Disclaimer: I don't own the situations or characters portrayed herein. I'm just playing with them for a while.
The Final Time
He followed her into the house and shut the door behind them. Things would be all right.
He was back on the right track with the boys, even Jamie. The vision of horses and softball games began to take shape again, helped along no doubt by the contract burning a hole in his pocket.
It was a letter from the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research, congratulating him on his new position as a Senior Consultant of International Diplomatic Intelligence Relations. There were several perks to the job. The pay had jumped, as Billy said it would, to GG-17, and 72k a year was not too shabby. The hours were better too, with paid overtime. He would be allowed to hire his own support staff.
Better still was the fact that they had offered no resistance to the idea of him marrying in the future, even hypothetically marrying his own secretary. He'd asked these questions in such a roundabout way that he doubted they had realized he'd asked them, but he had.
It was as safe a job as Lee Stetson would ever be comfortable with, and the best part was that he could finally tell Phillip and Jamie what he did for a living. They would probably think it was more dangerous than making documentary films, but he would know better.
Of course Amanda came first, and he would have to break the news to her gently. Perhaps she wouldn't want to leave the agency, and he would have to accept that. But he had to leave. He had been running for so long, and he couldn't keep on running right past all his opportunities for bettering his life and his future.
Billy had seen it, long before he'd ever told Lee about the job offer. He'd seen it back on that October day when Lee had brought a civilian down to the bullpen and let her explain how she had rescued him. He'd seen it when he suggested Amanda for so many of Lee's missions. He had obviously been rooting for the two of them for years, and he'd known that a relationship could never really happen at the agency. It had just taken Lee some time to catch up.
All this had been jumbled up in his mind all day, ever since he accepted the State Department job, but giving Jamie the camera had given him an idea for how to broach the subject with his wife.
He had new lenses, now. He wasn't focused on the temporary details that flashed into focus and blurred back into the background. He could see the whole picture. He could see the Arlington house and the Rockville house that was, mysteriously, still on the market. He could see their family growing and thriving, maybe not numerically but in love and devotion.
As he took a deep breath and planned how he would tell her about the job tonight, he repeated the thought he'd had earlier.
Things would be all right.
