“I miss you too,” I said, “so much,” surprising even myself by how much I meant it. Well, that was an interesting revelation that I didn’t know I was feeling. I played with that thought: Did I miss the comfort of what we had or did I miss her? You know what, it made no difference. I missed it all.

“With everything they’re doing…” She dropped the rest of that sentence. The government crackdown had caused everyone to think carefully about their words before they said them aloud. Both of us were aware there was a strong possibility that agents were listening to our conversation or that it was being recorded. There were questions that couldn’t be asked and wouldn’t be answered. As Jenny calmed down, we began maneuvering around them.

The reality of life as a wanted man was new to me, but I could make certain assumptions. For one thing, the people I cared most about were in jeopardy because I cared most about them. For the first time this thought censored my words: The government of the United States of America was my enemy.

“I’m safe, Jen. I’m in Canada.” I didn’t tell her anything at all about my escape. Which meant I didn’t have to tell her anything about Laura. Not that there was anything to tell, of course, but women being women …

Jenny was talking again and I picked up her thread mid-sentence. Apparently rumors about me had been spreading on the Hill, although no one seemed to know where they were coming from. Supposedly I had been caught fleeing the country with stolen classified documents, or I had been seriously injured in a highway accident, or most absurd, I had turned government informer. She finished with an upward inflection that suggested I should fill in the blanks, to which I responded, “You know I can’t talk about any of it.”

This was an incredibly frustrating conversation. We both had to talk around what we wanted to say. But as we spoke, I picked up hints from the things she said, as well as the way she said them, that made me believe she finally had picked a side.

She had applied for permission to visit Martha and had been told it was possible. When she expressed concern about Martha’s well-being, a pleasant woman at Homeland Security had reassured her that this was all temporary, and suggested that Jenny should pretend “the congresswoman is just on a little vacation and will be home soon.”

She started talking about “the show,” the hangings, asking me if I had seen it. “I did,” I told her, being careful not to say, “We did.” For the first time I heard her suppressed anger. Her grandfather had seen similar executions while serving in Europe at the end of World War II, she said, and it caused him to despise the governments that had permitted it. I got her point; her grandfather had lost a leg at Guadalcanal and been discharged. He was not in Europe in 1945. She was referring to a different war. This war.