She leaned back in her chair, considering him, and sipped her wine. She didn’t speak for so long that he thought she wasn’t going to say anything, and was just gathering himself to leave when she said, “You’re beneath my contempt.”

Alkaitis was paralyzed. He couldn’t imagine what to say.

“Oh, Ella,” Suzanne said. A small shard from the broken wineglass had been overlooked at the base of the bread basket. Suzanne plucked it between two fingers and dropped it delicately into Kaspersky’s water glass. They all watched it drift to the bottom.

Suzanne leaned in close and spoke quietly. “Why don’t you swallow broken glass?”

There was a moment where no one spoke.

“I’m sure you must hear this all the time,” Ella Kaspersky said, “but you two are perfect for each other.”

Alkaitis took his wife’s arm and steered her rapidly out of the restaurant, out to the cold street, where the car was waiting. He bundled her in and sat beside her. “Home, please,” he said to the driver. He glanced over and saw that Suzanne was weeping silently, her hands over her face. He pulled her close and held her tightly, her tears falling on his coat, and they stayed like that, not speaking, all the way back to Connecticut.

In a different life, in the library at FCI Medium 1, the visiting professor takes an uncharacteristic break from F. Scott Fitzgerald. “I want to talk about allegory today,” he says. “Any of you know the story of the swan in the frozen pond?”

“Yeah, I think I know that story,” Jeffries says. He was a police officer until he tried to arrange a hit on his wife. “The one about the swan who doesn’t fly away in time, right?”

Alkaitis finds himself thinking about the swan story later on, standing in line for his potatoes and mystery meat. The story was a favorite of his mother’s, repeated every so often throughout childhood and adolescence. There’s a flock of swans on a lake in the deepening autumn. As the nights grow colder, they all fly away. Except one, for reasons Alkaitis can’t remember: a lone swan who doesn’t perceive the approaching danger or loves the lake too much to leave even though it’s clearly time to go or is afflicted by hubris—the swan’s motivations were hazy and, Alkaitis suspects, changeable, depending on what message his mother was trying to impart at any given moment—and then winter sets in and the swan is frozen in ice, because it didn’t get out of the water in time.

“I thought I’d be able to get out,” he tells Freeman when she comes to see him again. “I was embarrassed. I didn’t want to let everyone down. They were just so greedy, these people, the returns they expected…”

“You feel the investors pushed you to commit fraud,” she says blandly.

“Well, I didn’t say that, exactly. I take full responsibility for my crimes.”

“But you seem to think the investors were partly to blame.”

“They expected a certain level of returns. I felt compelled to deliver. It was a nightmare, actually.”

“For you, you mean?”

“Yes, of course. Imagine the stress,” he says, “the constant pressure, always knowing that eventually it would all come crashing down but trying to keep it going anyway. I actually wish I’d been caught sooner. I wish they’d caught me back in 1999, that first SEC investigation.”

“And you maintain that no one else knew about the scheme.” Freeman’s voice was carefully neutral. “The account statements, the deception, the wire transfers, that was all you.”

“It was all me,” he says. “I never told a living soul.”

On a different day, Yvette Bertolli circles the recreation yard, walking a little behind and to the right of an elderly mafioso whose name used to inspire terror on the Lower East Side but who now shuffles awkwardly in a slow-motion attempt at jogging. Elsewhere, Olivia and Faisal are speaking with a man Alkaitis doesn’t recognize, a man who is also not a prisoner, presumably also not alive, a middle-aged man in a beautiful gray wool suit.

There were four Ponzi-related suicides that Alkaitis is aware of, four men who lost more than they could bear. Faisal was one of them; is this man another? There was an Australian businessman, if Alkaitis remembers correctly, also a Belgian. Are more ghosts even now approaching FCI Florence Medium 1? He stares at Olivia and is overcome by rage. What right does she have to haunt him? What right do any of them have to haunt him? It isn’t his fault that Faisal chose to do what he did. If he’s to be honest with himself, he supposes Yvette Bertolli’s heart attack was probably Ponzi related, but she should have seen the scheme for what it was and she could’ve gotten out whenever she wanted, just like everyone else, and whatever happened to Olivia can’t possibly be blamed on him, he’s been in prison for years now and she’s only been dead for a month. When Alkaitis thinks about how much money he provided, all the checks he sent out over the years, he feels a hollow rage.

“I’m not saying what I did was right but by any rational analysis I did some good in the world,” he writes to Julie Freeman. “By which I mean I made a lot of money over a period of decades for a lot of people, a lot of charities, many sovereign wealth funds and pension funds, etc., and I know that might seem self-justifying but the numbers are the numbers and if you look at investments vs. returns, most of those people/entities took out far more than they put in and made far more money than if they’d just invested in the stock market and therefore I would suggest that it is inaccurate to refer to them as ‘victims.’ ”

“Well,” he said to Suzanne, in the hospice, “at least now you won’t have to go to prison when the scheme collapses.”

“Think of the savings in legal fees,” she said. They were like that in the last few months, all competitive bluster and stupid bravado, until she stopped talking, after which he stopped talking too and just sat silently by the bed, hour upon hour, holding her hand.

When it did finally collapse, when he was finally trapped, the wrong woman was there with him. Although Vincent impressed him, at the end, despite not being Suzanne. The tableau: His office in Midtown, the last time he was ever in that room. He was sitting behind his desk, Claire crying on the sofa, Harvey staring into space, while Vincent fidgeted around with a coat and shopping bag and then sat and stared at him until he finally had to tell her: “Vincent,” he said, “do you know what a Ponzi scheme is?”

“Yes,” Vincent said.

Claire, from the sofa, still crying: “How do you know what a Ponzi scheme is, Vincent? Did he tell you? Did you know about this? I swear to god, if you knew about this, if he told you…”

“Of course he didn’t tell me,” Vincent said. “I know what a Ponzi scheme is because I’m not a fucking idiot.”

He thought, That’s my girl.

In the counterlife, he walks through a hotel corridor—wide and silent with modernist sconces, the corridor of the hotel on Palm Jumeirah—and takes the stairs this time, walking slowly through the cool air. There’s a potted palm on every landing. The lobby is empty except for Vincent. She’s standing by a fountain, looking into the water. She looks up when he approaches; she’s been waiting for him. It’s different this time, he’s certain that this cannot possibly be a memory, because it takes him a moment to recognize her. She’s much older, and she’s wearing strange clothing, a gray T-shirt and gray uniform trousers and a chef’s apron. There’s a handkerchief tied over her hair, but he can tell that her hair’s very short, not at all like it was when they were together, and she’s not wearing makeup. She’s become a completely different person since he saw her last.

“Hello, Jonathan.” Her voice seems to come from a long way off, like she’s speaking by telephone from a submarine.

“Vincent? I didn’t recognize you.”

She gazes at him and says nothing.

“What are you doing here?” he asks.

“Just visiting.”

“Visiting from where?”

But she’s looking past him, distracted now, and when he turns he sees Yvette and Faisal, strolling by one of the lobby windows. Yvette’s laughing at something Faisal just said.

“They’re not supposed to be here,” he says, truly alarmed, “I’ve never seen them here before,” but when he looks back, Vincent’s gone.

Later, lying awake in his uncomfortable bed in the noncounterlife, the nonlife, he’s struck by the unfairness of it. If he has to see ghosts, why not his real wife, his first companion instead of his second—his co-conspirator, his beloved Suzanne—or why can’t he see Lucas? He isn’t well. He’s in the counterlife more often than he’s in the prison now, and he knows that reality is sliding away from him. He’s afraid of forgetting his own name, and if he forgets himself, of course by then he’ll have forgotten his brother too. This thought is vastly upsetting, so he marks a tiny L on his left hand with Churchwell’s pen. Every time he sees the L, he decides, he’ll make a conscious effort to think of Lucas, and in this way thinking of Lucas will become a habit. He heard somewhere that habits are the last to go.

“A habit, like brushing your teeth,” Churchwell says.

“Yes, exactly.”

“See, but here’s the difference. Every time you brush your teeth, your teeth aren’t progressively degraded.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m no expert, but I remember reading somewhere, every time you retrieve a memory, that act of retrieval, it corrupts the memory a little bit. Maybe changes it a little.”

“Well,” Alkaitis says, “I suppose I’ll have to take my chances.” He’s troubled by this new information—is it new information? There’s a ring of the familiar about it—because these days he mostly only returns to one memory of Lucas, the same memory retrieved again and again, and it’s terrible to think that he’s chipping away at it every time, that it might even now be mutating in as-yet-imperceptible ways. When he isn’t in the counterlife he likes to dwell in a green field in his hometown, in the twilight following a family picnic. This was Lucas’s last summer. Jonathan was fourteen. Lucas arrived in the midafternoon, four trains later than planned. Jonathan remembers waiting at the station for one train, then another, then a third and a fourth, Lucas finally stepping out into the sunlight, much thinner than Jonathan remembered, a wraith in dark glasses. “Sorry about that,” he said, “I guess I just somehow lost track of time this morning.”

“We were almost starting to worry!” their mother said with that nervous little laugh that Jonathan had only recently begun to notice. She’d spent the last hour crying in the car while their father paced and smoked cigarettes. “We thought you maybe weren’t coming.” The family picnic was her idea, of course.

“Wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” Lucas said, and their father’s jaw tightened. As always, Jonathan couldn’t tell if Lucas was being sincere or not. It wasn’t fair that Jonathan had to be so much younger. He’d never been able to keep up.

“How’s the painting going?” he asked when they were in the backseat of the car together, and decades later in FCI Florence Medium 1 he can still feel the pleasure of that moment, of having thought to ask such an adult question.

“It’s going great, buddy, thanks for asking. Really great.”

“You’re still enjoying the city?” Mom always said the city in the way a preacher might say Gomorrah.

“I love it.” Lucas’s tone was a little off, though, even fourteen-year-old Jonathan could perceive that. Their parents exchanged glances.

“If you ever wanted to come home for a bit,” their father said. “Take a little break from it all, even just a week or two, get a little fresh air…”

“Fresh air’s overrated.”

Later, considering the memory from afar, from FCI Florence Medium 1, Alkaitis doesn’t remember much about the picnic. What he remembers is afterward: a sense of calm at the end of the long strange day, a temporary peace, sitting there in the shade with his whole family together, and then an hour or so when the sun is setting and their parents are starting to talk about driving Lucas back to the train station (“unless you’d like to stay here tonight, honey, you know there’s always room…”), one last beautiful hour of throwing a Frisbee with his brother in the deepening twilight, running and diving over grass, the pale disk spinning through the dark.