“We’re both here,” Emmaline says softly. “Henry’s sleeping.”
Subtext: Crisis or no crisis, do not wake up my baby.
Biz modulates her volume. “The Takedown is fiction. Remember that. Also remember that nobody’s read it yet. Just me, you, and the publisher.”
“And me,” Emmaline reminds her.
“And you.”
“And whoever writes the outlines. I mean, they know the plot,” he points out.
Emmaline flashes him a look but says nothing.
Biz goes on. “I know your instinct is going to be to make yourself small and stay quiet.”
“Right.”
“We’re going to do the exact opposite,” she tells him. “Take a shower and charge your phone. You’re calling into as many morning shows as I can get you on.”
She ends the call.
Caleb turns to his wife. “Em?—”
Emmaline shakes her head. “You heard her. Go get in the shower. I’ll put your phone on the charger.” She kisses him, once, firmly, before she stands up. “It’s going to be okay.”
Chapter Thirty
On a hunch, Leo uses his key to let himself into the school building very early, before the sun rises or the building opens. He wasn’t able to go back to sleep after hearing the Colonial Pipeline news. If Linda is who they think she is, she’d have been awake for hours, too.
He finds her in the preternaturally quiet library, in the fantasy section, reshelving returns. She looks up when he approaches, a brief smile crossing her face before she returns to the cart.
“How’s the Cold War transition book coming?” His tone is light and friendly.
Her hands pause on a spine. She doesn’t look at him. “Slowly. Research is always slower than you think it’ll be.”
He leans against the shelf, still casual. “What aspect are you focusing on? The political transitions? Economic? Cultural?”
“All of it, really.” She slides the book into place. “It’s a complex period. Hard to isolate one thread.”
Her vagueness feels off. Most researchers love talking about their projects—get them started and they’ll talk for an hour about their thesis, their sources, their arguments. It’s impossible to make them stop, even when they’re recounting minutiae that means nothing to anyone else.
But not Linda. She won’t even tell him her focus.
He tries a different angle. “Are you working from primary sources? I imagine that must be fascinating.”
“Some primary sources.” She moves to the next cart. “Mostly secondary literature right now. Building the framework.”
Her hands are steady. Either she’s genuinely private about her work or she’s trained to deflect interrogation. Both are possible. Both fit the profile of someone who spent decades in intelligence and doesn’t want to discuss operations that might still be classified.
He takes a risk. “You know, I’ve been thinking about what we teach kids about that period. The fall of the Berlin Wall, glasnost, perestroika—we present it like this inevitable march toward democracy. A clean narrative with a happy ending.”
Linda glances at him. She’s listening now.
“But for those of us who were alive when it happened, we know that’s a fairytale. A fantasy. The truth is messier,” he continues. “Transitions are chaotic. People make decisions in crisis mode. Some of those decisions” —he pauses to choose his words with care—“don’t age well. Then twenty, thirty years later, someone has to decide whether to tell the whole story or protect the institutions and the frameworks that survive.”
She sets down the book she’s holding. “That’s the question, isn’t it? What do we owe to the truth versus what we owe to the people who trusted us to keep their secrets?”
“I think we owe more to the truth.”
