I spend the next few hours meticulously scrutinizing every detail of my living room, dining room, kitchen, mudroom, and bathroom. But for the life of me I can’t find one thing so much as an inch out of place. If someone did search my house, then I’m impressed, because I would never be able to tell.

“November?” Ash says, and I turn to find him standing in my dad’s bedroom door. “I found something.”

For a second, I’m confused. “Really?”

“Did you think I wouldn’t?” he says, and I follow him into my dad’s bedroom.

“Truthfully, no,” I admit. “I never spent much time in my dad’s room. My dad didn’t spend much time in here, either—not since my mom died, anyway.”

Ash stands near my dad’s neatly made bed and gestures to the folded quilt. “Check the second navy square on the bottom left.”

I move around the bed and run my fingers over the square he indicated. The seams are straight and nothing is amiss. I put my hand under the quilt and inspect the other side. Everything feels perfectly as it should be. I give Ash a questioning look.

He directs my hand to the corner where the stitching is almost imperceptibly thicker. He uses my fingers to pinch the seam, and sure enough there’s something in there. I pick at it until the threads separate, then use my nails to pull out a tiny piece of tightly rolled paper.

On the inside is written:

Meet me under the city.

I stare up at Ash, confused, trying to figure out why in the heck my dad would leave me a message in a place I would never find it. “This doesn’t…”

“This doesn’t what?” Ash asks, reading my expression.

“Honestly? I want to be excited that you found something, but if this wasn’t written in my dad’s handwriting, I wouldn’t believe it was from him.”

Ash’s eyebrows push together. “Are you positive it’s his handwriting? Because the seam was repaired where the note was and it looks like it wasn’t the first time. If you ask me, another Strategia already found it.”

“I’m positive,” I say, and I stare at it like it’s going to sprout teeth. A Strategia was in my house. My stomach does a quick flip and I’m suddenly immensely grateful Ash stopped me from running up to Emily. If someone was watching, I could have gotten us all killed.

I hold the note up to the light, but the paper is thick, with no watermarks and no indentations from previous writing. “The thing is, it’s not like Dad’s usual clues. I don’t have any idea what this means. We mostly never leave Pembrook, much less the state of Connecticut, and we certainly never went underground anywhere.”