OneJoyTbilisi, GeorgiaOctober 7, 2021Joy is called a trailing spouse. It’s a tidy, if slightly condescending, term used by the U.S. government to refer to the partner of an employee who is posted abroad with their family.
Her husband was a Justice Department employee assigned to the American Embassy in Tbilisi, Georgia. It was his first posting overseas after a career in U.S. federal law enforcement working organized crime cases. Back in the States, Joy worked as an advanced-practice nurse specializing in anesthesiology. She had left behind a thriving practice stateside to support her husband’s career opportunity abroad. Joy, as part of her doctoral thesis, took on a little medical consulting work, but mostly she viewed living in Tbilisi as an adventure for her family, which included her eight-year-old son.
They lived in Dighomi, an upper-middle-class neighborhood of mostly single-family homes in northeast Tbilisi, popular with U.S. Embassy families. On a Thursday afternoon, Joy was home a little early to meet her son’s bus from the international school where he went for a half day. She’d driven her husband’s car that day and pulled into their driveway just in time. On school days the bus would bounce up the single-lane gravel road, punctual almost to the minute. With a few minutes to spare before the drop-off, Joy decided to get a load of laundry going and ran up to the second floor.
The laundry room was on the front side of the house, with a window facing the street. From up there, she could see when the bus was coming. The vantage point also allowed Joy to peer over the top of the high plaster walls that lined the narrow road and blocked the view of her neighbors’ homes from street level. From the window, there was a full view above the wall of the house across the street. It was bigger than their house, and there was a regular rotation of people coming in and out because the owners rented it on Airbnb. That house had a turret like a medieval castle in a theme park with a glass door and a Juliet balcony that looked straight into her laundry room.
Suddenly, as Joy reached into the dryer to pull out an armful of whites, she was hit by a piercing sound in her left ear and was blasted by a wave of pressure that knocked her sideways to the right. It came from the direction of the window. She was overcome by an instantly brutal headache as if she’d just been hit in the head with something hard. She gripped the washing machine to steady herself in a room that suddenly had no up or down, as if it were spinning off its axis. She stood there trying to process what was happening. Seconds passed, maybe minutes.
Joy had gone through the State Department’s spouse overseas survival training, where she had learned about getting off the “X,” moving out of the target zone if she ever felt that something wasn’t right. But that training was for explosive devices, not for something like this. What even was this? She finally moved away from the window and out the door of the laundry room, lurching toward the primary bedroom with its en suite bathroom, where she projectile-vomited across the floor in the direction of the toilet. In the bathroom the floor seemed to return to level and the pain seemed to switch off as quickly as it had switched on.
Her son’s school bus would be coming up the street any minute and nothing was going to keep Joy from being outside when the bus came. She didn’t hear any gunfire or explosions, so she decided to take her chances. She grabbed her phone from the bedside table to call her husband and made her way downstairs, steadying herself on the banister.
A video monitor to the left of the front door shows the view of the street outside the wall of their yard. Parked in front of the house directly across the street was a black Mercedes SUV, right below the laundry room window. She’d never seen that car there before; it wasn’t the type of car she had typically seen on her street. On instinct, she took a picture of the monitor with her cellphone.
Joy’s ears were still ringing and she’d just puked, but there was adrenaline pumping through her body. She opened the door and stumbled through the driveway gate to the road. Despite the ground shifting and sliding underneath her, she was able to hold her phone still enough to get another picture of the SUV and the license plate.
As she lowered her phone she locked eyes with a man standing behind the vehicle. He was taller and blonder than any of her Georgian neighbors. She’d never seen him on the street before. Well dressed in a suit, he stood on the dusty gravel and stared at her as his eyes narrowed. She felt a chill. After a second or two, he broke the gaze, jumped in the idling SUV, and drove off.
Copyright © 2026 by Michael Rey. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
