Free The Expats by Chris Pavone

plant had closed—an electronics manufacturer—so they both had part-time jobs, inadequate or nonexistent health insurance, when they got sick. They were screwed. It was inhumane, how they were treated.”
    “Is that why you’ve moved abroad?”
    “No. We’re here for the experience. But I guess I do carry some resentment. Or I don’t know if resentment is right. Disappointment? Don’t get me wrong: I love America. But not everything about it. So my sister, she slipped through the cracks of the disaster of our family. She became her own disaster.”
    While Emily lost herself in alcohol and drugs, Kate buried herself in a tomb of numbness, unattached and unattachable, a lonely workaholic. She also began to develop one of the roles that would define her adulthood: martyr. The primary caregiver and a crucial wage-earner and theperson who did the housework. The sacrifices; the suffering. Kate had never realized, until its disappearance, that she’d relished that facet of herself.
    “Eventually, I had to give up caring about Emily. She was beyond helping.”
    “How do you stop talking to your sister?”
    “She was never good about staying in touch. So once both our parents had died, and we weren’t close to any of the extended family, we didn’t need to communicate about anything. It was easy for me to simply stop calling her.”
    This was not true. Kate had diligently stayed in touch with Emily for years after their parents were dead, all throughout Kate’s college and Emily’s slow descent into destitution. But when Kate joined the Company, maintaining a relationship with Emily became not just a personal trial but a professional handicap. A liability that could be used against her. Kate knew she had to rid herself of the compassion that she’d held on to, needed to strip it away, like ripped and soiled clothing, beyond cleaning or repair, directly into the trash.
    She heard from Emily a few times over that first CIA year, messages that went unreturned. Then not again for a half-decade, when Emily needed to be bailed out of jail. But Kate, in El Salvador, couldn’t help. When she returned to the States, she wouldn’t.
    “So then Dexter’s family,” Kate continued. “His mother, Louise, is dead, and his father has remarried a dreadful woman. His brother, also, is dead.”
    “His brother? How awful.”
    “His name was Daniel. He was a lot older than Dexter; he’d been born when Andre and Louise were just children, really. Daniel ended up joining the Marines, in the late eighties. A few years later, he found himself out of the Marines, officially, and in the Balkans, unofficially, as one of those so-called military advisers, who we’ve now renamed private contractors. But same as it ever was, Daniel was a mercenary.”
    “Wow.”
    “His body was found in an alley in Dubrovnik.”
    “My God,” Julia said flatly. She seemed surprisingly unsurprised; or conversely she was so shocked she was stunned into numbness. Kate couldn’t tell which.
    “Yes. So anyway”—shifting gears—“that was probably much more of a long-winded answer than you bargained for to the question ‘Do you miss your family?’ ”

    AFTER KATE UNBURDENED her family saga, Julia told Kate the story of her meeting Bill. She’d been donating her design services to the silent auction portion of a fund-raiser, trying to kill a whole flock of birds—charity, networking, client-attracting, socializing—with one stone. And Bill was doing what young finance guys habitually did, which was spending excessive amounts of money on trying to attract the right type of woman, aka an unmarried socialite, which was the breed of twenty-something female that tended to populate five-hundred-dollar-a-head cocktail parties that benefited prep-school scholarships for inner-city kids.
    Bill assumed that Julia was one such woman. By the time she disabused him of his misconception, three hours later, they were naked. This was a state of affairs that