Alias- Jack & Laura

13) Thinking

In the back of a cab on the way home, Jack found himself doing the thing he'd been trying to avoid all night: thinking. He'd told her that she was crying because he'd found out about her pregnancy, but as he ran over the memory in his mind he realized that she had been crying before she knew he was there. What could that mean? When he'd been thinking at all over the past fourteen-odd hours, which hadn't been much, he'd been trying to face the idea that she was nothing but a cold-hearted Russian spy. If that were true, though, an inadvertent pregnancy that her target didn't know about could hardly be too much of a problem; abortion hadn't been legal then, but surely her KGB handlers could have arranged something. So what was she thinking when she started crying? Was it really worries that she wouldn't be a good mother?

And how did she really feel about Sydney? He'd never seen any sign that she didn't love her daughter, but then, he'd missed the signs that she didn't love him. He made a mental note to talk to Sydney and try to figure out if her mother treated her any differently when he wasn't there.

Suddenly, he realized with horror that his daughter had spent a large portion of her life alone with a KGB agent. What had Laura done to their daughter? Had she taught Sydney to keep secrets from her father, turned her against the U.S.? No. He wouldn't, couldn't face that possibility.

The cab had arrived; Jack paid the driver and got out. First things first, he found the bug detector and checked each room. The house was clean. Next, he carefully hid the bugs Dawson had given him: kitchen, living room, den, the third bedroom that both he and Laura used as a study. He rejected his own room as the location for the fifth bug; Laura wasn't likely to do much talking there unless he was there too. Finally, with some trepidation, he hid the last bug in Sydney's room.

Shutting down his thoughts once again, he showered and had some lunch. But then he looked at his watch and discovered that he still had forty minutes before it would be time to pick Sydney up. He washed the dishes, dried them, and put them away; still twenty-five minutes. The silence of the house struck him, and he realized how rare it was for him to be in the house alone; the closest he usually got was after Sydney was in bed on nights when Laura had choir practice or evening classes.

That was something else that didn't fit with the cold-hearted spy image, he thought. If Laura's goal was just to spy on him, then why was she in the church choir? And why was she working on a master's degree in English literature? It could just be an excuse to meet her handler, he thought, but just one of those activities would have sufficed. So why both?

Graduate school made sense with the persona she'd been cultivating since she'd met him, he though—a literature lover with her nose always in a book, someone who'd actually enjoyed going to college classes and writing papers. But he'd been surprised—no, shocked—four years ago when she'd told him that Emily Sloane had invited her to join the church choir and she'd accepted. The two of them had never even gone into a church together; they'd been married in a civil ceremony. And he'd never heard her sing. Not once. He'd caught her humming a few times, but she'd always stopped as soon as she knew he was there. He'd teased her many times during the last four years, trying to get her to sing for him, but she always refused. If her being in the choir hadn't made any sense before, it made even less sense now that he knew what her real purpose in life was.

He suddenly wondered what it had been like for her, to leave her home, her family, everything to go into the country of her enemies and get close to a man she knew nothing about. She'd been nineteen when he'd met her; even if she was lying about her age, she couldn't have been much older. Was it possible that she was sincere, that she didn't care about Russia anymore? She had lived in America basically her entire adult life. Was it even possible that maybe she had really fallen in love with him?

He'd been terrible to her, he realized. She was already injured and in physical pain, and no matter how disconnected she'd become from her country, it still had to hurt to betray it. And if she did love him—or even if she didn't—the awful things he'd said must have made the situation even worse.

But still, she'd lied to him. Fooled him for ten years into thinking she was someone she wasn't. If she'd told him on her own, if she'd turned herself in to the CIA, it might have been different, he thought. Or even if he'd been the one to catch her. But he had had no idea. She had made a fool of him, and that was what he couldn't forgive her for.

He glanced at the clock. It was time to go pick up Sydney.