Chapter 7: The Bureau House
The Bureau residence was a two-story house on a quiet street forty minutes from our own.
It looked like any other house on the block — a light on in the front window, a sedan parked in the driveway, a small porch with two wooden chairs.
Inside, it was not like any other house.
Every window had a secondary lock.
The back door had a keypad.
There was a room off the hallway that I was told was the monitoring station — I didn't go in, but I could see the blue glow of screens through the gap under the door.
Agent Carver showed us to a room upstairs — two beds, a small dresser, a lamp.
Plain and clean and exactly nothing like home.
He stood in the doorway.
"Someone will be outside this door all night.
There's water on the dresser.
If you need anything at all, you knock twice and they'll hear you."
Mom sat on the edge of the bed nearest the window.
"The book.
What did they find?"
Carver paused.
"There was a device in the spine."
Mom closed her eyes.
"It had not yet transmitted a location," he said carefully.
"The range requires proximity to a receiver.
Whoever placed it would have needed to be within a quarter mile of Emily to receive a signal."
"The school," Mom said.
"We think the planting was recent enough that the device hadn't been actively used.
We don't believe your current location has been compromised."
"You don't believe," Mom said.
Not a question.
"We're treating it as a live situation." He looked at her steadily.
"Sarah.
You did everything right.
Eleven months ago, and again tonight."
She opened her eyes.
"My daughter got h*t tonight."
The words sat in the room.
"I know," Carver said.
"She has a bruise on her cheek because I chose to trust a program that left a gap."
"The gap was your husband.
Not the program."
"He was my husband because the program gave me a life I had to fill with something." Her voice didn't rise.
It just went flat and precise in a way that was harder to hear than shouting.
"You gave me a name and an address and a legend and you told me to build something real out of it.
And I did.
And he was part of that.
And now my daughter has a bruise."
Carver didn't argue.
He looked at the floor for a moment, then back at her.
"In the morning, I'll have more answers for you.
About the woman at the school.
About the trace on the text.
About where the case goes from here." He straightened.
"Try to rest."
He pulled the door to.
Not fully closed — left it an inch open, the way you'd leave a child's door.
Mom sat very still after he left.
I changed into the spare clothes Denise had packed and got into the second bed and lay on my back looking at the ceiling.
"Mom."
"Mm."
"When this is over.
When Reese is convicted and everything is finished.
Can we use your real name again?"
She was quiet for a long time.
"Sarah Dolan has been gone for twelve years, Emily.
I don't know if she still fits."
"But it's who you are."
"Part of who I am." She turned off the lamp on her side.
"Go to sleep."
"I'm not tired."
"I know.
Go to sleep anyway."
I stared at the ceiling in the dark.
Then Mom said, very quietly, as if she was saying it to the room and not to me, "Her name was Margaret, by the way."
I turned my head toward her in the dark.
"Whose name?"
"The woman at your school." A pause.
"Margaret Reese.
His daughter."
I sat up.
"She knows what he does?"
"She's been running logistics for him since she was nineteen years old." Another pause.
"She's the one who found me the first time.
Before the program.
She's the reason two witnesses didn't come home."
The room was very, very still.
"Then she knows where we are," I said.
"No," Mom said.
"Carver said the device hadn't transmitted."
"But she came to my school.
She talked to me.
She asked about Dad."
Mom didn't answer right away.
And that pause — that specific pause — was the most frightening thing I had heard all night.
"Mom," I said.
"She wasn't there for the device, was she."
A long silence.
May you like
"No," Mom said finally.
"I don't think she was."
