And that’s why when they ate breakfast they focused too intently on setting the table and clearing it, why they brushed their teeth in silence, got dressed, made sure that Luiza was fed and changed, nodded discreetly to each other as he left to drive the boys to school, and nodded to each other again when he came back.

And through it all they never spoke until they were forced to.

“Piet?”

He heard Zofia open the creaking door of the basement and shout his name.

“You need to come up.”

He’d just gone down to his workroom and then to the even smaller room inside it and was opening the safe. But he closed it hastily. He knew that voice—serious and worried.

“What is it?”

He hurried up the basement stairs.

“Zofia, it . . . sounds important.”

She was sitting at the kitchen table. A package lay in front of her.

“This came for you.”

Not especially big, not conspicuous in any obvious way. Other than what was written on its upper side.

To Piet Koslow Hoffmann

Just like before.

Typewriter, no return address, contents that could only mean trouble.

That’s why they both glowered at it, in their own ways.

“Did it arrive . . . just now?”

“Yes.”

“But the mail never comes this . . .”

“A courier company. The messenger knocked on the door just as you were headed downstairs.”

She looked at him. Expecting him to tell her, finally.

Now that it was so obvious.

That the reason for the uneasiness of the last twenty-four hours was lying there on the table in front of her.

“What’s in it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Piet, I know you know.”

“I really don’t.”

And that was the truth, at last. He had no idea. Who, what, or why.

The package was left on the kitchen table. Unopened. A symbol of everything he couldn’t say. And they both avoided it, until Zofia and Luiza left for their morning walk, which Juan would follow her on, since Nic was at the school with his brother watching Hugo and Rasmus.

He waited just long enough to be sure they were out of sight.

Then he pulled out a kitchen chair and sat down.

Next to his fury. Next to his fear.

Running his fingers lightly over the brown paper.

He pressed it gently.

Something hard inside. Roughly the size of a cell phone.

He should be careful. Take the package far, far away. Absolutely not open it here, unprotected, in his own home.

He tore open the brown paper.

Ripped through the padding.

It didn’t just feel like a phone, it was one. Wrapped in even more paper with more anonymous lines of text.