness while I was at it.
But it didn’t matter, because my father didn’t want to talk to me. “Okay,” Matt said. “Aunt Bex is still here, do you want me to give you back to her?”
With my father’s response, Matt nodded to Aunt Bex and I knew the answer had been yes. Whatever they were talking about, they weren’t done. “Yeah,” Matt said in answer to a question I didn’t hear. “Yep. You too. Bye.”
“Zach? Yeah.” Aunt Bex said, taking the phone back.
Matt turned around and started back towards the living room, so I rushed back over to the couch, shoving Scout’s legs out of the way before I could be seen. “Ouch,” Scout said, rather purposefully and probably while experiencing very little actual pain.
When my brother came back, he looked ten years older, distracted as he looked at the ground, trying to figure out a puzzle that he only had a few pieces to. “Matty?” Scout said, seeing it too. “Hey, you okay?”
It took him a bit too long, but eventually Matt looked up, the spy in him knowing exactly what he had to do in order to make himself look presentable. There seemed to be nothing wrong with him as he said, “Yeah. I’m okay.”
“Collins,” Aunt Bex said, stepping out from the kitchen. She no longer had the phone to her ear, leaving my father alone in America. “Where’s Luke? I need to debrief him.”
“Right here,” he said, walking out of the slim hallway. He had changed into jeans and a sweater. Something in my chest jumped as I wondered exactly how long he had been standing there.
There was zero percent of my aunt left in the woman before me. This was Agent Baxter. This was the woman who led teams. Who shot guns. Who half of current Russian officials hesitated making eye contact with. This was the legend and she was looking at Luke Collins like he was her most interesting case yet. “Let’s go grab a coffee,” she said, pulling her jacket from underneath Scout. “You and I have a lot to talk about.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“And you, she said, turning to glare at me as she threw a scarf over her shoulders. She looked so elegant. It was almost unbearable. “Get some sleep. You have an early morning tomorrow.”
“But it’s, like, seven o’clock back home,” I argued.
She gave me a look that only moms (and, apparently, aunts) could give. “Well, you’ve made it perfectly clear that you’d rather be here than at home,” she scolded. “If you want to play in my backyard then you follow my rules, and my rules say that bedtime was a long time ago. Maybe if you had decided to stay home this weekend, you’d be able to stay up a little later, but you didn’t.” Those last few words were sharp. It was the strictest I’d ever seen her get. I think she realized this, because her voice was softer as she said, “You can sleep in my room.”
“But I haven’t had dinner yet,” I said, this time much, much quieter.
She nodded once, firmly, as she gave a single tug at the belt around her waist. “I know.”
She opened the door and let Collins out first, then slammed it behind her as she left. On thing was for sure—Aunt Bex was pissed. And when Aunt Bex is pissed…well, let’s just say that things work out better for everyone when she isn’t.