Another fact that was hard to dispute. Everything she had worked for, all the shit she had taken to rate as a special agent of the FBI, the long hours, her ideals: All of it added to nothing. She had a law degree but she did not want to be a lawyer. She wanted to serve her country and in doing so make it a better place for all.

You don’t come back from this.

Why delay the inevitable? She wanted to resign, though she knew that would send all the wrong signals. She was trapped in limbo, suspended in a netherworld while a bureaucracy grinded somewhere above her, going through the motions of an endgame, the result not in doubt.

As Linus did his best to retell a funny story from work that day, Odessa’s gaze fell upon the carton of Agent Earl Solomon’s office belongings on the floor by the door. The spicy food did not register upon her taste buds. The world had lost its flavor.

After letting the New York office know about her morning mission by email, Odessa summoned an Uber via her cell phone, entering Earl Solomon’s home address as her destination. As she entered the crossover SUV, the driver, a burly Middle Eastern man conversing via a Bluetooth earpiece, got out to open his trunk. As she thanked him and loaded in the carton of belongings, while glancing up and down the street in fear of an ambush, she understood the look in the driver’s eyes. Another crazy fare.

She rode southwest to a street just blocks from the Delaware River, which served as the border between New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The car pulled up at a prewar, one-story brick house ringed by a desultorily short—no taller than three feet—decorative chain-link fence. She noticed that other homes on the street had long since added on or built up, but this residence remained stubbornly modest. The driver pulled the carton from the trunk and set it in Odessa’s hands as though relieved to have discharged her.

“Good luck, miss,” he said.

Maybe he assumed she was going through a breakup. And in a sense—from her career, from her expected life—she was. She thanked him and gave him a five-star review before his vehicle was out of sight.

With difficulty, she emptied the contents of the mailbox into the carton in her hands, then pushed through the short gate and up the walkway to the front door. For security’s sake, in case any neighbors were watching her, she dropped a few letters at the door, setting down the carton to retrieve them and, in doing so, retrieving a key from beneath a planter made of blue pottery.

It would take some time to forget her police procedure instincts.