The text came at 2 a.m. like it was good news—my mother casually told me she’d sold my house while I was away, using an old legal document, and spent the money on my sister’s wedding. When I told her to stop the deal, she laughed—called me selfish, dramatic, ungrateful—and said I could “explain myself” at the family reunion.

I had laughed before I could stop myself. “That’s because the cabinets still smell like the holiday candles I forgot in the drawer.”

Luca, six and irrepressibly alive in the way children remain until fear teaches them efficiency, asked if the basement was the kind from spy movies. I told him every basement is the kind from spy movies if you put enough boxes in it. Angela smiled for what might have been the first time since I met her.

That smile came back to me as the plane descended into Reagan, and it made something in my chest hurt.

When I landed, the city looked exactly as it always did in winter: gray river, white dome in the distance, government buildings pretending to be permanent against a sky the color of exhausted paper. My phone held one message from Crawford. Conference Room 5C. Now.