It was my name, my whole legal name, the one that appears on my birth certificate and my financial-aid forms and almost nowhere else, the formal Evelyn Vance that even I rarely used, sitting at the head of a professional investigative file.

There is a particular vertigo in seeing your own full legal name where it does not belong, on a document produced by strangers, in a context you do not understand.

Your name is the most intimate label you own, and to find it rendered in someone else’s official typeface, at the top of a file thick with photographs of your life, is to feel the boundary between your private self and the outside world suddenly dissolve.

Somebody out there knew my full name.