"Excuse 'm? Excuse 'm?"
Alex Rider looked up. An elderly woman, the source of the croak, confronted him from across the store counter. Her haggard face was smothered in makeup and Alex had to wrench his eyes away from her crookedly painted mouth to her small, watery eyes.
"I'm sorry ma'am, what can I get for you?"
As he turned around to fetch cigarettes for her he sighed and wondered for the hundredth time that day why he was there.
Ten minutes later the bell above the door tinkled as his boss, a nervous man with a broad mustache, sidled in. It made Alex tired just watching him drag his weight around.
"Ah, Philip. Business slow this morning, eh?"
Alex nodded without hesitation. By this time he prided himself on an almost effortless integration into any character he chose, and unfamiliar names could no longer catch him by surprise. Philip Grosgrain was just another character in his life since he left Sabina's family.
As he stared at his reflection in the dirty bathroom mirror of his small flat later that evening, Alex slipped back into his thoughts. Was it really three years since he last saw Sabina and her parents? They were as close to family that he had left, and he could still recreate in his mind every small exchange, every "normal" family interaction that he had craved all his life and received three years ago. The Pleasures had given him, wholeheartedly, what he thought he had always wanted. If it had been painful for Alex to admit to himself that he missed his life with MI6, it had been torturous to tell the Pleasures - especially Sabina.
"You want to do what?"
"Sabina, I have a past. I can't just stay with your family like nothing ever happened. It feels wrong."
He remembered Sabina pacing in front of him, remembered feeling terrified but knowing that the discussion was necessary. He couldn't have family dinners every night, movies on Fridays and barbeques and watermelon in the summer. He hated to admit it, but he was itching to do something dangerous. He tried to explain it to Sabina.
"I have these skills, Sabina. I need to use them. I know things are happening, and I want to take part in them."
"You're insane." Her eyes closed in disbelief. "You would give up love for loneliness, safety for danger, me for…these people. The people who used you."
"I'm not doing it for them!" The very thought made his cheeks flare with anger. "They used me. Even my uncle. But they trained me - he trained me for this kind of life."
Sabina's eyes searched his and finally her mouth tightened. "You have become one of them."
"I have become one of them." Alex spoke out loud as he stared at himself in the mirror. He thought of the man he had spent three years tracking. The man with a ring finger shorter than his pinkie. For what? Half a dozen jobs and multiple aliases for what? For a couple of questionable connections, dead ends, and the satisfaction of confronting a common criminal who was surprisingly elusive in spite of his physical deformity. And Alex had loved every second of it.
Alex smiled to himself in the mirror. He was back.