Disclaimer: I don't own the situations or characters portrayed herein. I'm just playing with them for a while.
A Lovely Little Affair
It was something she had suspected for a long time: Amanda was far, far more important to Lee than Lee was to Amanda. It made Francine's reputedly stone-cold heart ache.
It wasn't that she blamed Amanda. Somehow something had shifted in Francine's approach to the other woman, and she, like Lee himself, no longer depended on Amanda for his happiness. But it hurt, all the same, that her best and oldest friend finally had someone in his life who saw him, truly, for the man he was — but did not reciprocate his feelings.
She spent entirely too much time, these days, puzzling out the ins and outs of the strange relationship she saw developing in front of her. Her resolution to remain hands-off in Lee and Amanda's relationship — friendship? affair? — had fallen by the wayside a long time ago, but she still made a halfhearted attempt to at least pretend to be disinterested.
It was increasingly difficult to keep up the pretense.
Billy sent Amanda off on another babysitting venture of a reasonably attractive restorer of art and manuscripts. (Her "Oooh" of interest, Francine saw, had not gone unnoticed by Lee.)
It wasn't fair to assume that Amanda's completely routine assignment would end up as a disaster, but Amanda was, for lack of a better word, ill-fated when it came to things like this, and the fact that Mercury was in retrograde made Francine uneasy for no good reason.
She didn't have time to think about Amanda and the dimple-chinned art restorer, though. She had to focus on the overwhelming amount of bad international news that had greeted her immediately after she arrived at the agency in the morning.
Red February, a terrorist group, was active. Possibly it was active in the kidnapping of an Italian civilian in Rome. They were definitely involved in a possible attempt on one of D.C.'s monuments. There had also been a random Swiss bank robbery, which seemed wrong on many levels.
She had to go to Dulles with Lee, to extract (or wheedle or sweet-talk or bribe) information out of Murray, a dry-handed security guard with an oozy, oily personality. She did a lot for this job. She chased down terrorists. She apprehended traitors. She got shot or drugged. She even stooped to glad-handing Murray.
And then a Committee arrived. Committees always showed up at the worst possible moment. They were like locusts who flew in the week before the harvest. They were like funeral processions on a morning when she was already late to work. They were like hail when she left the house without a hat because she had just gotten her hair done.
Billy sent her off to "acquaint the congressmen with logistic analysis, counter-revolutionary profiles and statistical operational procedures". It was what she said every time a Committee spawned on agency grounds. Her presentation was always the same, with small changes. Always, always, the result was the same: funds that they desperately needed were cut, sometimes by half.
Still, she would rather explain finances than have Lee's assignment: explaining his expense account. She was willing to bet that it had calmed down considerably during the past two years, but some of the more memorable expenses before then were truly staggering in their strangeness.
She knew of at least two sets of horseshoes, a stained-glass window, a sterling silver tea service, a pair of fluorescently pink soccer shorts, a set of bronze candlesticks, a rolling pin for making ravioli, three corsets for the Hungarian trapeze artists with the unpronounceable names, a rare copy of Paradise Lost, a full Russian encyclopedia set, thirteen tortoise-shell hair combs, an antique Chinese jadeite incense burner, two busts of President Millard Fillmore, a surfboard, an ice-cream truck, a Japanese Maple tree, a hot air balloon, a maroon paisley loveseat, and a Jersey cow. None of these would be fun to explain.
So it was no surprise that Amanda's assignment was hardly at the forefront of her mind.
She was reminded of it, forcibly, the next morning in Billy's office when they were told that the girl Red February had kidnapped was Alan Chamberlain's sister. Amanda was involved, again, in a disaster.
Lee told Billy he took Amanda off the case, but Francine had her doubts. Her doubts were strengthened when she saw Lee pause by the phone on the way to their rendezvous with Chamberlain. His fist clenched the way it always did when he was frustrated.
Had Lee lied to Billy, or just been overly confident that he would be able to reach Amanda easily? She didn't know.
She led Chamberlain's sister away, chatting amiably in Italian. Her ankle was still hurting rather badly from when Necci had shoved her away earlier, but at least the case had now been resolved.
She glanced back before they got into the agency car. Lee was standing, rooted to the spot. Beyond him, Amanda had just kissed Alan Chamberlain.
Her heart sank.