And yet … that birthmark, a kiss on Mia’s temple. Peter’s charcoal eyes, his croaky voice.

Evan washed the glass and then made his way down the hall, passing the empty brackets where the new katana was supposed to hang. Over the past few days, he’d learned to remove his bandages and undress with minimal pain.

Standing naked at the threshold of the shower, he flashed back to that bathroom at the chalet. The floor sloping to a drain. Bar of soap and a folded towel. Prison toilet, trash-can liner to the side.

Of their own accord, his fingers had moved to his scabbed neck.

He ducked into the warm stream. The first hit of water always stung the collarbone, but the burn quickly abated. He breathed hard, reminded himself that he was home.

He was, he realized, barely holding it together. His weight tugged him to the side, the wall cool against his ribs. He let the hot water beat against his crown.

At some point autopilot clicked on, the rituals of survival keeping him in motion. He got out, toweled off, rebandaged. In his bedroom he confronted the dresser, glaring at the bottom drawer with its false compartment bearing the bloodstained flannel—Jack’s very own Shroud of Turin.

Evan carried Jack’s shirt up the hall and across the great room to the free-standing fireplace, set it atop the pyre of cedar logs, and watched it burn. The coordinates by which he had charted the past eight years, up in smoke. As matter turned to air, he recognized that his own misguided sorrow and guilt had coalesced in the stiff fabric, as much a part of the shirt as the dried blood staining it. Even after no trace of the flannel remained, he found himself standing before the flames.

Returning to the bedroom, he pulled an unworn pair of dark jeans from the stack of duplicates. One drawer up were the fresh V-necked gray T-shirts, also neatly folded, also identical. A hinged wooden box in the closet held four Victorinox watch fobs still in the package. He took one out, clipped it to his first belt loop on the left side.

What did it say about him that he was so easily put back together? He’d long thought that it was a positive attribute, a testament to his durability, but now it felt artificial, unhuman. He was rebuildable, a snap-together Lego toy. His well-stocked drawers reminded him of the mac-and-cheese meals of his childhood, an assembly-belt existence from as far back as he could remember. And as far ahead as he could see. One mission would bleed into the next until the inevitable. If not Van Sciver, someone else. Evan would get older. His reflexes would get slower. Sooner or later he’d be a half-second too slow. Would he have balanced the books by then? And even if he had, would it make a difference?