The husband wasn’t a threat, but he would have to be the first one—to shock them, and then Mae, and then . . . He might even use that suppressor, just in case.

“Keep them all in this room,” he said to Mae. “No one leaves it.”

The children stared, not knowing English apparently. Mae spoke to them, and they sat on the sofa and chatted casually. The husband joined them. Mae must’ve lied to them in Chinese. Maybe she promised a presentation from Lett. Maybe she said he was here to save them.

Mae turned to him. “Keep smiling,” she said in English. “They think you’re a friend.”

“None of them understand us?”

“None of them,” Mae muttered, losing her put-on face. “They are innocent.”

“Just, keep it together,” Lett said through his smile.

He couldn’t look at the sofa. If he did, he would see the boy kicking his legs that didn’t quite reach the floor, something Lett always did in the orphanage and got in trouble for. He would see that the girl had her black hair in long braided pigtails, just like the German girl he had to kill on that snafu mission in enemy-occupied Cologne—it was that or be found out.

Mae’s face reflected the last flash of sundown. In a moment, it would go dim.

A burn of vomit rose up his throat and he tried to swallow it, and the machinery inside him barely kept it down.

Everyone fell silent. Time seemed to stop a moment. Lett wasn’t sure how long. His gears weren’t working.

“What options do you have?” he heard himself say to Mae.

“Options? Yes! I have one,” Mae replied, the words popping out as if she’d been holding her breath, “just one, please, I can tell you, please.”

“Why didn’t you tell me before?”

Mae uttered a bitter laugh. She threw a glance at her family. “You never ask.”

“All right, all right,” Lett said.

“I have a way off the island. No one knows. The family won’t know. About you here, with me? Husband will never tell. The children never tell. The war taught them silence. They know what happens. They have seen it.”

“What’s your play?”

“I go through the kitchen and out the backyard and go. As soon as they in bed, or sooner. Gone forever. I know how. I send for family later. Much later. When safe. I have means.”

“What about the reporter?”

“He doesn’t get to see me. I don’t tell. I disappear. Forever.”

“Why should I trust you?”

“It’s my family’s life now. Everything change. You can trust that.”

Lett stared a long while. Miss Mae babbled in English to fill the silence for her family’s benefit and even laughed, but still Lett didn’t speak. He might have nodded along.