—Because she liked him.

—Because all evidence pointed to him telling the truth.

—Because she wasn’t sure where she’d be safe just yet, and as long as she wasn’t locked up, another twenty hours here made no difference.

She wandered while he slept, opening cabinets, peering into closets, everything except Liv’s room. The odd assortment of shoes and clothing, suitcases, camping supplies, and first aid confused her until she found the gun safe—locked—and the fireproof boxes, also locked—and she understood what this house really was, and was afraid to touch anything after that.

Jen and Chris arrived in the predawn and headed right back out again, with Liv Wilson in tow. They’d taken her to a hospital in Philadelphia according to Jack.

They could have gone round trip to Toronto for as long as they took.

They returned that evening, loaded up on groceries and supplies, and she kept out of sight at first, unsure of her place in the order of things, listening to them knock about in the kitchen, until curiosity and hunger got the best of her.

Jen was first to see her. She lit up with a welcoming smile and motioned her in, and it felt a lot like being a fly on the wall at another family’s holiday get-together, all the inside jokes and rapid-fire banter, Jack and Jen bustling around each other while cooking, and Chris trying to be useful but mostly getting underfoot.

They spoke openly about Frankfurt and Berlin and Prague in her presence, as if their secrets weren’t actually secrets. Glimpses of those same events as seen through their eyes were like stepping through the looking glass.

The war room’s data hadn’t been wrong, it’d been incomplete.

Where headquarters saw a legacy killer about to rendezvous with a handler in a lead-up to an assassination, there’d been a son trying to escape his mother’s past and hoping to find a father.

Everything had ultimately been about that, about finding Dmitry.

And Dmitry was still unfinished business.

Jen tugged a piece of paper from her pocket, unfolded it, and spread it flat on the table. Dot-matrix type and peg-holed edges pointed to a flight manifest printed directly off a gate agent’s printer. Jack and Chris leaned in for a closer look, and Jen said, “When I lost track of time in Frankfurt, it’s because I’d tailed the spotter to his flight and was trying to get this. If you still think he was Dmitry, then this is where we start hunting.”

She slapped a set of keys down on top of the paper.

“Took these off a couple Russians holed up in an apartment overlooking the café in Savignyplatz.” She nudged them in her brother’s direction. “Front door, apartment door,” she said. “They were set up long before we got there. What are the odds those weren’t Dmitry’s guys?”