I dropped the magazine I had snuck into the bathroom to read. I crept out the door and closed it behind me and walked back down the hall to the bedroom I shared with Iris. We had two twin beds, but I crawled into hers and scooped her into my arms. She didn’t even stir. I was the light sleeper, the jittery one. I always did the worrying for both of us. I remember feeling jealous of her, because she didn’t know, and at the same time I didn’t want her to know. I dreaded the coming of dawn, when her universe would shatter. I felt our barren, hard lives yawn eternally before us. I felt her heart beat and wished with all my might that we could die together like this and never know what the world was like without a father.

But no fairy godmother came to grant my wish that night. Sometime during those terrible hours, I fell briefly asleep, and then woke to the sound of screaming. Iris stirred against my chest and asked what was that. I stroked her hair and told her Daddy’s gone to heaven, darling.

At the time, she thought she was dreaming, or else I was kidding, and maybe she was right. I don’t believe in an afterlife of heaven or hell. I think we create our own, here on earth.

SUMNER FOX, ON THE other hand. No doubt he believes firmly in heaven and hell, angels and purgatory and the devil himself, to go along with the God he wishes I wouldn’t curse. As a decent Christian, though, he doesn’t seem to judge me for my failure of faith. He just stands there waiting for me to make my decision.

I nod at the manila envelope I left on the couch.

“All right. What have you got for me?”

To my surprise, he holds his eyelids shut for an instant or two, betraying relief. Then he opens them and reaches for the envelope.

“A little background, first,” he says, motioning me to sit, which I do. Then he sits back down, a few inches closer than before, and removes some documents from the envelope. “We began formulating plans for the extraction of the Digbys as soon as we knew they’d defected—”

“Extraction? You mean like a tooth?”

“I apologize for the jargon. You see, we’d suspected Digby’s involvement with Soviet intelligence for some time, and to be perfectly honest, his defection was a relief. We couldn’t prosecute him on the evidence we had, because most of it was classified and highly sensitive, but we couldn’t allow him to stay where he was, feeding them more information. And if the Soviets knew he was compromised, they might try to eliminate him, because they couldn’t take a chance we’d turned him.”

“Turned him?”