I open my eyes slowly. Every part of me aches and throbs. The sun is so bright, it’s blinding me. I can’t keep my eyes open for more than a few seconds at a time. Squinting helps a bit. After a few moments, I manage to lift up my head and look around. I’m in the middle of a thick jungle. Mosquitos and other insects are crawling all over my body. I’m experiencing everything in third-person, as if I’m watching myself onscreen and none of this is actually happening in real life.

I notice that I’m dressed in the same pants and dress shirt that I wore to the wedding.

Except that the dress shirt is drenched in blood. I reach my hand and place it on my stomach. When I pull my hand away, it’s covered in blood. Suddenly, it’s no longer a third-person experience. My stomach hurts like hell and so does my leg. I was in shock. My training tells me that I was in shock, but now I’m coming out of it, and everything’s going to get a lot worse. Shit.

I look around again. The jungle is a flurry of activity. Insects and reptiles all around. People. I need people. I try to sit up, but I was shot in the stomach and curling up is pretty much out of the question. I try to check my body for other injuries. Both arms seem to move fine, but the left leg...something’s wrong with my left leg. I reach down as far as I can and feel the wetness of my pant leg. More blood. The calf throbs, sending shooting pains up to my spine. I’ve been shot there too. Perfect.

And then, somewhere far away I hear voices. Little kids. Laughing and giggling. With great difficulty, I turn my head in the direction from which the sounds are coming.

“Hey! Hey!” I yell. The first one is barely audible. My voice cracks and I cough. I try again. I don’t know how much time I have, but I’m pretty certain that they’re my only chance.

I try again in Spanish. “Hola! Hola!”

Their laughter stops as they walk up to me. The kids are two boys, no older than seven or eight. They are very small for their age – must be Mayan rather than Mexican.

“Help,” I whisper, first in English, then in Spanish. They stare at me and then talk amongst themselves. I can’t understand them. They must be speaking Mayan, an indigenous language of the region, and I don’t know any Mayan. Suddenly, one takes off. The other one stays with me. He rips some leaves off a nearby bush, cleans my leg wound and presses the leaf to it. He whispers something in Mayan. It has a calming effect on me. I lay my head back down on the ground and close my eyes.

I must’ve passed out, because the next thing I know, I wake up in a small wooden cabin with a beautiful old Mayan woman leaning over me and applying bandages to my body. She sings something quietly as she takes off one bandage and puts on another. When she sees that I’m awake, she smiles at me and continues her work without stopping. I look around the place. I’m lying on the floor in the main room. A few hammocks hang around me, attached to the walls. The cabin itself has a thin metal roof and no glass in the windows. Just shutters to keep the elements out. But most of the time, the windows and the door are wide open to let in the sunshine.

Somewhere near the front door, two boys sit on the floor, eating something wrapped in large green leaves. The place is filled with the most delicious aroma I’ve ever smelled – fresh tamales and spices. My mouth starts to water. As if she can read my mind, the woman finishes with my bandages and brings me a glass of water and a plate with an unwrapped tamale. My stomach throbs as I sit up a little against the wall, but it’s definitely a lot better. I stuff some rice and beans into my mouth and thank her by nodding my head. She just smiles and walks away as if recuperating recently-shot CIA agents who were left for dead in the jungle is something she deals with every day.

As I sit there, I see a large cockroach crawling on the ceiling. I have already seen geckos and an assortment of other little creatures, but this is the first cockroach that I’ve seen this close up. This area is filled with them – and they are huge with wings. I move my index finger a little and point out the cockroach, expecting the woman to scream and let her two boys deal with it, but everything about this place is a surprise. Without so much as a change in her expression, she walks over to the front door, grabs a flip-flop, and knocks it down on the ground. The cockroach opens its wings, but she catches it between her palms and hands it to one of the boys. From what I understand, she tells him to go deep into the jungle and let him go. Until this very moment, I still had some doubts. But as soon as I saw her do this, all of my worries vanish and I drift back to sleep certain that I would make a full recovery.

Over the next few days, I keep getting stronger and stronger. The woman continues to give me doses of her medicine, which she grinds up with a mortar and pestle from dried plant ingredients. After each dose, I always fall asleep and wake up half a day later, but every time I wake up, I feel stronger. I eat more, drink more, and sometime later, I even start to move around on my own. My stomach’s healing, and so is my leg. The woman seems pleased with my progress, nodding and smiling during each pivotal step in my recovery. Eventually, I start to make my way outside and walk more and more around the cabin. As I suspect, the woman lives all alone with the two kids in the middle of a thick jungle, with only a dirt road leading up to their house.

When it’s finally time for me to go, the goodbye is bittersweet. For more than a few days, I actually debated whether or not I should stay here for good. Everyone thinks I’m dead, so what if I actually stayed dead? I could start a whole new life. I used to think that a simple life is nothing to want, but now I have my doubts. This family seems much more content than many middle class families that I’ve seen in the States. They’re actually happy. Genuinely happy. Everything is simple here. Life is about all the little pleasures. Growing your own food. Going swimming under the waterfall. Playing with the chickens and the dogs. There are no worries about careers and mortgages. Those aren’t really my concerns, but I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t a little jealous about their way of existing in the world. And if I stayed here, then I definitely wouldn’t have to fulfill the rest of my contract to Truman and that organization, which I’ve come to despise.

And I probably would stay here, were it not for one person. The person who I thought about day and night during my recovery.

Avery.

I should not have kept this secret from her, but how could I have known what would happen? What the hell was she doing there on the beach? Without context, I must’ve looked like a murderer to her.

I don’t want to admit it, but I’m a little more than terrified of her not believing me. When I find her again, will she believe me? I mean, isn’t being a CIA agent some perfect lie to cover up being an actual murderer? I think I heard that killers use that lie on more than one occasion in television shows and movies.

What if she asks for proof? I don’t have any. That’s the point of being covert. I’m not even on CIA’s regular payroll. Only a handful of people within the CIA even know about Daffodil. Besides the extra phone, which is encrypted, I don’t have any other paperwork or physical object proving that I work there and that I was authorized – no, forced – to do what I did. And of course, there’s no way that Truman would ever corroborate anything I’m saying to a civilian. He’s not the sentimental type. So, if she doesn’t believe me…that’s that. She’ll be terrified of me, and I can’t scare her more. She deserves better than that.

If she doesn’t believe me, then I’ll come back here, I decide. I’ll build myself a little hut a little bit away from this one. I’ll help the woman with her animals and the gardening. I’ll play with the kids. I’ll learn Mayan. I’ll start a new life.