My sister rang at eight minutes past midnight and told me to kill the lights, get into the attic, and not tell my husband. Through a gap in the floorboards I watched him hand a stranger three passports.

PART 1 — EIGHT MINUTES PAST

Ven’s name came up at 12:08 and for about a second I thought about letting it ring.

Devlin was asleep next to me. Rain on the windows. The monitor was still on the nightstand with its green light even though Ollie was at his grandparents’ for the weekend.

My sister is thirty-nine and she has worked for the Bureau since 2014 and she has never once rung me after ten at night.

“Ven?”

“Listen to me. Turn everything off. Phone, lights, all of it. Get in the attic, lock it, and don’t tell Devlin.”

I looked at my husband of six years, asleep, with one arm over his face.

I said, “What?”

“Iona. Move.”

Something in how she said my name got me out of that bed.

I got my phone and the charger and I was nearly at the hall when he shifted behind me.

“Ion?”

I stopped dead with my hand on the door frame.

“Getting water.”

I waited until his breathing went long again. Then I did the hall, the kitchen and the front room, and went up the attic stairs in the dark with the phone against my ear.

Ven stayed on the line the whole way. She told me not to go near the window. She told me not to make a sound.

“Do not hang up.”

And then the call dropped.

I crouched down in the dark in a roof space that smells of dust and Christmas boxes, with a dead phone in my hand, trying to understand why an FBI agent had just told me to hide from my own husband.

Less than a minute later Devlin was talking downstairs.

And there was nothing sleepy in that voice at all.

“Lights are off.”

And a second man answered him. In my house.

“Then she knows.”

I got my hand over my own mouth and moved, on my hands and knees, to the gap between two floorboards over the front room, where the light was coming up.

Devlin was standing at our dining table with his back to me.

There were three passports on that table. Open, face up, side by side.

Mine. His. And a small one.

The photographs were ours. The names were not.

And the second man, who I could only see the shoulder of, said:

“Her sister might already know.”

Devlin went completely still.

Then he lifted his head and looked at the ceiling.

Straight up. At the attic.

“Where’s Iona?”

And somebody started up the stairs.