She can’t really talk with Neale about this stuff, about how different she feels. Neale is on a mission to forget. And everyone else Cate knows still lives in the old neighborhood: they’re stumbling through the middle years of their lives in a familiar place, which they find tricky and difficult enough, filled with small, ultimately solvable problems. Their innocence fatigues her. She looks back with nostalgia at a sepia-tinted time when she thought Maureen’s affair with her sister was a big problem. Or Graham’s inability to resist the siren call of Eleanor. (He’s been spending the odd night over at her place lately, but in a tapering way.) These look like play problems now.

She knows anyone would advise her to see a shrink, but she hasn’t been able to bring herself to that yet. She thinks anyone worth seeing would cut through the counseling platitudes and start poking around in soft spots and sensitive areas, and Cate isn’t yet up to opening herself—particularly her new self, with whom she’s just making first acquaintance—to the judgment of a professional stranger.

She had long thought her bad thing already happened, down in her father’s workshop. This relieved her of a lot of luxury fears. She didn’t bother worrying about exploding stoves or falling safes. She allowed herself to take on small bits of daring. She still sometimes throws her feet forward and takes the last three steps onto whatever landing, a real-life version of her staircase dreams. A childhood trick she probably should have given up this far into adulthood. Now, though, a further bad thing has happened to her, adding randomness to bad. The treaty she thought was in effect has been violated. She has been tossed back into the general risk pool. Also, she has the extra worry of a new encounter with the woman whose darting eyes she sprayed with fire retardant. If there is an encounter, Cate wants to be in charge of it.

On The Americans, Elizabeth, the undercover KGB killer, does most of her disguising with glasses and wigs. So Cate got some cat’s-eye frames at a thrift shop on Belmont, then found a long, blond ’90s wig at Elim Wig and Hair on Broadway. She wore these with old jeans and a drab peacoat from the wayback of her closet. Assembled in all this, she looked in the mirror and hardly recognized herself. It was a little amazing.