So this is what it comes down to. I’m being asked if I’m happy in the FBI.

I’ve asked myself that question a lot lately.

It’s the kind of routine I always longed for after growing up in the back of a tour bus, sleeping in airports; the FBI has a kind of stability I always craved. I wanted to help people. I just didn’t know it would be so hard.

People have been waiting for me to slip up, for my past to catch up with me. “We’re show people,” Grandfather used to say. Show people, with our own values, our own way of doing things. Gypsies who work in the open. People like us don’t belong in places like this. We belong to the fringe. Some of us, even people close to me, belong on the other side—in those files we search through . . .

My eyes drift toward the magazine. I get the feeling I’m about to be set up for a fall. I pull the folder out of the stack and flip it open to show the magazine cover.

“Am I here because of this?”

3

AILES NODS AT THE MAGAZINE. It’s me on the cover at nineteen. I’m wearing a red sequined tuxedo jacket with my cleavage on display and what could debatably be called a thong, although I was wearing flesh-colored tights under the fishnets.

Magician Magazine. At the time I was proud to be the youngest female magician to ever grace the cover of a major magic magazine. Even if the cover suggested the kind of thing that comes to your mailbox in a brown wrapper.

After Grandfather taught me that first trick, I pushed to learn more and be in the show more. Neither he nor Father would let me onstage until I could perform flawlessly. Better than them.

I produced playing cards from my hands until the skin cracked and bled. I didn’t go on dates. I didn’t have friends. I had magic.

I needed to prove that I could be just as good as them. When I was fifteen I booked myself as a featured act at the national magic convention. I won that audience over. Grandfather still took time.

“You’re just a novelty,” he’d tell me.

“Magic is a novelty act,” I’d remind him.

He would puff away at his cigar and just stop arguing. I wasn’t going to be a pushover like his sons. I was in awe of my grandfather, but I knew he was just a man. My father didn’t have his technical skills and mind, and my uncle lacked his charisma, but people told me I had both. People except for my grandfather.

The year I got the cover of the magazine, the International Magic Alliance also named me magician of the year. Younger than my father or grandfather. They treated it like a joke. They didn’t want to admit that I’d done it mostly on my own.

My famous last name helped. It’s probably why my father got it a decade earlier. But it didn’t help me keep practicing on the concrete loading dock in freezing rain while I waited for them to finish their after-show drinks at the bar across the street. It didn’t help me get up at 4 a.m. to practice so I could have enough time to catch the city bus to Venice Beach Middle School—where I’d had to register myself.