Secrets

Secrets are tricky things. In his job, they're a necessary evil, but you have to know how to separate them out from lies.

A lie is him telling someone, "My name is Todd and I work for a software company". A secret is that he works for OSP. Lies can be managed; secrets are much more delicate.

Back when he'd met Sam and they traded backgrounds, he never imagined that there would ever be a situation where he'd have to share Sam's secret with the rest of the team. Sam was married … his wife was an agent (and assassin). No big deal. They worked in a very weird world where stuff like that wasn't nearly as unbelievable or uncommon as you'd think. After all, he was the last remaining member of a family against which another family had maintained a blood feud for generations, and no one knew his first name. :: yawn ::

No … the problem wasn't in the secrets. It was in the telling. A situation that exposed a secret was the worst kind of thing. Because once a secret is out, it's out – and suddenly everything changes.

With a lie, people hear it, maybe repeat it, but it's just something that you manage like you do any other bit of data. With a secret, you have to keep it. You can't share, you don't know who else knows. Any slip of the tongue brings questions and suspicion. And that can get you killed.

He wasn't sure how Sam was going to contain his secret, now that it was out. But he knew Sam would. It was the rest of the team he was worried about. Because once one person's secret is out there, everyone else starts worrying about theirs.

Right now, the only secret he wanted to know was how Hetty managed it all. Because he had no idea.