It nearly lost me a conviction I was right about, it kept a foreign breach of a military hospital off the books for seven years, and it stood in a hallway on a Thursday afternoon and told a seven-year-old that her father was a ghost.

I’m not going to be good at the other thing. I’ve started late and I’m working against thirty years of proof that my way works.

But my daughter has my face and my flat assessing stare and my habit of watching a room before she enters it, and she is going to be extraordinary, and I would like her to learn it somewhere other than from watching her mother say nothing at a table.

On the first cold morning of December, we walked to the corner where the light takes a long time.

Theo counted aircraft. Nora held my hand.

The signal changed, and I told them where we were going and why, out loud, before we stepped off the curb.

End of Part Two.