That night, Augusta couldn’t sleep. She padded down the stairs to the kitchen. She turned on the light and then saw a hunched figure sitting at the table.

She let out a small scream before realizing that it was Nick Flemming, his elbows on the table, eating buttered toast cut into triangles. Ingmar and Toby darted out from under the table, nosing Augusta. She shooed them away. “I’m fine. I’m fine,” she assured them and then she asked Nick what he was doing awake.

“Can’t sleep. Too much time to make up for. My brain keeps waking me up. Consciously and subconsciously, I don’t want to miss any more. Not another minute, Augusta.” His voice was almost angry.

She walked to the fridge, poured herself a glass of milk, and sat down next to him. “How was today with Atty and Liv?”

“It was perfect.”

“Really? Perfect. With Atty and Liv.” She laughed.

“It wasn’t perfect in the traditional sense of the word. I mean, it was imperfect and flawed and I don’t like riding those things. But it was perfect because it wasn’t perfect. It just was, which is perfect.”

“You never liked Norman Rockwell’s kind of perfect anyway, I guess.”

“Why aren’t you asleep?” he asked.

“Too many people breathing in the house. It’s so full of heartbeats.”

“We made those heartbeats, you know?”

Augusta looked at him. “I imagine that your body is still full of scars, like a topographic map of old wounds.”

“I got shot a lot and knifed too.” He leaned forward and smiled. “You want to see it?” He motioned to his chest. “It’s available for display.”

She ignored him. “We were so close to telling them.” There was a time when she gave an ultimatum and he’d agreed.

“But then we couldn’t.” A fellow agent’s son went missing and then his body was found—in parts—in Miami.

“How is Gerard?” Augusta asked. She’d never met the man who’d lost his son, but she’d thought of him often over the years. “Do you ever hear from him?”

Nick shook his head. “My covers, the legends about who I was, where I came from. I wasn’t Nick Flemming. I wasn’t a husband or a father. It had to stay that way. It might have saved us.”

“Who were you?” Augusta had never asked before.

Nick knew that only Ru had figured that out. For a while, he’d been Peter Wilderman. He’d grown up in White Plains, New York. His father had sold insurance. His mother taught violin lessons. He had no siblings. He’d played baseball decently in high school. He attended Penn State and got average grades. He joined the military. He didn’t play the violin even though he’d been raised in a musical household.

None of this was true, but over time it reminded him of the truth.

“I can’t tell you who I was,” Nick said. “Sometimes it’s still who I am.” He rapped his knuckles on the table and said, “You know the real person. The kids will too. This is who I want to be.” He reached out and slipped his hand over hers.

His hand was callused and warm.

“I missed you,” she whispered.

“I missed you too.”

This was said so softly that Liv, who also hadn’t been able to sleep and was smoking on the patio, couldn’t hear it. She’d heard all of it up until this point and now moved closer to the open window. The kitchen curtains were still. She was in the dark, unseen, and she stood there, watching her parents hold hands. She felt like she was seeing something rare and precious—a species that had been thought to be extinct. She’d heard that the passenger pigeon used to be one of the most common birds in the world, but the last one died in a zoo. Love—is that what this was? Rare and miraculously still alive.