Many of the ideas here come from an interview with Alison Wright (Martha) on Daniel Montgomery's podcast, Gold Derby. Please note, in the narrative below, 'Jennifer' is Elizabeth Jennings in disguise, and 'Clark' is Philip Jennings.

LYNNETTE

I hadn't realized how much I'd wanted to flee Colorado until Lynnette visited.

It was just after I had got on permanent for the Division chief of Counter Intelligence. Lynnette had gushed over it all, thought I was one of Hoover's G-men - her dad had all the comics portraying the glamourous FBI in the 1930s and 40s. I had to dissuade her of the image, both for me as well as for the real agents.

Me, I kept appointments, ferried documents around and, as my boss said, I made the Division chief always look good. Look prepared. Never late for a meeting. The agents in C.I., it was mainly 99% boredom and 1% sheer terror.

But Lynnette wanted to know why it had been, that I'd cut myself off from Colorado. We weren't highschool kids any more, I said. In a hushed tone in the D.C. coffee shoppe, she made mention of my brief pregnancy back home. Before I could say anything, she said in an even more quiet voice, "miscarriages are brutal. My mom had three of them before I was born. She said she never got over them."

In the intervening years, Lynnette had come out to D.C. on only one other occasion, where she tried to look me up, that is. Hers was the last voice I had erased from my answering machine before leaving that fateful morning.

That morning when Clark had driven beside me, rolled down the window, and said, "Get in."

Life. Now very different. Besides mom and dad, Lynnette would have been one I'd have leaned on as a single parent. But I was here, and they were there. Me, I was now Марта, русская.

OBSESSING ABOUT LONG LOST EVENTS

Yet, here I am in Russia. It's where my life is. It's where my daughter is. I have 'family', one that mom and dad will never see. Even the Soviet Union is gone, it was nice to know you. Now, Russia's leader is going to the West seeking help, presumably, in transitioning from communism.

Which, from everything I've seen, was not that great. It's beyond me why people fought tooth and nail for the Soviet Union. Gave it their all. For empty supermarket shelves.

When I think it through, Clark Westerfeld made sense. But I'm obsessed with 'thinking it through', aren't I? Repeatedly. The same event, run again and again. So much of the first years with Clark, they were what I'd always dreamed of with a man - with someone who I would call 'husband'. Now I replayed even the smallest bit of chitchat at one of our most ordinary of breakfasts.

'Thinking it through' always included that perhaps not a true word ever escaped his mouth. Not initially, not when we were courting. Not ever. But dammit, I clung to those early conversations. It was the only 'data', who cared if it had been a lie?

Soon, I will have to face what I did, and how I could have been so stupid. My love for Clark was genuine, it's just that Clark Westerfeld never existed. Clark had a sister, Jennifer. I'd first met her at the wedding. Then there was the night I could not get a hold of him, and who should show up at my door? Jennifer.

More than anything else, her random appearance at my place that night deadened any lingering doubts I may have had, not that then I'd had a lot. The whole thing was so disarming. The only nagging doubt? Why was Jennifer, his sister, so interested in Clark's sex-life? Or was that the wine talking?

It's pretty plain now that she was not and was never his sister. When I think this through, I have to constantly and violently remember - the man was a KGB operative, good at what he did. I'd heard of 'honey trapping', but that's what female agents did to men who were their marks. What did male agents need to do to successfully 'honey trap' a woman. Someone like me?

That kind of honey-trapping needed a sister. It's what Clark Westerfeld did. I am driving myself crazy, overthinking all of it - overthinking the minutiae of every conversation, every love-making, everything. Why did I meet Clark's mother only once? In a marriage, even one as bizarre as ours, there was a lot of minutiae - I'm not so sure I have fully appreciated the training accorded to a KGB agent. I start the thinking-process about him as KGB, but minutes later I'm replaying old events as if we'd simply had a slightly abnormal marriage. It was crazy making.

I was in love. Was he? Ever? If not, then why did he… STOP!

Yet at the end, he was the one who had answered honestly. Brutally. I'd asked him when - not if, but when he'd accompany me to Moscow, when we would be together again. Even after meeting Jennifer downstairs at Gabriel's house - even after feeling within my bones that Clark and her were closer than mere siblings…

…. even then he did not lie. I mean, probably few moments of truth ever escaped Clark's lips. But when I asked when he would join me in Moscow, he said honestly, 'Never'. How did I know he had been honest?

It was exactly what I didn't want to hear. And he knew it.

That was one of the precious few moments of clarity for me. Of who Clark was, of how stupid I had been. Yet in this Moscow apartment with my daughter finally asleep, as I drift off I fully expect him to come in the door asking how my day had been.

JENNIFER THE REALIST

While I am obsessing, let me include one last thing.

When was the other time when I has forced - I mean forced - to accept that I'd crossed a line, a line of no return?

It was when I had been on the run from Gabriel in the Metro region of Washington, and I'd called Clark for help from a park pay-phone.

Clark had implored me to stay put, that he would come and get me. Even then I was unsure. My mind was telling me to run, but my heart was still with Clark. Maybe, just maybe (so said my heart) I was missing something, something that would make everything right again. Something I'd missed that would restore me back to the desk in front of Frank Gaad's office, restore me to the bed at my suite with my husband.

When had all that doubt disappeared?

When Jennifer showed up, out of the blue. She, like Clark, tried to reel me in with comforting words. Yes, words that were lies, from start to finish - but remember, my heart and head were badly misaligned. My heart was wanting to go with her to see her brother, my husband. Once again, my head was saying 'run', and if not 'run', then 'scream'. When Jennifer came towards me, I was just readying myself to pierce the ears of everyone within a ten-mile radius.

Then she hit me. It wasn't so much that she hit me, she so obviously knew where to hit me. In the stomach, at the place where all my breath withered away, pitifully I might add. No screaming for me, she had assured that. My breath lamely seeped out of my mouth with a pitiful groan that embarrasses me to this day.

It wasn't just that she had to hold me up from collapsing. The punch had not been that hard - not that I had had any experience with being punched. Why was I collapsing? At that moment it became abundantly and ontologically clear that Jennifer, too, was KGB. Trained. Methodical, in the way Stan Beeman used to describe. Yes, please think me stupid, she'd been back at Gabriel's, so what else could she have been? Until that punch I was hoping against hope that if Clark couldn't fix this, maybe Jennifer could.

With that punch, my heart finally listened to my head. I was toast. It was unavoidable. It became plain to me in that moment that I would never see my parents again. It was plain that Clark had been playing me like a fiddle this whole time. That 'Clark' never existed.

Thinking about it, Jennifer was equally amazing in how she maneuvered me back to Gabriel's. She was all business. I knew from her manner - without sounding too melodramatic, a professional 'spy' manner - that I would never see my desk at Counter Intelligence again, and that I'd never again see Colorado's mountains. Or Lynnette. Or mom. Or dad.

That punch turned the page, to where I am now. A single-parent, in Moscow. On an SVR pension. With a modest apartment on which I pay no rent. My status as a 'Hero of the Soviet Union' had been grandfathered into hero's status in Russia too. While people in my building generally keep to themselves, they seem to know 'who' I am and what I have done for Russia.

Which I haven't. It had been all Clark's manipulation. But here, today, I sense that people in the building treat me and my daughter with respect and admiration.

DON'T LET ME FOOL YOU

Don't think that I have stopped obsessing about minutiae of my 'marriage'. Don't think I've figured this out. Don't think that I no longer catch myself replaying specific times with Clark, over and over and over again.

Just this morning, as I'd dropped my daughter off at day-care and was on the trolley to the TASS office, I saw a woman - a dead ringer for Jennifer, Clark's 'sister'. It was not until the lunch break at TASS, that a colleague said that I looked preoccupied. I had also not done a stick of work on the translating of documents assigned to me. I was just sitting there, staring.

Was Jennifer Clark's sister? I rehearsed it, yet again. For the umpteenth time. It occurred to me this morning, that Jennifer would have made the perfect wife for Clark. Me, I was understanding and in listening mode with him. I tried to help him through the tough work he'd purported to be in - The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility.

It occurred to me, that I had never really helped Clark through any of that struggle. It was fiction. But that Jennifer could. Jennifer would lay down the law with him - from what little I knew of the man, that's what he'd respond to. Not a 'supportive' wife like me, but a woman who would challenge him.

Me, I've just this minute finished crying. Why was I crying?

Because from the moment I'd seen that woman on the trolley, to just now, my head finally got through to tell me that the whole drama I'd spent the day obsessing over - none of it was real. None. Yet I knew I would do it again.

Did it really matter if Jennifer had been Clark's wife? If I'd asked either of them and they told me, any answer they gave would be a lie. Except Clark had not lied. He'd told me the brutal truth for once.

Did they have kids? If so, what would it have been like to grow up in a house like that?

There I go again. Inventing stuff four steps removed from anything real, and wasting time obsessing about it.

Jesus, I miss my mom and dad.

CHRIS AMADOR

Back to what I'd been asked to write about. I think I had left my narrative at meeting Clark, and being so attracted to him, to his vulnerability. Mainly his passion for cleaning up Counter Intelligence from the flaws I'd been complaining about for years.

What does my brain tell me now, when it outpaces my heart?

That Clark may have had something to do with Chris Amador's murder. I mean, Clark even told me about Eugene Craft. From this vantage point, my brain must have known that Clark was in over his head, and by extension so was I.

Amador, though, was just so annoying. But he was Stan's friend, so I didn't want to think about it.