My mother could, and had tried to teach me how, and somewhere in the long year after the party I finally learned it, walking home alone through falling leaves with no one watching and nothing, for the first time in my life, to prove.

Chapter 24 — Thank You for Seeing Us

My phone chimed in my coat pocket as I reached the middle of the park.

It was a message from Katarina Rostova.

She was not, by nature, a sender of messages; she was the most economical communicator I had ever worked with, a woman who could reject a flawed design in four words and did not waste a fifth.

So the photograph surprised me.