It is very hard for a room to feel dangerous when there is a dog in it who thinks every human being is arriving home from a war.

It is a Saturday in late September.

The doors to the terrace are open and the air coming in is the first genuinely cool air of the year.

Chadworth is at the wide oak desk in the sunroom, which he moved down from the study eighteen months ago, because the study had a door and he had come to distrust rooms with doors.

He is reading something, but he has read the same paragraph four times, because outside on the lawn his daughters are trying to teach an unteachable dog to roll over, and Barnaby Reyes — who is fifty-eight, who carries a firearm for a living, and who has become, in a development nobody could have predicted, the single most requested adult at every birthday party in the household — is lying flat on his back in the grass demonstrating the maneuver personally.