But as I tried to find something that worked, Vee answered. “She’s out a lot these days. Drinking and such. With friends. Only she turns her phone off so my dad can’t track her.”

Hansen looked at me. I nodded. I could think of nothing to add that was not a lie.

“Perhaps we should write that your wife could not be reached, Mr. Curtis?”

I could see what he was thinking, though he tried to disguise it: the cuckold and the wife-errant.

“Okay,” I said. “Thank you.”

“I’ll put a uniformed officer at the entrance to your apartment,” he said.

“We need two,” said Vee.

“Vee,” I said. “Please.”

“Dad, she came in through the back.” She turned to him. “The officer at the front should sit in the kitchen. That way they cover both entrances.”

“All right,” said Mikkel Hansen. He looked at his watch. “I’ll make a few calls.”

It was half past four. I gave him a key. I closed the blinds on the front of the house, double-locked the front door.

Franklin, Vee, and I lay on the double bed in my bedroom, arms entangled. Vee kept getting up to peer through the window blind; it was only when the uniformed officer appeared on the grass below that she wrapped herself tightly around Franklin and seemed to fall into the deepest sleep.

Elsa returned an hour later. She was red-eyed and sour-breathed, her fists clenching and unclenching, her breathing ragged. She had spent the night pacing the shore, she told me later, had come home ready to lay her cards on the table. But she could taste, she said, the tension in the apartment. She knew at once that something very serious was wrong. What cards? I should have said. What do you want to confess, Elsa?

I was so strung out I didn’t ask.

We stood in silence in Franklin’s room, where some admirer of the Andersens had stood above our baby’s crib, spraying protect in red letters a meter high.

Whether or not there was a connection between Bror and the Andersens—and surely there could be no doubt now—we had come to the attention of their admirers. People for whom children were simply a strategic tool in the planning of the coming war. They wanted us to know they could reach any of us.

There was a worse thought, which I kept from Elsa, though surely she must have thought it too: What if the plan had been to take our baby son?