Ivy ( Your Neglected Wife)

At the airport terminal, the urn containing her parents' ashes felt heavier than grief; it felt like an anchor. Ivy’s phone buzzed with a frantic, unknown number. She ignored it. It buzzed again. And again. Finally, annoyed, she answered, her voice flat. "What?" It was her soon-to-be-ex-husband, his voice stripped of its usual condescending calm and frayed with panic. "Ivy, thank God. You have to fix this. My company... the entire network is locked down. They're bleeding us dry, demanding a ransom I can't pay. They said... they said they were 'calling in a marker from the Ghost of Odessa.'" The name hit Ivy like a physical blow, a specter from a past she had buried under years of feigned domesticity. Odessa wasn't a place; it was the callsign for a ghost operation she had commanded—a scorched-earth mission that had officially never happened. The marker wasn't for his money. It was for her.

Ivy ( Your Neglected Wife)

At the airport terminal, the urn containing her parents' ashes felt heavier than grief; it felt like an anchor. Ivy’s phone buzzed with a frantic, unknown number. She ignored it. It buzzed again. And again. Finally, annoyed, she answered, her voice flat. "What?" It was her soon-to-be-ex-husband, his voice stripped of its usual condescending calm and frayed with panic. "Ivy, thank God. You have to fix this. My company... the entire network is locked down. They're bleeding us dry, demanding a ransom I can't pay. They said... they said they were 'calling in a marker from the Ghost of Odessa.'" The name hit Ivy like a physical blow, a specter from a past she had buried under years of feigned domesticity. Odessa wasn't a place; it was the callsign for a ghost operation she had commanded—a scorched-earth mission that had officially never happened. The marker wasn't for his money. It was for her.

The final box was sealed with a strip of packing tape, the sound a gunshot in the sterile silence of the penthouse. It was the last of me, the last evidence that I, Ivy, had ever tried to build a life here. The only thing left unpacked was a small, ornate urn of polished ebony, its surface cool and smooth under my fingertips. My parents. The only people who had ever looked at me and seen not what I could do for them, but who I simply was.

For three years, I had shed my skin. I'd folded my military uniforms into a trunk, locked away the memory of the g-force pressing me into the cockpit seat of a fighter jet, and buried the woman who could whisper in five languages and command a legion of the world's best hackers from a darkened room. I did it for love. For him.

I became the model corporate wife. I organized charity galas with the strategic precision of a covert op. I memorized the names of his investors' children and pets, my mind, which had once calculated missile trajectories, now calculating the perfect canapé-to-guest ratio. I diligently contributed to his company, smoothing over international contracts with my fluency, once even silently patching a critical vulnerability in their servers after overhearing his panicked CTO on the phone. I left the fix anonymous, a ghost in the machine I had once commanded.

And what did it earn me? Dismissive words. A pat on the head like one would give a clever pet. The worst were the nights with his friends. They'd sit on our thousand-dollar-a-section sofa, glasses of scotch in hand, and the mockery would begin. "How's the little homemaker?" James would sneer, his eyes roving over me as if I were part of the décor. "Planning your next garden party? Maybe take a baking class to really perfect the role."

He would just laugh, a hollow, grating sound. The condescension in his voice was a physical blow. They'd all chuckle, a pack of sycophants laughing at a lioness they mistook for a housecat. They never knew the woman sipping tea quietly in the corner had a kill count they couldn't comprehend, that she could break into their bank accounts and their firewalls before they could finish their insulting joke.