At six in the evening, I returned to Sofia’s house in Paramus.

The sleet had stopped, replaced by a dense, clinging fog that swallowed the streetlights. Two of my security sedans were parked at opposite ends of the block, their engines idling quietly to keep the heaters running.

Sofia was in the kitchen, packing Emma’s clothes into a small nylon duffel bag.

"We have a flight out of Newark at five tomorrow morning," Sofia said without looking at me. She shoved a pair of red corduroy overalls into the bag. "My sister lives in Boise. Nobody in Idaho cares about the Port Authority or the Moretti family."

"You won't make it through security at Newark," I said gently.

Sofia whirled around, clutching a folded sweater to her chest like armor. "Are you threatening me, Alejandro?"

"The state police have placed a material-witness travel hold on your passport and Emma’s birth certificate," I said. "The moment you scan your boarding pass, TSA will detain you in a private holding room until the county sheriff arrives."

Her face went completely white. She dropped the sweater onto the kitchen table and sank into a chair, burying her face in her hands.

"She’s four years old," Sofia sobbed, her shoulders shaking violently. "She doesn't know what a court is. She thinks judges are doctors who wear black coats. They're going to put her in a room with five strange men who want to twist her words until she thinks she did something bad."

The kitchen door swung open, and Emma walked in.

She was wearing her pajamas with yellow stars on them, dragging her white bunny backpack by one ear. She didn't look scared. She looked curious.

She walked straight past Sofia and stopped beside my knee.

"Mr. Alejandro?"

I knelt down on the linoleum floor so my eyes were level with hers. "Yes, Emma?"

"I made a picture of your house," she said.

She reached into the front zipper pocket of the backpack—the same pocket where she had carried the plastic toy injector earlier that day—and pulled out a folded piece of construction paper.

She smoothed it out against my knee with her small, sticky fingers.

It was a drawing done in heavy crayon. There was a big brown square for the study, a gray rectangle for the sofa, and a stick figure lying flat on the floor with blue circles around its neck. But beside the figure, Emma had drawn something else.

It wasn't a bunny, and it wasn't an elephant.

It was a man with yellow hair, wearing a green coat, standing near the window. He was holding something small and rectangular up to his ear. Above his head, Emma had carefully drawn three red letters that she had copied from the back of the device.

*S-E-N.*

I stared at the drawing. My father had taught me never to let anyone see your pulse quicken, but in that moment, my throat felt as tight as it had the day of the poisoning.

"Emma," I said, keeping my voice softer than a whisper. "Who was the man by the window?"

"The loud man," Emma said plainly. "He told Uncle Carlo to make sure you didn't wake up before the six o'clock news."

"Did you hear his name?"

"No," Emma said, pointing her purple crayon at the drawing. "But he had a shiny golden pin on his coat. Like a little flag, but with a bird on it."

Senator Thomas Gallagher wore a gold bald-eagle lapel pin on every television broadcast he had done for fifteen years.