That, at least, was what I believed about my own life, and it was about to turn out to be spectacularly untrue.

Why in the world would two private investigators be sitting in my section, ordering four hundred dollars of food, watching the room with that strange under-the-surface watchfulness I had noticed and dismissed.

Why would there be a professional dossier with my name on it.

But even as my mind rejected it, my eyes were confirming it, because I was looking now, really looking, at the photographs, and what I saw in them turned the dread in my stomach into something colder.

These were not random pictures.