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found a black card, the shape of a regular credit card but three times thicker, with copper contacts on the bottom and four glassy rectangles on the front.
    It was electronic, but I couldn’t fathom what it did. As I turned it over in my hands, I accidentally pressed one of the rectangles with my thumb. An LED in the card began flashing, tinting the dark room red in a complex pattern.
    After a moment it stopped, and as I tried to figure out what I had just done, Jack’s laptop screen blinked on with a similar pattern of white flashes. A command line appeared, code scrolled down the screen, and then, across the middle of the display, a message appeared: “Fingerprint not recognized.”
    I stepped in front of the computer and started to sweat. I didn’t want there to be a record of me poking around up here. A second later a light turned on beside the webcam built into the top of the display. My face appeared on the screen.
    The computer let out three loud beeps.
    Scanning…authentication failed, the display read.
    Please wait while we contact a representative.
    My heart pounded. I dropped the card back in the drawer and slid it shut.
    Jack probably heard it. And now I would look like the thief. I waited for the knock on the door, the totally justified accusations. None came.
    It was odd. The food should have been done. He should be looking for me by now. I heard the sounds of blinds dropping downstairs, of furniture moving.
    I walked to the top of the stairs.
    “You should just stay up there,” Jack said.
    I took a step down, looked across the living room, and discovered where that Glock .40 had gone. Jack held it raised in his right hand.
    “Don’t come any closer!”
    Now that was the brother I remembered.

Chapter 6
    ANNIE HAD DONE a good job hiding her concern when I told her I was going to meet up with Jack tonight. I knew she had a few worries about my old life, but I think she understood that it would be good for me to reconnect with him, have someone I could talk to, square things from the past.
    “Go, see your brother,” she’d said.
    She and I had moved in together four months before, though we’d barely spent a night apart over the past year. We lived in a quaint neighborhood in Alexandria called Del Ray, all 1940s bungalows and throwback main street shops. It was just across the river from the capital, and I was glad, after the scandal, to have put a little distance between me and Washington. We’d thought about trying a new town, but it was nice to be near my father now that he was out. My family had fallen apart when I was a kid, and I finally had a few pieces of it back. That was part of what drew me to Jack.
    Annie gardened. I mowed the lawn. There were always some folks stopping by to chat with us as we sat on our porch. I would have the neighbors over for barbecues—an orthodontist on our left and a tax attorney on the right—nice enough people, if a little dry. They liked to talk about QuickBooks and bond funds.
    Some nights Annie and I would open a bottle of wine, climb through a dormer window, and watch the stars and lunar eclipses from our roof. We’d hide notes in each other’s bags. I’d get to court, face down a federal judge, and open my case to find “Thanks for last night, counselor” scrawled on a Post-it.
    But something wasn’t right. Ever since the madness at my last job, ever since that one awful moment at the end, there had been a distance between me and Annie. It’s one thing when your fiancée hears you, after fifteen minutes on hold with Comcast, groan “Jesus, I could kill somebody.” But things take on a much different cast when you say that in front of a woman who has actually seen you standing over the body of a man after you took his life. She told me she understood that I had no other choice, but she never quite forgot. I’d catch her watching me sometimes with something like suspicion, and I knew it was still on her mind, maybe feeding those doubts about me