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.

Angela and the children were moved twice more over the following month. The final interim site was in Maryland, then later farther out, so layered with compartmentation that access came through three different names and no single case file contained the whole route. That was good practice even without my family’s contribution, but after the Alexandria breach nobody was interested in testing how much the Castellanos had learned. I visited Angela once at the Maryland site. It was a rental townhouse in a development so aggressively neutral it might have been designed by committee to erase memory. Beige siding. Beige carpet. Beige winter trees outside beige blinds.

She opened the door before I could knock twice. Her face when she saw me was complicated—relief, anger, gratitude, exhaustion, something bordering on pity. People under protection learn quickly that the professionals guarding them are still people with ordinary failures attached.

“Are we safe now?” she asked.

“Safer,” I said, because false certainty is just another form of betrayal.