A/N: I recently rewatched the entire series of "Scarecrow" over a long, rainy weekend; thus, this story. I'm not sure why I find it so enjoyable to settle with a show I loved years ago when there's no lack of new streaming content. Maybe it's the return to things I liked as a kid...

The last season of Scarecrow aired in 1987. This story takes place 3 years later - so 1990ish. I tried to stay consistent with the technology and events of the time period. This means cell phones are still fairly new, PCs are just starting to proliferate, and the Berlin Wall is in the process of being dismantled.

I've worked a few characters and events from my favorite episodes into this. Maybe they were some of your favorite episodes, too. This is going to be short story length - probably around 15k or 20k words. Enjoy.

As much as Amanda King knew that being secretly married was hard, she discovered - to her surprise - that being secretly widowed was harder. Logically (and Amanda knew herself to be a logical person), that discovery made no sense. Without a covert husband, there was an entire list of explanations she no longer had to invent. She didn't have to explain to her mother why she was gone four hours picking up a gallon of milk, only to arrive home with her hair disheveled, her blouse missing a button…and no milk. She didn't have to explain to her boss Billy Melrose how she came to be answering Lee Stetson's phone at eleven o'clock on a Saturday night, with soft music playing in the background. And she sure as hell didn't have to explain to Francine Desmond how she knew Lee's suit size and underwear preference (he liked those new boxer briefs). Things should have been simpler.

But it turned out that losing a secret husband was every bit as tricky as living with one. Because two years after Lee was killed in a bomb blast during what should have been a routine mission in the Middle East, she was still inventing explanations: Why she didn't accept dinner invitations from the new neighbor her mother thought was so handsome; why she couldn't seem to click with any of the partners Billy paired her with. In the beginning, her explanations fell on sympathetic ears. Those closest to her weren't idiots - they knew she'd had some kind of relationship with Lee. But they weren't aware of the depth of it, not even remotely.

She considered coming clean about the marriage now that she was…well…no longer married. Many of the reasons for keeping it a secret had gone away. It was unlikely that her family was at risk of being used as leverage, for example. She didn't have Scarecrow's reputation in the spy world; hell, she still didn't have a code name. And she didn't have to worry about the Agency's rules barring relatives working in the same chain of command, since Lee wasn't in the chain of command any longer.

But coming clean presented its own set of issues, the biggest of which was; how on earth could she tell her mother that she'd married a second time? Any woman knows there are things you keep from your mother and there are things that you don't. Being married fell unequivocally into the Don't category. Not to mention that the Agency would be perfectly justified in reprimanding her, or even firing her for breaking the rules. No, all in all, it seemed safer to let secrets stay secret. And since Lee had named her the executor of his will, it was easy to hide the fact that she was his spouse and primary beneficiary.

Not that she gave a damn about the will. Lee's worldly goods weren't going to make her feel better. It had taken months simply to accept that he was gone. He had pulled off so many miraculous escapes in his career that she kept expecting him to walk through the door, especially since his body was never recovered. She raced to answer the phone and spent evenings studying news and surveillance footage from the city where he'd gone missing. It was Billy who had eventually taken her aside and laid out the probabilities for her. He'd done it compassionately but firmly, with all the authority of a thirty-five year career in the intelligence business. And Amanda had bowed to the stark, cold reality that Lee was dead.

She'd had a year as his wife, and two as his widow. Enough time for Philip to graduate high school and be heading off to college in the fall. Enough time for Jamie to get his driver's license. As hard as losing Lee was, Amanda wouldn't have traded that year with him for anything. She knew it was a cliché, but she had never felt so alive, so much herself during their marriage. Maybe it was because of the secrecy, or maybe it was because they couldn't be together as often as they wanted, but there was no wasted time in their relationship. Every moment was appreciated. They talked a lot, especially about their lives before they met. Amanda loved hearing Lee's stories of the exotic places he'd been to. And Lee liked hearing her more ordinary stories - about growing up in Virginia and the challenges of raising a family. There was no one in her life, she thought, who understood her quite the way he did.

Despite Francine's dire predictions, Amanda's career at the Agency didn't suffer from Lee's absence. It was true she wasn't as good in the field without him. She couldn't seem to find the same rhythm - that sixth sense that she'd shared with Lee - with anyone else. Her hand-to-hand skills improved marginally, and she passed her shooting qualifications by the skin of her teeth. (Leatherneck could only shake his head when she turned in her scores.) But her powers of observation grew ever keener - she could spot patterns faster than most agents. And her ability to read people made her a sought-after interrogator. Colleagues asked her to review surveillance tapes and consulted her about next moves. Billy promoted her not once, but twice, and she held the title Senior Analyst.

Billy maintained the Q Bureau but didn't name anyone to replace Lee as the head of it. He continued to hand cases to Amanda, having her analyze the majority of them from the safety of the Agency. For some reason, the odd situations (the "Q" for question mark) seemed to gravitate toward her and she could make sense out of things that puzzled other agents. Her closure rate was second to none. So she continued trekking up the stairs to the "film library," while Billy doled out the more dangerous aspects of the cases to agents who were handier with their weapons.

She sometimes wondered what Lee would think of the job now. Technology was transforming the spy business in ways they hadn't imagined three short years ago. Computers were faster and easier to use, putting a wealth of data at agents' fingertips. Cell phones were smaller, and signal coverage was broader. Amanda recalled the many times she'd raced to find a pay phone or left frantic messages for Lee at the Agency. Things certainly would have been simpler if she could have reached him right away.

More importantly for the Agency, the adversary was changing. President Reagan gave a speech at the Brandenburg Gate and the wall between East and West Berlin was coming down. The cold war dynamic appeared to be shifting…maybe even ending. Of course, that didn't mean that the Agency had stopped spying on Russia. As Billy's boss Dr. Smyth like to say (and God forgive Amanda for quoting Dr. Smyth), "a leopard doesn't change his spots just because the president gives a speech." But the intensity had changed, and there were other adversaries to worry about.

Along with keeping the marriage secret, Amanda had never confessed to her mother what she really did for a living. It was another case of letting sleeping dogs lie. And now, with fewer assignments in the field and regular hours, the cover story of working for IFF was even more plausible. Amanda still had the occasional night where she got called out unexpectedly, but she explained it away by saying someone on the film crew was sick and they needed her to fill in. Dotty knew that Lee was dead, of course. That fact was too big to hide. But she'd been told he was killed in a car accident while filming overseas, and thankfully, hadn't pressed Amanda for details. She was perceptive enough to know that her daughter continued to feel the loss.

Life had certainly changed, but Amanda couldn't say that it wasn't fulfilling. She had a rewarding career and the love of her family, and she was almost never alone. And yet, she sometimes found herself lonely.