The call came from Okonkwo on a Thursday.Not the measured, organized Okonkwo of formal meetings, not the carefully paced Okonkwo of difficult conversations. This was a different register, the compressed efficiency of someone who had received information and was moving it as quickly as its weight would allow."Fitch," he said, when Kai answered.Kai put down his coffee."What about him," he said."He's been talking to a journalist," Okonkwo said. "Not about Morrison. Not about Vance. About the review.""The independent review," Kai said."Yes," Okonkwo said. "Specifically about what it might find and who it might implicate beyond the names already in the public record."Kai was quiet for a moment."He's trying to shape the narrative before the findings are released," he said."That's my reading," Okonkwo said. "The journalist in question is credible. Not someone who fabricates, but someone who publishes what she's given and frames it in the direction she's been pointed.""Who is she,"

Priscilla Wade answered on the third ring.Lila was in the small sitting room at the back of the house, the one they used when the kitchen felt too public for a conversation that needed to be private. The lamp on the side table was the only light. Marcus had been down for forty minutes. Kai was in the kitchen with a book he was not reading, the particular vigil he kept when she was doing something that required the house to be quiet around it."Ms. Wade," Lila said. "My name is Lila Hartley. I'm the co-CEO of Hartley. I'm sorry for calling in the evening."A pause.Not a long one. The pause of someone recalibrating quickly rather than someone caught off guard."I know who you are," Priscilla Wade said.Her voice was younger than Lila had expected, which was another useless expectation. Clear, careful, the voice of someone who had learned to manage what she revealed in the first seconds of a conversation with a stranger."I wanted to speak to you directly," Lila said. "Before anything

The word arrived on a Tuesday.Not Friday, as Kai had predicted, and not in any of the days between Friday and Tuesday during which he had listened with the particular attention of someone who had been told something was coming and could not stop listening for it.It arrived at seven-twenty in the morning while Kai was in the hallway putting on his jacket and Lila was at the kitchen table with her coffee and Marcus was in the bassinet that had been moved back upstairs three weeks ago because the downstairs logistics had finally been resolved in favor of a routine.Marcus was not in the bassinet.He was on the mat on the kitchen floor, the padded mat they had placed there for the specific purpose of giving him a surface on which to conduct his investigations, and he was looking at the kitchen door through which Kai had just come.Kai stopped in the doorway.He looked at Marcus.Marcus looked at him.And then, with the complete, unself-conscious directness of someone who had been approa

The cemetery was on a hill on the north side of the city.Not a grand hill. Not the kind that announced itself. The kind that you only understood was a hill when you were halfway up it and your pace had changed without your deciding to change it, the ground making its own case for attention.They went on a Saturday morning, the week before Christmas.The city below them was doing its December business, the particular compression of the last weeks of the year when everything that had not been done acquired urgency and the streets reflected this with their density and noise and the slightly frantic quality of collective deadline.Up here it was different.Kai carried Marcus in the carrier against his chest, the way Marcus preferred when they were moving somewhere that required both hands free and when the world was interesting enough to warrant the elevated vantage point. Marcus wore the small knitted hat that Chloe had sent, the one that had arrived in the post with a card that said on

Christmas arrived the way it always did in this house.Not as a single day but as an accumulation, a slow thickening of the year into its final week, the particular density of a season that had been building for a month and now arrived at what it had been building toward and found it both exactly as expected and somehow more than that.Kai noticed it first in the kitchen on the twenty-third.The smell of it.Not a specific thing. Not the tree, which had been there for two weeks, or the food Lila was beginning to prepare, or the candles she had placed on the windowsill. Something underneath all of those, the accumulated quality of a house that was full in a specific way, full with the particular presence of people who were not all there yet but were coming.James was coming.Benjamin was coming.Chloe, who had sent the hat and then two weeks later a card and then three weeks after that a phone call to Lila that had lasted forty minutes and which Lila had reported afterward simply as go