Sam recalled how he’d felt, hearing her describe it all. Her mind worked exactly like his. She was methodical and careful. She was okay with taking risks, but only when they were necessary, and she took them in the smartest possible way. She wasn’t fucking around.

He followed her into her house; it was the first time he’d been inside. The place was about like his, but more broken-in. There were no movers’ boxes stacked along the walls. It had the feel of a house where everyone had found their little rhythms and patterns over the course of a few months. Things were put away and arranged and settled.

Dani led him down the hall to her room. They passed the den, and a bedroom that must belong to her parents. When she’d first mentioned that both her mom and dad had jobs, it triggered an obvious question: did her mom work for the military, too?

Dani didn’t know. Her mom claimed to work in an office in Brenner—some local company that sold farm equipment. Maybe that was the truth. There was no way to check on it—no way to hide the microcassette recorder in her purse without her finding it.

The whole idea raised another question for Sam: what about his mom? In L.A. she had worked part-time on the board of a charity organization. From what Sam had heard, she was planning to still do some of that work by phone, after moving to Ashland. It didn’t sound like she planned to have a job locally. The question was simply how much she knew about all this. How much did she know about her husband’s new line of work?

She had to know some of it. How far in the dark could his dad hope to keep her about something that big? And for how long? It was one thing to pull the wool over your kid’s eyes, but your wife? Sam thought of the strange tension that had been in the air between his parents, for the weeks leading up to the move. It had been understandable enough at the time, but it made more sense now.

Dani pushed open her door, and Sam followed her in.

The room was like the rest of the house: settled, moved into. Still, it wasn’t at all the way a kid’s room should be. It wasn’t plastered with posters or photos, or overflowing with any of the hundred little things that marked a room as really belonging to someone. Dani hadn’t claimed this space as her own. Maybe she had started to do that, in those early weeks when she didn’t know the truth about this town. Had started to and then stopped. The thought of it crept under Sam’s skin. Another little tap of the hammer, driving home the reality of his new world.