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Buster’s, the ones who were always chasing after their children and wiping their running noses, the ones who always looked so tired. That’s not why she had gotten pregnant.
    Yet that’s what lay before her.
    She brought a hand to her mouth, realizing the truth. She should have done as John demanded, gotten rid of the baby. Even her mother had wondered if Julianna was certain she was making the right decision. Being on her own, keeping a step ahead of John, would be difficult enough without an infant to care for. She had offered to accompany her daughter to a clinic where the problem would be taken care of.
    But Julianna had still been starry-eyed about the pregnancy. About being a grown-up. About her future.
    With a moan, Julianna sank to the floor. She rested her cheek against the vanity’s doors, the faux wood cracked and peeling. She didn’t have any starry-eyed notions anymore. She saw the future—and it frightened her. Almost as much as the past.
    She squeezed her eyes shut, tumbling back once more, back to that last night she and John had spent together….
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    They had lain facing each other on the bed, talking quietly. John had asked her about how she had spent the weeks he had been away. She had filled him in, barely able to catch her breath, going into great detail about the watercolor class she was taking and about her jazzercize group—when all she could think of, all she wanted to discuss, was her pregnancy.
    John listened attentively, so attentively it was almost as if he knew she was keeping something from him. And while she spoke, he studied her with an intensity that was unsettling. He knew her so well. As no one else did or ever would.
    Just tell him. Blurt it out—about how she had stopped taking her pills and about her missed period, her visit to the doctor, the urine test. Her excitement.
    Not yet, she thought, a thread of panic snaking through her. Not yet.
    â€œHow was your trip?” she asked instead.
    â€œSuccessful.”
    â€œWhere did you go?”
    He simply looked at her. He had a rule: she wasn’t to ask him about his business, not ever. Julianna knew he worked for the state department, CIA, or somebody like that, and that what he did was classified. But that was all.
    And for a long time, that had been enough. She hadn’t cared what he did. But lately, she had been curious. Frustrated and annoyed by his secrecy. By feeling shut out of his life. Bored with her own.
    So, even though she knew he would be displeased if he discovered what she was up to, she had started to snoop. The first time, he had just returned home from a trip and was in the shower. Heart thundering, she had rifled through his travel bag and jacket pockets.
    She hadn’t found anything suspicious that time, but in the many since she had unearthed several items that hadn’t added up. In a coat pocket she had found a letter, its open envelope addressed to someone other than John, at an address other than his. The letter itself had consisted of a single line of gibberish. In the front pocket of his travel bag, she’d found an airplane ticket stub to Colombia, a place he professed never to have been, the passenger name on the stub a Mr. Wendell White.
    Success had made her bolder.
    When John was out of town and her nights seemed to stretch endlessly before her, she had gone to his place and searched it. Each drawer and every closet, every piece of furniture for a secret hiding place, baseboards and floorboards, behind framed photographs and the few pieces of art he had hanging on the walls. She had even checked the contents of his freezer. There she’d finally hit pay dirt. Wrapped in white butcher paper, between two packages of frozen meat, she had found a small, spiral-bound, black leather book. Inside had been columns of dates followed by notations in some sort of code.
    It was then that she’d figured out why John never spoke of his work; why he never