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funeral.”
    “Meaning?”
    “Paul, the agency is focusing more and more on homegrown subversives. If it comes out—the truth about Pass, I mean—and it’s known that you went to his funeral, that you were old friends—”
    “I didn’t go as an old friend.”
    “Whatever made you go, it was imprudent.”
    “You’re saying it could hurt me inside the agency?”
    “Of course.”
    “That would require my knowing the truth before I went, now wouldn’t it?”
    Ranold pressed his lips together. “You did know. I told you.”
    “Then I would be in trouble only if anyone in the agency knew that you had told me. Am I right? Surely I can count on you to sit on that . . . Dad.”

3
    PAUL WAS RELIEVED to wake up in his own bed in Chicago Sunday morning. The winter sun flooded through the windows and glinted off the clean, crisp snow. Jae was already downstairs with the kids, and he could hear them clamoring to go ice-skating.
    “I guess they felt cooped up at my parents’ house,” Jae said when he joined them at the breakfast table. “It might do us all good to get some exercise and fresh air.”
    “Could you take them?” Paul said. “I don’t feel like skating, and I want to make more headway at my mother’s house. I want to clear everything out over the holidays and get the house ready to put on the market.”
    “We could all come and help you.”
    “No, thanks. You’ve done plenty. Most of what’s left is that stuff she saved, which no one can really go through but me.”
    “That seems depressing after a funeral.”
    “It’s what a funeral puts me in the frame of mind to do. ”

    The truth was that Paul had felt cooped up too. He craved an afternoon alone. After letting himself into his mother’s house, he stood in the front hall and relished the quiet. His mother had spent her whole adult life in the neat suburban home where Paul grew up, with a live-in caretaker after she’d begun to lose her faculties. During her last few years, she was increasingly gripped by dementia, unable even to recognize her son and grandchildren. Last Wintermas, Paul had set up a tree for her, though he could tell she had no idea it was there.
    Though most cancer was now curable, certain strains defied the best efforts of modern science. A century of study had yet to unravel the intricate mechanisms of the brain. For Paul’s mother, cutting-edge treatments had served only to slow the virulent disease. All the doctors could do, Paul had been told, was keep her comfortable until the end. His mother’s death, when it came, was anticlimactic, for Paul had said good-bye years before.
    The upstairs rooms were now empty, but Paul had not yet tackled the basement, jammed with a lifetime of mementos. A trash can by his side, he began sorting through the dusty boxes. Financial transactions had been electronic for decades, so Paul was surprised to find a cache of checks used before the war—carefully filed and made out in dollars, United States currency when each country had its own. For all her tidiness, his mother was a pack rat. He plucked out a few checks to show the kids and jettisoned the rest.
    By early afternoon he had cleared out half of the storage space. Now he started unearthing artifacts of his parents’ marriage. His mother had given him many of his father’s papers, photos, and possessions long ago, and he remembered seeing some of these, the ones she kept, when he was young. He came upon his parents’ marriage license, their wedding invitation— the celebration had been held in a hall on an army base—and a ribbon-tied stack of old-fashioned greeting cards, with graphics on the front and preprinted messages inside, congratulating his parents on his birth. Beneath these was a heavy, cream-colored vellum envelope with the remains of a flattened blob of a dark red wax on its flap—a broken seal, Paul supposed.
    Clapping the dust from his hands, he picked it up and turned it over. On the front was the