Sovereign staff filled his narrow home. Snaps Kennedy. Mitchell Fox. His research assistant, David Tenchant, and Tenchant’s pregnant wife, Maggie. Tom Burkey and Karen Forsythe, photographers he worked with when Snaps wasn’t available. Two senior editors who were having an affair they thought no one knew about. Staff called them Tweedledee and Tweedledum behind their backs. Other faces. A handful of hipsters dressed like summer lumberjacks he assumed were from television. More strangers sipping mimosas filled his hallway, all the way back to his kitchen.

A familiar voice rose above the din. “Dr. Livingstone, I presume!” Klay’s editor, Alexander Porfle, made his way forward from the dining room. Porfle was lean, a few years older than Klay, and British. He had narrow-set blue eyes, sparse hair he parted on the side, and that stiff-legged, terrified posture they appreciate at the Westminster dog show. He wore a navy-blue blazer over an open-collared white dress shirt and penny loafers, no socks.

Porfle thrust out his hand to shake Klay’s, saw the sling, and awkwardly patted Klay’s chest instead. He turned to the room. “We’re all sorry for your loss, Tom. But it is a reminder, a lethal reminder to us all, that it is a dangerous world out there our Mr. Klay inhabits. He is—and I have long said this, so I don’t feel it inappropriate to repeat myself now—a sniper, a man who trains his rifle on unsavory human beings few of us can even countenance, let alone confront.”

“Oh, honestly, Alex.” Hadley Porfle pushed her husband aside and kissed Klay lightly. “We won’t stay,” she whispered into his ear. “I am sorry for your loss.”

“That’s what he is,” Porfle continued, for everyone to hear. “And you all should know it. Mr. Klay, our Good Christian Soldier, identifies targets with me on the scope, and he takes them down. This was a small setback,” he said, turning to Klay. “We’ll get that bastard, my boy. Your pen and my pencil. The old Sov is behind you.” Porfle raised his glass. “To Tom Klay, master of the upright pronoun!”

“Hear! Hear!”

Klay thanked Porfle, drank his champagne, greeted colleagues clustered in his front room, and then made his way deliberately down the crowded narrow hallway to the kitchen. He didn’t recognize a single person nibbling catered Greek food, sipping white wine, talking across his granite island, leaning against the stainless refrigerator.

Klay didn’t cook, but shopping for this house he’d liked the idea of himself as a cook, with a wife like Erin who liked to cook, too. She’d had the same idea. And though the house needed plenty of work elsewhere, they’d walked in, seen the farmhouse sink, the gas-fueled Viking stove, and the Sub-Zero refrigerator, and they felt sure this would be their home.