The house was a one-story rental in a suburb that prided itself, visibly and aggressively, on its own tidiness. Tan brick, green shutters, a lawn that had gone a little ragged since the last tenants but whose bones showed the kind of careful original planting that told you someone had once cared about it a great deal. The street was the kind of street where the garbage cans came in from the curb within an hour of collection, where the Christmas lights went up the same weekend in November across every house on the block, where the length of your grass was a statement of character and everyone’s hedges were trimmed into the same comfortable shapes. It was the sort of neighborhood that communicated its expectations before you had finished pulling into the driveway for the first time.

My name is Diane. My partner on this assignment was Jack, who had worked with me for three years and whose primary observable characteristic, beyond his considerable professional competence, was that he could fall asleep anywhere and wake up alert. We had been given the rental for the duration of a job, a short-term placement, the kind of assignment that gets you a temporary address and a cover story and very specific instructions about maintaining the appearance of ordinary civilian life. The house was a staging point. We were not there to put down roots. We were there to work, and to look like two people who were not there to work.