Exhibit A

You're still thinking about the texts at breakfast.

Not the words exactly. The rhythm of them. Quick and dry and then, around one in the morning, slower, with a gap before each one, like she was deciding whether to send it. You'd gone to sleep with the phone on your chest. You woke up with it there, and the light under her door was finally out.

In the kitchen she doesn't mention any of it. She's in a white men's shirt with the sleeves shoved up, eating cereal standing over the sink, reading a legal brief propped against the coffee maker.

"Morning," you say.

"Debatable." She doesn't look up. "Sefton's coffee is in the pot. I'd sooner drink the creek."

You make fresh. She watches you do it out of the corner of her eye. When you set a mug beside her brief, she picks it up, sips, and closes her eyes for one second.

"Fine," she says. "You can stay, Ethan."

The week teaches you her shape.

She leaves at seven-thirty for the Homefront Clinic, a storefront in Anacostia between a barber and a church, where she and two other lawyers fight the government on behalf of widows, disabled vets and kids whose fathers came home wrong. She is ferocious there. You sit in the waiting room on the second day, because the press office wants a photo of the Mechanic supporting his wife, and you hear her through a door telling a benefits officer on the phone, very politely, that she will be on his doorstep with a camera crew by noon. She is on his doorstep at 11:52.

She hates her detail. Not the people; the fact of them. She walks fast to make them hurry. She takes the stairs to make them puff. She sends you photographs throughout the day, without comment at first, then with captions.

Exhibit A: Agent Vantreese, guarding a croissant.

The photo is exactly that. Vantreese, six-foot-four, earpiece, standing over a pastry on a café table like it's ticking.

Exhibit B: Sefton has a feeling. Nobody knows what it is. Nobody will ever know.

Sefton in profile, looking at a parking meter.

You catch yourself grinning at your phone in the clinic waiting room, and a woman with a toddler on her hip grins back at you knowingly, and you put the phone away.

On the street you walk on the outside, between her and the curb. You don't decide to; it's just where your body goes. On Wednesday she stops dead on the sidewalk on Good Hope Road and looks at you.

"You do that every time."

"Do what?"

"Walk on the street side. Stop when a car slows down. Look at windows." She narrows her eyes. "Motor pool, my foot."

"Mechanics are careful people."

"Mechanics are not careful people. I've met mechanics. They leave their wrenches in my engine." But she starts walking again, and she doesn't move to the street side, and you notice that too.

The agents rotate. Sefton is always there, a gray-braided shadow who has not said ten words to you that weren't instructions. Vantreese is there most days, cheerfully narrating his life. And there's a third, Agent Roscoe Eberhardt: late thirties, handsome in a clean-cut recruiting-poster way, perfect suits, easy smile. He's the only one who makes small talk with you.

"How you holding up, Ethan?" he asks on Thursday, in the carriage house, where you've gone to return a borrowed charger. "Big change. Boat yard to Georgetown."

"Engines are engines."

"Ha. Sure." He hands you a coffee you didn't ask for. "Must be weird, though. All this attention. I'd go nuts. You need anything, anything at all, you come to me, not the boss lady. Sefton's old school. I'm easier."

"Thanks," you say, and you mean it about halfway, because some men are friendly because they're friendly and some are friendly because they're building something, and you can't tell yet which one he is.

Friday night is the cabinet reception at the White House, the night before the gala marking a year since the inauguration. The State Dining Room. Navy suits, cocktail dresses, a string trio and a lot of people who look at you the way they'd look at a horse that wandered into church.

Juliet is in black, simple, devastating. Her hand is on your arm. You can feel how tired she is through the fabric of your sleeve; she's been smiling for an hour and her cheek muscle is twitching.

"Senator Desjardins at ten o'clock," she murmurs without moving her lips. "Carver's father. He'll say something about your hands. Say something about his son."

"What do I say?"

"Anything. Just make him have to think." She smiles at someone over your shoulder. "Wyeth at two o'clock. He's pleased with himself."

Lockridge raises his glass to you across the room, warm, avuncular. Juliet's godfather, it turns out; she told you on Tuesday, in the car, in a voice you couldn't read. He waves you over with two fingers like you're family.

"Not now, Ethan," Juliet breathes. "Garvey's coming."

You know the Secretary of Defense from the news the way everyone does: a retired four-star general, bald, weathered, a boxer's broken nose, reading glasses on a cord around his neck. Up close he's shorter than you expected and broader. He moves like a man who used to carry a ruck and still feels the ghost of it. He shakes Juliet's hand, kisses her cheek, says something kind about her mother.

Then he turns to you, and holds out his hand.

You take it. His grip is dry and hard and he doesn't let go. His eyes go over your face slowly, like a man reading a name off a list he's read before. The trio is playing something by Gershwin. Juliet's hand on your arm has gone very still.

"Congratulations," Garvey says, loud enough for the people around you. "A Blue Room wedding. You're a brave man."

"Thank you, sir."

Still he doesn't let go. He leans in, as if to share a private joke with the groom, close enough that you can smell the bourbon and the aftershave, and his voice drops below the music, below anything anyone but you could hear.

"Sexton," says the Secretary of Defense.

Nobody has called you that in six years. Five of the men who used it are in Section 60 at Arlington. The sixth was never found.

Garvey lets go of your hand, smiles for the room, and walks away.