While I resent their invasion of my privacy, anything less than my full cooperation will lead to a search warrant and a deep dive into my past, and that I can’t afford, so I take them on the grand tour. Bedrooms, bathrooms, closets.

Unlike the professorial Declan, Ben Diamond looks vaguely menacing, with his shaved head and black leather jacket. It takes innate command presence to pull off a look like that at age seventy-three, but Ben still has it.

When I was young and imagined the setting for a perfect retirement, I dreamed it would be a hilltop villa in Koh Samui, or a tree house on the Osa Peninsula, where I would be serenaded by birds and howler monkeys. These were places I knew and loved, places that, in the end, I could not flee to. Because that’s where they would expect me to be. Being

Old age confers anonymity, which makes it the most effective disguise of all.

In the two years since I moved onto the adjoining property, he’s no doubt gleaned a number of details about me. He knows that I turn off my lights every night around 10:00 p.m., that I’m up early to feed and water my chickens. He knows I’m a novice at tapping maple trees, that I mostly keep to myself, and that I don’t throw loud parties. And today

Inside the niche is where I store my go bag. Over the years I have pared down the contents to the basics, just enough to skip town and hunker down elsewhere for a few weeks. Passports, credit cards, multiple bundles of cash in different currencies, and a few tools of the trade.

Once again, we are strangers, bound together only by envelopes of cash and a Starbucks gift card, with which he buys coffee to signal when he wants to meet me.

I don’t want him to show up at my hotel, nor do I want to be knocking at the door of his apartment, because both places present difficulties when it comes to a graceful escape. I am always about having a planned escape route, whether it’s from a firefight or a romantic evening, and a restaurant is a safe place to meet.

When I was twenty-five, I thought I’d never have to look at this version of my face. I had romantic notions of dying in action before wrinkles ever set in, but here I am, looking every bit my forty-two years of age. Living hard doesn’t mean dying early; sometimes it just means those hard years end up on your face.