“What was unusual?” Raphael asked.

“Inquiring about guests like that. How would he even know who was checking in that night?”

“It’s not the worst thing for a houseman to take a look at the guest list, familiarize himself with the lay of the land. Just playing devil’s advocate.”

“Okay, sure, I’ll give you that. But then, the way he looked straight to that point on the glass when he walked in, straight at the potted plant. I just don’t think the philodendron was that obvious,” Walter said.

“It is obviously out of place, to my eye.”

“But is it the first thing you look at? Especially at night? You walk into the lobby from the side door, at night, you look past the double row of pillars, past the armchairs and the side tables, halfway down the glass wall…”

“He does clean the lobby,” Raphael said. “He’d know better than anyone where the potted plants go.”

“I’m not accusing him of anything, to be clear. It’s just something I noticed.”

“I understand. I’ll speak with him. Was there anything else?”

“Nothing. The rest of the shift was completely normal.”

The rest of the shift:

By four a.m., Leon Prevant was beginning to yawn. Paul was somewhere back in the heart of the house, mopping floors in the staff corridors. Walter had finished his report and gone through his checklist. He was gazing out into the lobby, trying not to think too much about the graffiti. (What does Why don’t you swallow broken glass signify, if not I hope you die?) Larry was standing by the door with his eyes half-open. Walter wanted to wander over and talk to him, but he knew Larry used the quiet hours to meditate, and that when his eyes were half-open, that meant he was counting breaths. Walter considered going to talk to Vincent, but it wouldn’t look right for the night manager to linger by the bar while a guest was present, so he settled for a leisurely inspection of the lobby. He straightened a framed photograph by the fireplace, ran a fingertip over the bookshelves to check for dust, adjusted the leaves of the philodendron so that they better covered the paper taped to the glass. He stepped out for a moment into the cool night air, listening for a boat that he knew was not yet en route.

At four-thirty Leon Prevant rose and drifted toward the elevator, yawning. Twenty minutes later, Jonathan Alkaitis arrived. Walter heard the boat long before it came into view, as always, the motor violently loud in the stillness of night, and then the lights on the stern swung over the water as the boat rounded the peninsula. Larry set off for the pier with a luggage trolley. Vincent put away the newspaper she’d been reading, adjusted her hair, reapplied lipstick, and took two quick shots of espresso. Walter put on his warmest professional smile as Jonathan Alkaitis walked in behind his luggage.

In later years Walter was interviewed three or four times about Jonathan Alkaitis, but the journalists always left disappointed. As a hotel manager, he told them, he lived and died by his discretion, but in truth there wasn’t much to tell. Alkaitis was interesting only in retrospect. He’d come to the Hotel Caiette with his wife, now deceased. He and his wife had fallen in love with the place, so when it’d come up for sale he’d bought the property, which he leased to the hotel’s management company. He lived in New York City and came to the hotel three or four times a year. He carried himself with the tedious confidence of all people with money, that breezy assumption that no serious harm could come to him. He was generically well dressed, tanned in the manner of people who spend time in tropical settings in the wintertime, reasonably but not spectacularly fit, unremarkable in every way. Nothing about him, in other words, suggested that he would die in prison.

The best suite had been set aside for him, as always. He was absurdly jet-lagged, he told Walter, and also quite hungry. Could an early breakfast be arranged? (Of course. For Alkaitis, anything could be arranged.) It was still dark outside, but day broke in the kitchen long before sunrise. The morning shift would be arriving by now.

“I’ll just take a seat at the bar,” Alkaitis said, and within minutes was deep in conversation with Vincent, who was, it seemed to Walter, at her brightest and most engaging, although he couldn’t quite make out what they were talking about.

3

Leon Prevant left the lobby at four-thirty a.m., climbed the stairs to his room, and crept into the bed, where his wife was sleeping. Marie didn’t wake up. He’d purposefully drunk one whiskey too many with the thought that this might make it possible to fall asleep, but it was as if the graffiti had opened a crack in the night, through which all his fears flooded in. If pressed he might have admitted to Marie that he was worried about money, but worried wasn’t strong enough. Leon was afraid.

A colleague had told him this place was extraordinary, so he’d booked an extremely expensive room as an anniversary surprise for his wife. His colleague was right, he’d decided immediately. There were fishing and kayaking expeditions, guided hikes into wilderness, live music in the lobby, spectacular food, a wooded path that opened into a forest glade with an outdoor bar and lanterns hung from trees, a heated pool overlooking the tranquil waters of the sound.

“It’s heavenly,” Marie said on their first night.

“I’m inclined to agree.”

He’d sprung for a room with a hot tub on the terrace, and that first night they were out there for at least an hour, sipping champagne with a cool breeze in their faces, the sun setting over the water in a postcard kind of way. He kissed her and tried to convince himself to relax. But relaxation was difficult, because a week after he’d booked this extravagant room and told his wife about it, he’d begun to hear rumors of a pending merger.

Leon had survived two mergers and a reorganization, but when he heard the first whispers of this latest restructuring, he was struck by a certainty so strong that it felt like true knowledge: he was going to lose his job. He was fifty-eight years old. He was senior enough to be expensive, and close enough to retirement to be let go without weighing too heavily on anyone’s conscience. There was no part of his job that couldn’t be performed by younger executives who made less money than he did. Since hearing of the merger he’d lived whole hours without thinking about it, but the nights were harder than the days. He and Marie had just bought a house in South Florida, which they planned to rent out until he retired, with the idea of eventually fleeing New York winters and New York taxes. This seemed to him to be a new beginning, but they’d spent more money on the house than they’d meant to, he had never been very good at saving, and he was aware that he had much less in his retirement accounts than he should. It was six-thirty in the morning before he fell into a fitful sleep.

4

When Walter returned to the lobby the following evening, Leon Prevant was eating dinner at the bar with Jonathan Alkaitis. They’d met a little earlier, in what seemed at the time like a coincidental manner and seemed later like a trap. Leon had been at the bar, eating a salmon burger, alone because Marie was lying down upstairs with a headache. Alkaitis, who was drinking a pint of Guinness two stools down, struck up a conversation with the bartender and then expanded the conversation to include Leon. They were talking about Caiette, which, as it happened, Jonathan Alkaitis knew something about. “I actually own this property,” he said to Leon, almost apologetically. “It’s hard to get to, but that’s what I like about it.”

“I think I know what you mean,” Leon said. He was always looking for conversations, and it was a pleasure to think about something—anything!—other than financial insolvency and unemployment for a moment. “Do you own other hotels?”

“Just the one. I mostly work in finance.” Alkaitis had a couple of businesses in New York, he said, both of which involved investing other people’s money in the stock market for them. He wasn’t really taking on new clients these days, but he did on occasion make an exception.

The thing about Alkaitis, a woman from Philadelphia wrote some years later, in a victim impact statement that she read aloud at Alkaitis’s sentencing hearing, is he made you feel like you were joining a secret club. There was truth in this, Leon had to admit, when he read the transcript, but the other part of the equation was the man himself. What Alkaitis had was presence. He had a voice made for late-night radio, warm and reassuring. He radiated calm. He was a man utterly without bluster, confident but not arrogant, quick to smile at jokes. A steady, low-key, intelligent person, much more interested in listening than in talking about himself. He had that trick—and it was a trick, Leon realized later—of appearing utterly indifferent to what anyone thought of him, and in so doing provoking the opposite anxiety in other people: What does Alkaitis think of me? Later, in the years that he spent replaying this particular evening, Leon remembered a certain desire to impress him.

“This is slightly embarrassing,” Alkaitis said that night, when they’d left the bar and retired to a quieter corner of the lobby to discuss investments, “but you said you’re in shipping, and I realized as you said it that I’ve only the dimmest idea of what that actually means.”

Leon smiled. “You’re not alone in that. It’s a largely invisible industry, but nearly everything you’ve ever bought traveled over the water.”

“My made-in-China headphones, and whatnot.”

“Sure, yes, there’s an obvious one, but I really mean almost everything. Everything on and around us. Your socks. Our shoes. My aftershave. This glass in my hand. I could keep going, but I’ll spare you.”

“I’m embarrassed to admit that I never thought about it,” Jonathan said.

“No one does. You go to the store, you buy a banana, you don’t think about the men who piloted the banana through the Panama Canal. Why would you?” Easy now, he told himself. He was aware of a weakness for rhapsodizing on his industry at excessive length. “I have colleagues who resent the general public’s ignorance of the industry, but I think the fact that you don’t have to think about it proves that the whole system works.”

“The banana arrives on schedule.” Jonathan sipped his drink. “You must develop a kind of sixth sense. Here you are in the world, surrounded by all these objects that arrived by ship. You ever find it distracting, thinking about all those shipping routes, all those points of origin?”

“You’re only the second person I’ve ever met who guessed that,” Leon said.

The other was a psychic, a college friend of Marie’s who’d come into Toronto from Santa Fe, back when Leon was still based in Toronto, and the three of them had had dinner downtown at Saint Tropez, Marie’s favorite restaurant in their Toronto years. The psychic—Clarissa, he remembered now—was friendly and warm. He liked her immediately. He had an impression that psychics must very often be exploited by their friends and passing acquaintances, an impression not dispelled by Marie’s reminiscences about all the times she’d asked Clarissa for free advice, so over the course of the evening Leon went elaborately out of his way to avoid asking her anything, until finally, over dessert, curiosity overtook him: Was it ever deafening, he asked her, being in a crowded room? Was it like being in a room filled with radios tuned to overlapping frequencies, a clamor of voices broadcasting the mundane or horrifying details of dozens of lives? Clarissa smiled. “It’s like this,” she said, gesturing at the room around them, “it’s like being in a crowded restaurant. You can tune in to the conversation at the next table, or you can let that become background noise. Like the way you see shipping,” she said, and this remained in memory as one of the most delightful conversations Leon had ever had, because he’d never talked with anyone about the way he could tune in and out of shipping, like turning a dial on a radio. When he glanced across the table at Marie, for example: he could see the woman he loved, or he could shift frequencies and see the dress made in the U.K., the shoes made in China, the Italian leather handbag, or shift even further and see the Neptune-Avramidis shipping routes lit up on the map: the dress via Westbound Trans-Atlantic Route 3, the shoes via either the Trans-Pacific Eastbound 7 or the Shanghai–Los Angeles Eastbound Express, etc. Or further still, into the kind of language he’d never speak aloud, not even to Marie: there are tens of thousands of ships at sea at any given moment and he liked to imagine each one as a point of light, converging into rivers of electric brilliance over the night oceans, flowing through the narrow channels of the Suez and Panama Canals, the Strait of Gibraltar, around the edges of continents and out into the oceans, an unceasing movement that drove countries, a secret world that he loved so much.

When Walter walked within earshot of Leon Prevant and Jonathan Alkaitis, some time later, the conversation had shifted from Leon’s work to Alkaitis’s, from shipping to investment strategies. Walter understood none of it. Finance wasn’t his world. He didn’t speak the language. Someone on the day shift had covered the graffiti on the glass with reflective tape, an odd silvery streak of mirror on the darkened window. Two American actors were eating dinner at the bar.

“He left his first wife for her,” Larry said, nodding at them.

“Oh?” said Walter, who could not possibly have cared less. Twenty years of working in high-end hotels had cured him of any interest in celebrity. “I wanted to ask you,” he said, “just between the two of us, does the new guy seem a little off to you?”

Larry glanced theatrically over his shoulder and around the lobby, but Paul was elsewhere, mopping the corridor behind Reception in the heart of the house.

“Maybe a little depressed, is all,” Larry said. “Not the most sparkling personality I’ve ever come across.”

“Did he ask you about arriving guests last night?”

“How’d you know? Yeah, asked me when Jonathan Alkaitis was arriving.”

“And you told him…?”

“Well, you know my eyesight’s not great, and I’d only just come on shift. So I told him I wasn’t completely sure, but I thought the guy drinking whiskey in the lobby was Alkaitis. Didn’t realize my mistake till later. Why?” Larry was a reasonably discreet man, but on the other hand, the staff lived together in the same building in the woods and gossip was a kind of black-market currency.

“No reason.”

“Come on.”

“I’ll tell you later.” Walter still didn’t understand the motive, as he walked back toward Reception, but there was no doubt in his mind that Paul had committed the act. He glanced around the lobby, but no one seemed to require his attention at that moment, so he slipped through the staff door behind the reception desk. Paul was cleaning the dark window at the end of the hall.

“Paul.”

The night houseman stopped what he was doing, and in his expression, Walter knew that he’d been correct in his suspicions. Paul had a hunted look.

“Where’d you get the acid marker?” Walter asked. “Is that something you can just buy at a hardware store, or did you have to make it yourself?”

“What are you talking about?” But Paul was a terrible liar. His voice had gone up half an octave.

“Why did you want Jonathan Alkaitis to see that disgusting message?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“This place means something to me,” Walter said. “Seeing it defaced like that…” It was the like that that bothered him the most, the utter vileness of the message on the glass, but he didn’t know how to explain this to Paul without opening a door into his personal life, and the thought of revealing anything remotely personal to this shiftless little creep was untenable. He couldn’t finish the sentence. He cleared his throat. “I’d like to give you an opportunity,” he said. “Pack up your things and leave on the first boat, and we don’t have to get the police involved.”

“I’m sorry.” Paul’s voice was a whisper. “I just—”

“You just thought you’d deface a hotel window, for the sake of delivering the most vicious, the most deranged—” Walter was sweating. “Why did you even do it?” But Paul had the furtive look of a boy searching for a plausible story, and Walter couldn’t stand to listen to another lie that night. “Look, just go,” he said. “I don’t care why you did it. I don’t want to look at you anymore. Put the cleaning supplies away, go back to your room, pack your bags, and tell Melissa that you want a ride to Grace Harbour as quickly as possible. If you’re still here at nine a.m., I’ll go to Raphael.”

“You don’t understand,” Paul said. “I’ve got all this debt—”

“If you needed the job that badly,” Walter said, “you probably shouldn’t have defaced the window.”

“You can’t even swallow broken glass.”

“What?”

“I mean it’s actually physically impossible.”

“Seriously? That’s your defense?”

Paul flushed and looked away.

“Did you ever think of your sister in all of this?” Walter asked. “She got you the job interview here, didn’t she?”

“Vincent had nothing to do with this.”

“Are you going to leave? I’m in a generous mood and I don’t want to embarrass your sister, so I’m giving you a clean exit here, but if you’d prefer a criminal record, then by all means…”

“No, I’ll go.” Paul looked down at the cleaning supplies in his hands, as if unsure how they’d landed there. “I’m sorry.”

“You should go pack before I change my mind.”

“Thank you,” Paul said.

5

But the horror of it. Why don’t you swallow broken glass. Why don’t you die. Why don’t you cast everyone who loves you into perdition. He was thinking about his friend Rob again, forever sixteen, thinking about Rob’s mother’s face at the funeral. Walter sleepwalked through the rest of his shift and stayed up late to meet with Raphael in the morning. As he passed through the lobby at eight a.m., up past his bedtime and desperate for sleep, he caught sight of Paul down at the end of the pier, loading his duffel bags into the boat.

“Good morning,” Raphael said when Walter looked into his office. He was bright-eyed and freshly shaved. He and Walter lived in the same building, but in opposite time zones.

“I just saw Paul getting on the boat with his worldly belongings,” Walter said.

Raphael sighed. “I don’t know what happened. He came in here this morning with an incoherent story about how much he misses Vancouver, when the kid practically begged me for a change of scenery three months back.”

“He gave no reason?”

“None. We’ll start interviewing again. Anything else?” Raphael asked, and Walter, his defenses weakened by exhaustion, understood for the first time that Raphael didn’t like him very much. The realization landed with a sad little thud.

“No,” he said, “thank you. I’ll leave you to it.” On the walk back to the staff lodge, he found himself wishing that he’d been less angry when he’d spoken with Paul. All these hours later, he was beginning to wonder if he’d missed the point: when Paul said he had debts, did he mean that he needed the job at the hotel, or was he saying that someone had paid him to write the message on the glass? Because none of it actually made sense. It seemed obvious that Paul’s message was directed at Alkaitis, but what could Alkaitis possibly mean to him?

Leon Prevant and his wife departed that morning, followed two days later by Jonathan Alkaitis. When Walter came in for his shift on the night of Alkaitis’s departure, Khalil was working the bar, although it wasn’t his usual night: Vincent, he said, had taken a sudden vacation. A day later she called Raphael from Vancouver and told him she’d decided not to come back to the hotel, so someone from Housekeeping boxed up her belongings and put them in storage at the back of the laundry room.

The panel of glass was replaced at enormous expense, and the graffiti receded into memory. Spring passed into summer and then the beautiful chaos of the high season, the lobby crowded every night and a temperamental jazz quartet causing drama in the staff lodge when they weren’t delighting the guests, the quartet alternating with a pianist whose marijuana habit was tolerated because he could seemingly play any song ever written, the hotel fully booked and the staff almost doubled, Melissa piloting the boat back and forth to Grace Harbour all day and late into the evening.

Summer faded into autumn, then the quiet and the dark of the winter months, the rainstorms more frequent, the hotel half-empty, the staff quarters growing quiet with the departure of the seasonal workers. Walter slept through the days and arrived at his shift in the early evenings—the pleasure of long nights in the silent lobby, Larry by the door, Khalil at the bar, storms descending and rising throughout the night—and sometimes joined his colleagues for a meal that was dinner for the night shift and breakfast for the day people, shared a few drinks sometimes with the kitchen staff, listened to jazz alone in his apartment, went for walks in and out of Caiette, ordered books in the mail that he read when he woke in the late afternoons.

On a stormy night in spring, Ella Kaspersky checked in. She was a regular at the hotel, a businesswoman from Chicago who liked to come here to escape “all the noise,” as she put it, a guest who was mostly notable because Jonathan Alkaitis had made it clear that he didn’t want to see her. Walter had no idea why Alkaitis was avoiding Kaspersky and frankly didn’t want to know, but when she arrived he did his customary check to make sure Alkaitis hadn’t made a last-minute booking. Alkaitis hadn’t visited the hotel in some time, he realized, longer than his usual interval between visits. When the lobby was quiet at two a.m., he ran a Google search on Alkaitis and found images from a recent charity fund-raiser, Alkaitis beaming in a tuxedo with a younger woman on his arm. She looked very familiar.

Walter enlarged the photo. The woman was Vincent. A glossier version, with an expensive haircut and professional-grade makeup, but it was unmistakably her. She was wearing a metallic gown that must have cost about what she’d made in a month as a bartender here. The caption read Jonathan Alkaitis with his wife, Vincent.

Walter looked up from the screen, into the silent lobby. Nothing in his life had changed in the year since Vincent’s departure, but this was by his own design and his own desire. Khalil, now the full-time night bartender, was chatting with a couple who’d just arrived. Larry stood by the door with his hands clasped behind his back, eyes half-closed. Walter abandoned his post and walked out into the April night. He hoped Vincent was happy in that foreign country, in whatever strange new life she’d found for herself. He tried to imagine what it might be like to step into Jonathan Alkaitis’s life—the money, the houses, the private jet—but it was all incomprehensible to him. The night was clear and cold, moonless but the blaze of stars was overwhelming. Walter wouldn’t have imagined, in his previous life in downtown Toronto, that he’d fall in love with a place where the stars were so bright that he could see his shadow on a night with no moon. He wanted nothing that he didn’t already have.

But when he turned back to the hotel he was blindsided by the memory of the words written on the window a year ago, Why don’t you swallow broken glass, the whole unsettling mystery of it. The forest was a mass of undifferentiated shadow. He folded his arms against the chill and returned to the warmth and light of the lobby.

Shield

One of the first things she bought was an expensive video camera, a Canon HV10. She’d been shooting video since she was thirteen, a few days after her mother disappeared, when her grandmother Caroline arrived from Victoria to help out. That first night of her grandmother’s visit, when Vincent was sitting at the table after dinner—drinking tea, which was a habit she’d picked up from her mother, and staring down the hill at the water because surely any minute now her mother would walk up the steps to the house—her grandmother brought a box to the table.

“I have something for you,” she said.

Vincent opened it and found a video camera, a Panasonic. She recognized it as one of the new kind that took DV tapes, but it still had an unexpected weight. She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do with it.

“When I was younger,” Caroline said, “say maybe twenty-one, twenty-two, I went through a difficult time.”

“What kind of difficult time?” It was the first thing Vincent had said in some hours, maybe all day. The words were sticky in her throat.

“The details aren’t very important. A friend of mine, a photographer, she gave me a camera she no longer needed. She said to me, ‘Just take some pictures, take pictures every day, see if it makes you feel better.’ It seemed like a dumb idea, to be honest, but I tried it, and I did feel better.”

“I don’t think—” Vincent said, but couldn’t finish the sentence. I don’t think a camera will bring my mother back.

“What I’m suggesting,” Caroline said softly, “is that the lens can function as a shield between you and the world, when the world’s just a little too much to bear. If you can’t stand to look at the world directly, maybe it’s possible to look at it through the viewfinder. I think your brother would laugh at me if I said something like this to him, but maybe you could just try to absorb the idea.”

Vincent was quiet, considering it.

“I was going to buy you a thirty-five-millimeter film camera,” Caroline said with a self-conscious little laugh, “but then I thought, it’s 1994, do kids even take still photos anymore? Surely video’s where it’s at?”

Vincent settled quickly into a form she liked. She recorded segments of exactly five minutes each, like little portraits: five minutes of beach and sky by the pier at Caiette, and then later there were five-minute clips of the quiet street where she lived with her aunt in Vancouver’s endless suburbs, five minutes from the window of the SkyTrain on her way into the city center, five minutes of the fascinating, appalling neighborhood where she lived with Melissa when she was seventeen—not in the film: the way she had to take off running down the street because an addict wanted her camera—and five-minute clips of the dish pit at the Hotel Vancouver that same year, the camera rigged in a plastic bag on a shelf with a timer while Vincent sprayed dishes with hot water and fed them into an industrial machine. Five-minute increments of Caiette again, and then—after she met Jonathan—five minutes of the infinity pool at the Greenwich house, the way it rippled into the lawn, precisely because she hated looking at that vanishing point and was trying to be stronger; five minutes from the window of Jonathan’s private jet the first time she crossed the Atlantic, a few ships far below in the steel-gray water, no visible land. “What are you doing?” Jonathan asked, startling her. He’d been sitting in the back of the plane with Yvette Bertolli, a formidably elegant associate of his who was coming to France with them; she lived in Paris, so Jonathan was giving her a ride as far as Nice, where he had a villa. Vincent, sunk into an enormous armchair by the window, had thought she was momentarily alone.

“Kind of beautiful, don’t you think?” Vincent said.

Jonathan leaned over her to peer down at the distant waves. “You’re shooting video of the ocean?”

“Everyone needs a hobby.”

“Just when you think you know a woman,” he said, and kissed her head.

Shadows

Jonathan had a shadow. He introduced the topic a few hours after they arrived at the villa in Nice, when they were sitting together on the terrace in the late afternoon. It was only early spring but already warm here, a pleasant breeze coming in from the sea. Vincent was dazed and jet-lagged, trying to cover this with coffee and the eye drops that she’d applied in the bathroom earlier. Yvette, Jonathan’s associate, had discreetly retired to a guest bedroom, so Vincent and Jonathan were alone. The view was of palm trees and then the otherworldly blue of the sea, oddly familiar after all the movies she’d seen set around the Mediterranean, most of which had involved fast cars, gamblers, and/or James Bond. Jonathan was in a contemplative mood. “This will seem an obvious statement,” he said, “but success attracts a certain kind of attention.”

“Positive, or negative?”

“Well, both,” he said, “but I’m thinking of the negative kind.”

“Are you thinking of a particular person?” A door opened behind them, and Anya appeared on the terrace with two coffee cups on a little silver tray. Vincent was startled to see her, because she hadn’t realized Anya was coming to France, although it occurred to her that she hadn’t seen Anya around the house in Greenwich in the last couple of days. “Thank you,” Vincent said to Anya, “I desperately needed that.” Anya nodded. Jonathan took his coffee from the tray without comment, because for him, coffee appearing out of thin air was so commonplace an occurrence that it didn’t merit acknowledgment.

“Yes,” he said. “There is a particular person. A particular obsessive.”

He’d met Ella Kaspersky back in 1999, at, of all places, the Hotel Caiette. They’d had a conversation about Kaspersky’s possibly investing with him, but she’d concluded—without basis, obviously—that the sheer consistency of Jonathan’s returns was indicative of some kind of nefarious fraud scheme. Completely illogical and unfair, delusional even, but what could he do? People jump to their own conclusions.

“I’d think good returns would be an indication that you’re good at your job,” Vincent said.

“Well, exactly. I’ve never claimed to be a genius, but I do know what I’m doing.”

“Clearly,” Vincent said, with a gesture meant to encompass not just the terrace but the villa and its proximity to the Mediterranean, the private jet that had brought them here, the entirety of this remarkable life.

“I’ve done all right,” he said. “Anyway, Kaspersky took her story to the SEC. I’m sorry, it’s rude to throw obscure acronyms around. I mean the Securities and Exchange Commission. They’re the people who look after my industry.” Vincent knew what the SEC was, because she made an effort to follow the financial news, but she only nodded. “They investigated me thoroughly. Naturally they found nothing. There was nothing to find.”

“Did you hear from her again? After the investigation?”

“Not directly. I’ve heard from other people whom she’s spoken to.”

“If she’s spreading false rumors against you,” Vincent said, “can’t you sue her for defamation?”

“The thing you have to understand,” he said, “is that in my business, credibility is everything. I can’t run the risk of it becoming a news story.”

“You’re saying the appearance of scandal would be almost as bad as an actual scandal.”

“Smart girl. But I thought about it later, when all of that insanity with the SEC had passed, and I realized what the problem was. That money she wanted to invest? It was her father’s fortune. He’d died quite recently. So there was just, well, there’s a lot of emotion caught up in money sometimes.” Anya was moving around the periphery of the terrace, discreetly setting out candles for the evening. How much of the conversation was she hearing? Did it matter? Did Anya care? “The letter Ella Kaspersky sent me, it was unhinged,” Jonathan said, “rambling on about her father’s legacy and so on. But to be fair, when I look back on it I realize she was obviously grieving, and grief can make anyone a little irrational in the moment.” The unspeakable subject of Jonathan’s dead wife floated between them, like a ghost; they glanced at one another but didn’t say her name. Jonathan cleared his throat. “Anyway, the reason I’m telling you all this is, I just didn’t want you to wonder if you ever came across anything from her online, or if we ever came across her in real life. You never saw her in Caiette, did you?”

“At the hotel? I don’t really remember many of the other guests, to be honest. I was only there for six or seven months.”

“Till I swept you off your feet,” he said, and kissed her. His lips were cold and tasted unpleasantly of stale coffee, but Vincent smiled at him anyway.

“I think envy’s understandable,” she said. “Not everyone succeeds.”

(Had Vincent succeeded? She felt that by any rational measure she was living an extraordinary life, but on the other hand she wasn’t sure what the goal had been. Later she stood alone on the terrace, filming the Mediterranean, and thought, Maybe this could be enough. Maybe not everyone needs to have a specific ambition. I could be the sort of person who just goes to beautiful places and owns beautiful things. Maybe I could film five-minute videos of every sea and every ocean and perhaps there would be some meaning in that project, some kind of completion.)

The Astronaut

She met Jonathan’s employees that summer, at his annual Fourth of July party, which lasted until the small hours of the morning and involved a fleet of chartered buses. There was an army of caterers and a swing band dressed in white on the lawn. The guests were all employees of Jonathan’s. There were a little over a hundred employees, five in the asset management group and the rest in the brokerage company.

“Are the asset management people a little standoffish?” Vincent asked. The asset management team was standing in a tight little group at the party’s edge. One of them, Oskar, was trying to juggle plastic cups while the others watched. “No, wait,” Oskar was saying, “I swear I used to know how to do this…”

“They’ve always been a little insular,” Jonathan said. “They work on a different floor.”

When everyone was gone, the lawn seemed enormous, a twilight landscape of round tables with flickering candles on wine-stained tablecloths, plastic cups glimmering in the trampled grass. “You’re so poised,” Jonathan said. They were sitting by the pool with their feet in the water, while the caterers blew out candles and folded tables and packed dirty glasses into crates. That’s my job, Vincent didn’t say in return. Calling it a job seemed uncharitable, because she really did like him. It wasn’t the romance of the century, but it didn’t have to be; if you genuinely enjoy someone’s company, she’d been thinking lately, if you enjoy your life with them and don’t mind sleeping with them, isn’t that enough? Do you have to actually be in love for a relationship to be real, whatever real means, so long as there’s respect and something like friendship? She spent more time thinking about this than she would have liked, which suggested that it was an unresolved question, but she felt certain that she could go on this way for a long time, years probably. The Fourth of July was a feverish night at the peak of a heat wave.

“Well, thank you. I try.” Sweat ran down her back.

“You try without appearing to try, though,” he said. “You’ve no idea what a rare quality that is.”

She was watching the shimmer of lights on the surface of the pool. When she looked up, one of the caterers was watching her, a young woman who was straightening deck chairs. Vincent looked away quickly. She had studied the habits of the monied with diligence. She copied their modes of dress and speech, and cultivated an air of carelessness. But she was ill at ease around the household staff and the caterers, because she feared that if anyone from her home planet were to look at her too closely, they’d see through her disguise.

Mirella

In their first winter together, they flew south to a party at a private club in Miami Beach. Jonathan seemed to belong to an extraordinary number of clubs. “It’s an expensive hobby,” he told Vincent, “but I’ve always had a weakness for places where it seems like time slows down.” (Yet another clue that Vincent felt she should have picked up: Why exactly did he want time to slow down? Was there something in that statement besides a general awareness of mortality, some other inevitability that he felt was rushing toward him?) “Some of the clubs have other pleasures,” he said, “golf courses and tennis courts and whatnot, but there’s a certain pleasure in just drinking coffee or wine in a private lounge. Time moves differently in these places.”

The Winter Formal in Miami Beach was a deadly evening of tuxedos and iridescent gowns. The women were mostly much older than Vincent. The men would have looked alike even if they weren’t all dressed like penguins—the curious sameness of expensively maintained people with similar habits—and most of them had always been in this world, it was obvious, they had lived their whole lives above a safety net and were therefore of a different species from Vincent. She moved through the room in a silver gown, smiling and telling people that she was delighted to meet them, laughing convincingly at weak jokes, listening intently to dull anecdotes with the same smile she’d used on good tippers back in her bartending days. Jonathan had known most of the Miami Beach people for a decade or more. Many of the other women had been friends with Jonathan’s wife, Suzanne, and they had children Vincent’s age and older. Several of them had had unfortunate cosmetic procedures—puffed-out faces, immobile foreheads, swollen rubbery lips—that made her eyes widen involuntarily when they were introduced. Vincent stayed by Jonathan’s side until he excused himself for a discreet conversation with a potential investor, at which point she went to the bar, where a tall woman in a blindingly fuchsia dress was ordering a gin and tonic. Vincent had noticed her earlier, as one of the very few women in the room who seemed to be about Vincent’s age. They received their drinks from parallel bartenders at the same moment and nearly collided as they left the bar.

Mirella and Faisal had lived in London for a couple of years, then briefly in Singapore, before they’d settled in New York. “My life wasn’t really different in those places,” Mirella said when Vincent asked. This was a month or two after they’d met. Vincent had taken Mirella to her favorite gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vincent had no formal education in art, but she was moved by portraits, especially portraits whose subjects looked quite ordinary, like people you might see in the subway except in outmoded clothes.

“I don’t think of those as similar cities,” Vincent said.

“They’re not, but my life was the same. It was just a change in background scenery.” She glanced at Vincent. “You didn’t come from money, did you?”

“No.”

“Me neither. You know what I’ve learned about money? I was trying to figure out why my life felt more or less the same in Singapore as it did in London, and that’s when I realized that money is its own country.”

One of the things that Vincent tried not to think about too much: a difference between Mirella and Vincent was that Mirella was in this country of money with a man whom she truly loved. You could see it in the way she looked at Faisal, the way she brightened when he came into a room.

The Investor

If money is a country, there were other citizens whom Vincent liked much less. She and Jonathan had dinner with Lenny Xavier, a music producer from Los Angeles. Jonathan was quiet and distracted on the way to the restaurant. “He’s my most important investor,” he said quietly as they walked in, and then he caught sight of Lenny and Lenny’s wife at the far end of the room and broke into a grin. Lenny wore an expensive-looking suit with sneakers and had hair that was messy on purpose. His wife, Tiffany, was very beautiful but didn’t have much to say.

“We met at an audition, actually,” she said when Vincent attempted small talk, and said almost nothing further to her. She’d been a singer but now she wasn’t singing. Toward the end of the evening, Jonathan somehow drew Tiffany into conversation, and Lenny, who had had too much to drink, turned to Vincent and launched into a monologue about a girl he’d worked with years ago, another girl who’d also wanted to be a singer.

“The problem is,” he told her, “some people just can’t recognize opportunity.”

“That’s very true,” Vincent said, but his statement made her uneasy. She enjoyed Jonathan’s company, but it was undeniable that when he’d walked into the bar of the Hotel Caiette, she’d recognized an opportunity.

“She had real potential. Real potential. But an inability to recognize opportunity? That right there is a fatal flaw.”

“Where is she now?” Vincent asked. Lenny had been talking about the girl in the past tense, which Vincent found mildly alarming.

“Annika? Who gives a fuck. I haven’t seen her since 2000, maybe 2001.” Lenny poured himself another glass of red. “You really want to know? She went back to Canada to play weird electronica with her friends.”

(“The problem is, though,” Tiffany was saying to Jonathan, across the table, “when you buy jewelry online, it’s really hard to tell how chunky it is.”)

“You don’t work with her at all anymore?”

“No, because she’s a fucking idiot. Okay, so this girl, Annika, when I met her she was young. Really shockingly beautiful, okay? Just shockingly beautiful. Not a ton of talent, but enough. Great body. Her voice was just okay, but you know what? We can work with that. She writes poetry, so her lyrics are good. She plays the violin, which is a fucking useless instrument for pop music, but whatever, at least she’s got a musical background. So we start working with her, we’re moving toward an album, making plans for how to package her, how to roll her out. Like I said, she’s beautiful, and tell you what, she’s got this edge to her, this kind of rare quality, like she’s really sexy but it’s not obvious, right? Like it’s not in your face, there’s something a little mysterious about it.”

“Mysterious?”

“Kind of remote, but not ice-queen remote, more like, I don’t know, intelligent remote, which can be attractive in certain girls.” His eyes dropped briefly to Vincent’s chest. “So anyway, we’re pretty far along, we’re hiring a backup band and looking for a choreographer, and then she comes to us and she’s like, ‘I want out.’ We’re like, ‘I’m sorry, what?’ We’re pretty shocked, me and my partners. We’ve got her on this program, right? We’re paying for vocal lessons, guitar lessons, songwriters, a personal trainer. Any musician, any recording artist would kill for an opportunity like what she’s got here. We point that out and she’s like, yeah, she gets it, she appreciates the effort, but we’re violating her artistic integrity.” Lenny paused to sip his wine. “Hilarious, right?”

Vincent smiled, unsure of what exactly she was supposed to find hilarious. (“Oh, that? That’s topaz, I think,” Tiffany was saying to Jonathan. “With little diamonds around it.”)

“We’re like, your what? Your integrity? You are twenty-one years old. You don’t get to have integrity. I mean, okay, look, maybe she had integrity, you know, personally, like as a human being, but artistic integrity? You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. She’s a little girl.”

“So what happened?”

“Like I said, she went back to Canada. I Googled her the other day, and you know what she’s doing? Touring Canada in a fucking van, playing in tiny clubs and music festivals in towns you’ve never heard of. You see what I mean? Couldn’t recognize an opportunity. Whereas me, when I met your husband? When I figured out how his fund worked? That right there was an opportunity, and I seized it.”

“Lenny,” Jonathan said, cutting Tiffany off midsentence, “let’s not bore our lovely wives with investment talk.”

“All I’m saying is, my investment performed better than I could’ve imagined.” Lenny raised his glass. “Anyway. Annika. It’s all good, because you know what? I can predict the future.” He smiled and tapped his forehead with one finger. “She’ll come back to me.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Vincent said. What was strange was that she was certain Jonathan was listening very intently to her conversation with Lenny, even though he was gazing at Tiffany and nodding at what Tiffany was saying. It seemed to her that there was something that Jonathan didn’t want Lenny to reveal.

“Any year now, any day now, I’ll hear from her again, I’d bet money on it.”

“No question.” If only the evening would end. Vincent’s face was getting tired.

“She’ll be all, like, hey, remember me, we were going to do something together, and I’ll be like, yeah, we were going to do something together, you and me, past tense. That was five years ago, six years ago, now you’re not twenty-one anymore.”

Poolside

“Tell me about the place you’re from,” Mirella said toward the end. The age of money lasted a little under three years. During the final summer, six months before the end, Faisal went home to Riyadh to spend a few weeks with his father, who’d just received a cancer diagnosis, and during that period Mirella fell into the habit of taking a car up to Greenwich almost every afternoon. Vincent and Mirella spent languid hours swimming or lying in the shade by the pool, stunned by heat, Mirella’s bodyguard reading the paper or staring at his phone on a lawn chair out of earshot.

“I grew up on a road with two dead ends,” Vincent said. “That pretty much sums it up.”

“Put down that camera, will you? You’re making me nervous.”

“I’m not filming you, I’m just filming those trees over there.”

“Yeah, but they’re boring trees. They’re not doing anything.”

“Fair point,” Vincent said, and smiled and put the camera away, although it pained her to stop filming at the three-minute-twenty-seven-second mark. She was aware that the necessity of filming in precise five-minute intervals probably constituted an undiagnosed case of OCD, but this had never really struck her as a serious problem.

“How can a road have two dead ends?”

“If it’s accessible only by boat or floatplane. Picture a row of houses on an inlet. Forest all around, water, nothing else.”

“You had a boat?”

“Some people had their own boats. We didn’t. I used to catch the mail boat to get to school in the mornings, then a bus would meet us by the pier on the other side and drive us to the nearest town. There was no television there till I was thirteen.”

“What do you mean, no television?” Mirella was looking at her as if she’d just announced she was from Mars.

“I mean, there was no signal.”

“So if you switched on the TV, what would happen?”

“Well, you’d just get static,” Vincent said.

“On every channel?”

(A memory: thirteen years old, suspended from school for the graffiti incident, sitting by the kitchen window with a book, then looking up and seeing Dad walking up the hill from the water taxi with an unwieldy box in his arms, grinning. “Look what my mom bought for us,” he said. “I got a call to come pick it up from the electronics store in Port Hardy.” Grandma Caroline had departed that morning to return to her own life for a few days, but it appeared she’d left a parting gift.

A television! A tower had gone up a few months earlier in Grace Harbour, just up the inlet, which meant that for the first time in history there was a signal in Caiette, and Mom would never have allowed this but it wasn’t up to her anymore, because she’d been gone for three weeks. Dad and Vincent flicked through variations of static to find a room, where two women with American accents were talking, one with long brown hair and glasses, the other with a cloud of platinum hair and tighter clothing.

“WKRP in Cincinnati,” Dad said. “I used to watch this in the eighties.”

One of the women said something funny, which made Dad laugh for the first time in three weeks. Where was Cincinnati? On television the city had a soft gleam, like the blond actress’s hair. Later, Vincent pulled the atlas down from a high shelf and found it, a point in the middle of the closest country to the south. She looked up the page for southwestern British Columbia, but of course Caiette was too small to appear on the map.)

Mirella had a story about a duplex in a housing development of identical duplexes, exurban Cleveland, cornfields on one side and an expressway on the other. Her mother worked two jobs and her father was in prison. Mirella and her sister were home alone for hours every day, watching television; they walked home from the school bus stop and locked the door behind them, and then they weren’t allowed to go outside again. They warmed up Hot Pockets for dinner and sometimes did their homework, sometimes didn’t. “It actually wasn’t that bad,” she said. “I got lucky. Nothing terrible happened to me. It was just boring. You grew up with both your parents?”

“My mother drowned when I was thirteen.” Vincent appreciated the way Mirella just nodded at this. Perhaps from now on she would only be friends with people who were missing at least one parent. “My dad was a tree planter, so he’d be up at these remote camps for weeks at a time during the school year, so I went to live with my aunt in Vancouver.”

The conversation shifted away from points of origin, which was fine with Vincent. Everything about Caiette was either impossible to describe or too difficult to talk about, and everything after Caiette was either boring or embarrassing. Mirella was talking about how she and Faisal had met. Mirella had tried to be a model, but she hadn’t made it very far. The problem, as her agent had explained it, was that Mirella was beautiful but it was an ordinary kind of beauty. There was nothing unusual about Mirella’s face, except for its prettiness, and that was a moment in modeling when it wasn’t enough to be beautiful, the agent said. One also had to be strange. The successful models of that moment had unusually wide-spaced eyes, or faces that were actually quite plain but had an indefinably striking quality, or ears that stuck out like jug handles. When she met Faisal, Mirella was trying to be an actor because the modeling wasn’t working out, but acting wasn’t going well either. She had some talent, but not enough to rise above the sea of other moderately talented beautiful young women. The night she met Faisal she was at a party in an expensive dress that she’d borrowed from her roommate, hours after a call with her agent’s assistant—her agent wasn’t taking her calls anymore—wherein the assistant, who’d once wanted to be an actor too, had gently broken the news that Mirella had been passed over for yet another role. Rejection is exhausting. Mirella was standing by the window, looking out at a view of downtown Los Angeles, and she realized that she was getting too tired for this life. She was thinking that maybe she should finally go to school, study something that would lead to a good job, but her sister had done that and now her sister was struggling under the weight of student loans, and Mirella wasn’t sure the debt was worth it. She was standing there trying to imagine what might come next, and then Faisal appeared beside her, beautifully dressed and holding two glasses of wine, and she thought, Why not you?

“We met over drinks too,” Vincent said, “but I was the bartender.”

Mirella smiled. “I’m not surprised. You make an excellent cocktail.”

“Thank you. It was a strange moment in my life. My father had just died.” Mirella’s eyes widened. Having one parent exit the scene was nothing unusual, but losing two was a different situation. “I had to go back to my hometown to deal with his stuff, and there was a job opening at the local hotel, so I decided to stay for a while.”

“What happened to him?”

“A heart attack.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thank you.” Vincent didn’t like to think of her parents.

“Was this the hotel Jonathan owns? I remember him talking about it.”

“Yes, exactly. I thought living there would be a simpler life, but I knew it was a mistake within a month. My childhood best friend worked there, and then after a few months my brother showed up and started working there too, and, I don’t know, it just started to seem a little claustrophobic, living in the same place with the same people I’d known since I was born.”

“I didn’t know you had a brother.”

“He was never really part of my life,” Vincent said. “I haven’t seen him in years.”

“So you went to this place in the middle of nowhere, and left because your brother was there too?”

“No, I…there was a strange incident,” she said. “Okay, so the lobby, it had a glass wall overlooking the water. I was working one night, and there was this guest in the lobby, a man with insomnia, he was just sitting in an armchair reading or working or something, and then he made this sound and jumped out of his chair. So I looked, and someone had just written this awful message on the outside of the glass.”

“What was it?”

“The message? Why don’t you swallow broken glass.”

“Crazy,” Mirella said.

“I know. And then a minute later, my brother Paul comes in from his dinner break, and it was just so obvious that he’d done it, he was all kind of shifty, couldn’t even meet my eyes—”

“Why would he—?”

“I don’t know. I almost asked him, but then I realized it didn’t matter. There’s just no scenario where writing something like that isn’t horrible, is there?”

“I can’t think of one.” Mirella was quiet for a moment. “It’s a horrible message, but I’m not sure I completely understand why it bothered you that much.”

“The thing with my mother,” Vincent said, “is I know she drowned, but I don’t know why she drowned. She went canoeing all the time. She was a good swimmer.”

“You think it might not have been an accident.”

“I think I’ll never know one way or the other.” They were quiet for a while, and the buzz of the cicadas in the trees at the edge of the property was very loud. “Anyway, it wasn’t just that. I was having one of those moments, where you look at your life and think, Is this really it? I thought there’d be more.”

“I’m familiar with those moments,” Mirella said. “So you were going to leave anyway, and then Jonathan walked into the bar?”

“No more than two hours later, maybe less. It was five in the morning. I had to do two shots of espresso just to keep my eyes open.”

“Here’s to coffee.” Mirella raised her glass.

“When I say I don’t know where I’d be without it, I mean that literally,” Vincent said.

A lonely man walks into a bar and sees an opportunity. An opportunity walks into a bar and meets a bartender. A lonely bartender looks up from her work and the message on the window makes her want to flee, because the bartender’s mother disappeared while canoeing and she’s told everyone all her life that it was an accident but there is absolutely no way of knowing whether this is true, and how could anyone who’s aware of this uncertainty—as Paul definitely is—write a suggestion to commit suicide on a window with that water shimmering on the other side, but what’s driving the bartender to despair isn’t actually the graffiti, it’s the fact that when she leaves this place it will only be to go to another bar, and another after that, and another, and another, and anyway that’s the moment when the man, the opportunity, extends his hand.

“Would you believe I actually grew up here?” she asked Jonathan, when in the course of that first conversation he asked where she was from. She’d served him his food and they’d fallen into a surprisingly effortless conversation.

“Here as in Caiette?”

“Well, here and then Vancouver.”

“Great city,” he said. “I keep meaning to spend more time there.”

He slipped her a folded bill as he was leaving—she thanked him without looking at it—and it turned out to be a hundred dollars, folded around a business card on which he’d scrawled a cell phone number. A hundred-dollar bill? Mortifying in retrospect, but she always appreciated the clarity of his intentions. It was always going to be a transactional arrangement. When he beckoned, she would come to him. She would always be well compensated.

Why not you?

Soho

That last summer in the kingdom of money, Vincent and Mirella met up in Soho on a subtropical afternoon, where they lingered for a while in Faisal and Mirella’s loft and then went shopping, less out of need than out of boredom. Dark clouds filled the sky. In the late afternoon they wandered down Spring Street with no particular destination in mind, having spent several thousand dollars each on clothing and lingerie, and Vincent was admiring a yellow Lamborghini parked across the street when Mirella said, “I think the rain’s about to start”—and they walked faster, too late, the first thunderclap sounded and the downpour began, Mirella took her hand and they broke into a run. Vincent was laughing—she loved being caught in the rain—and Mirella didn’t like what rain did to her hair, but by the time they reached the corner she was smiling too, she pulled Vincent into an espresso bar and they stood just inside for a moment, pleasantly chilled by the air-conditioning, pushing wet hair away from their eyes and surveying the damage to the shopping bags. Mirella’s bodyguard came in a moment later, mopping his forehead with a handkerchief.

“Well,” Mirella said. “Shall we stop for a coffee?”

“Let’s.” Vincent had been on the East Coast of this continent for two and a half years now, but she was still startled by the violence of the summer thunderstorms, the way the sky turned green. They found a minuscule table by the window and sat there with their little coffees, wet shopping bags crowded around their legs. They’d fallen into a companionable silence, and as they watched the downpour, Vincent realized that she felt perfectly at ease, for the first time in recent memory. The truth was that in the kingdom of money, before she’d met Mirella she’d been extremely alone.

“Do you find that shopping is actually incredibly boring?” Vincent felt guilty saying this aloud. It was only possible to say it because Mirella hadn’t come from money either. Ghosts of Vincent’s earlier selves flocked around the table and stared at the beautiful clothes she was wearing.

“I know it’s in poor taste to admit it,” Mirella said, “but it’s incredible how quickly the novelty wears off.” There was something about the way she looked up just then, the way the light caught her face, that made Vincent think of a nursery rhyme from childhood, her favorite verse from the Mother Goose book in the elementary school library, read so many times that she had committed it to memory by the time she was five or six: She is handsome, she is pretty, she is the girl of the golden city…

“At first it felt like some kind of compensation,” Vincent said. “You remember the times when you had to choose between rent and groceries, and it’s like, ‘Now I can afford this dress, so balance has been restored in the world,’ but after a while…”

“After a while you find you’ve acquired enough dresses,” Mirella said. “If Faisal knew the extent of my shopping habit, he’d probably stage an intervention.”

Although of course the clothing wasn’t the point, Vincent thought later, on the train back to Greenwich. It wasn’t the stuff that kept her in this strange new life, in the kingdom of money; it wasn’t the clothing and objects and handbags and shoes. It wasn’t the beautiful home, the travel; it wasn’t Jonathan’s company, although she did genuinely like him; it wasn’t even inertia. What kept her in the kingdom was the previously unimaginable condition of not having to think about money, because that’s what money gives you: the freedom to stop thinking about money. If you’ve never been without, then you won’t understand the profundity of this, how absolutely this changes your life.

When she arrived home, Jonathan was waiting in the living room. He’d been working but closed his laptop when she came in. “You poor thing,” he said. “I wondered about you, out there in the deluge.” She was shivering a little, her clothes damp in the chill of the air-conditioning. There was a cashmere blanket on the back of the sofa, just within his reach. He put his laptop on the coffee table and held the blanket open to receive her. “Come here,” he said. “Let’s get you warm.”

“Yeah, but people do that for a reason,” Mirella said. “Don’t you ever get the impression that it’s easier to live pretty much everywhere else?” Look at me, Vincent thought, notice me, say my name, but Mirella ignored Vincent as completely as if she were a stranger.

“Hey, excuse me,” Mirella said.

Vincent took off her glasses before she turned to face her.

“Mirella,” she said.

“Could I get another martini?” As though she hadn’t heard her name.

“Of course. What’s that you were drinking, Mirella, a Sunday Morning?”

“No, just a plain old Cosmo.”

“I thought you didn’t like Cosmos,” Vincent said.

“Oh, I’ll take another Midnight in Saigon, please,” the flapper said.

“Coming right up,” Vincent said. Was it possible that she was actually unrecognizable to someone who’d once been her dearest friend? A more likely possibility was that this was Mirella’s revenge, pretending not to know Vincent, or perhaps she was playing the same game Vincent was, living in disguise, except that Mirella’s disguise was more comprehensive and included pointedly not recognizing anyone from her previous life, or alternatively, possibly Vincent was losing her mind and maybe none of her memories were real.

“One Cosmopolitan, one Midnight in Saigon.” Vincent set the drinks on the bar.

“Thanks so much,” Mirella said, and Vincent heard the glasses clink as she turned away. She emptied the tip jar on the counter.

“Little early to count out, isn’t it?” Ned was looking at her curiously. There was no one at the bar now except Mirella and her friend, deep in conversation.

“Ned, I’m sorry about this, but you’re going to have to close up on your own tonight.” Vincent divided the tip money into two piles and pocketed one of them.

“What’s going on? Are you sick?”

“No, I’m walking off the job. I apologize.”

“Vincent, you can’t just—”

“I can, though,” Vincent said, and left him there. She was much more ruthless after Alkaitis than before. She exited via the kitchen door. Mirella didn’t look at her as she left. She wouldn’t have imagined that Mirella could be so cold, but what were they if not actors? You didn’t come from money, Mirella had said to Vincent once, in a different, unimaginable life. If they were plausible in the age of money because they could disguise their origins, why should it be surprising that Mirella was capable of pretending they’d never met? Pretending was their area of mutual expertise.

That night she walked down to lower Manhattan, to the Russian Café, a place she’d frequented during her years with Alkaitis, although if anyone recognized her from that time, they never let on. Her favorite manager was working that night, a woman in her thirties named Ilieva who spoke with a slight Russian accent and had once let slip that she’d acquired her green card in exchange for testimony in a criminal case.

“You have no coat?” Ilieva asked when she came to Vincent’s table. “You’ll freeze to death.”

“I just quit my job,” Vincent said. “I forgot my coat in the break room.”

“You just walked off the job?”

“I did.”

“Glass of red on the house?”

“Thank you,” Vincent said, although the wine here was terrible. The point of this place wasn’t the wine, the point was the atmosphere. Here in the warmth and dim lighting, with scents of coffee and cheesecake in the air, Nina Simone on the sound system, the gripped feeling in her chest was beginning to subside. This place was the one constant between the kingdom of money and her current life.

“So,” Ilieva said when she came back with the wine, “what next? Another bartending job?”

“No, I have my second job, in the other place,” Vincent said. “I’m going to try to get more hours.”

“It’s a kitchen job, isn’t it? What, you want to be a chef, open your own restaurant?”

“No,” Vincent said. “I think I’d like to go to sea.”

Vincent’s mother went to sea in her early twenties. Vincent had always pressed her for stories from when she was young, because while the contours of Vincent’s father’s life were fairly straightforward—an undramatic childhood in the Seattle suburbs, a brief stint studying philosophy before he dropped out and found work as a tree planter—Vincent’s mother’s past held a certain mystery. Vincent’s mother had survived a miserable childhood in a small town in the Prairies—there were aunts, an uncle, and even a set of grandparents whom Vincent had been given to understand she would never meet—and gone east when she was seventeen, to Nova Scotia, where she worked as a waitress and wrote poetry, then at nineteen she got a job as a steward on a Canadian Coast Guard vessel that maintained navigational aids in the shipping lanes. She loved it and hated it in equal measure. She saw the northern lights and sailed past icebergs, but also she was always cold and thought she might actually die of claustrophobia, so she quit after two rotations and drove across the country with a new boyfriend. She was a restless person. Within a year the boyfriend was going to medical school in Vancouver and Vincent’s mother was living precariously in Caiette, writing poetry that was sometimes accepted for publication in obscure literary journals, commuting back and forth on the mail boat and hitchhiking into Port Hardy for a job cleaning houses, until she fell in love with a married man down the road—Vincent’s father—and got pregnant with Vincent. She was still only twenty-three years old.

Vincent’s mother would not talk about her family. “They’re not nice people,” she’d say. “They’re not worth talking about, sweetie, so please don’t ask.” But of the stories she was willing to tell, what Vincent most wanted to hear about was the time on the coast guard vessel, and she pressed her mother for those stories so many times that they began to seem like Vincent’s own memories: she’d never been to that coast but held mental images of the northern lights shifting over a winter sky, the silent towers of icebergs in a dark gray sea. And then after her mother was gone, Vincent started trying to place her mother in the picture—her mother gazing at the iceberg, her mother’s face tilted toward the aurora borealis—but who was her mother at twenty, at twenty-one? It’s so difficult to picture your parents in the time before you existed. In memory her mother was stranded forever at thirty-six, the age she’d been when she came into thirteen-year-old Vincent’s bedroom, kissed her on the top of the head—Vincent barely looked up from her book—and said, “I’m just taking the canoe out for a bit, sweetie, I’ll see you later”—before she descended the stairs for the last time.

The day after she saw Mirella, Vincent took the train back into the city and then boarded a southbound subway and rode it to its terminal point, to stand for a while on a white-sand beach at the edge of the city, filming the waves. A cold gray day, but the cold was bracing. A containership was passing on the far horizon. She was thinking of her mother, and then, watching the ship, she found herself thinking of one of her last nights at the Hotel Caiette, a day or two after she first met Jonathan. He’d been eating dinner at the bar that night, and she’d been talking to him, when another guest arrived, a man staying in the hotel with his wife. She couldn’t remember his name, but she remembered a detail of the conversation: “I’m in shipping,” he’d said to Jonathan when the subject of work came up, and this was memorable because he was someone who clearly loved his job, she could see that immediately, the way he lit up when the topic was introduced. Years later, standing by the ocean on a cold spring day, she lowered her camera to watch the passing ship. How difficult would it be to get a job at sea?

Geoffrey

“Thailand,” Geoffrey Bell repeated, aboard the Neptune Cumberland in the fall of 2013. “Why are you going to Thailand when your leave comes up?”

“Because I’ve never been,” Vincent said.

“Seems like a solid reason. It’s just that most people use their shore leave to go home.”

“Where would that be, though? I don’t mean this in any kind of tragic sense,” Vincent said, “but I don’t feel that I really have a home on land at this point.”

“Don’t tell me you think of the Neptune Cumberland as home,” Geoffrey said. “You’ve been at sea for, what, two months?”

“Three.”

Three months of rising in her cabin for a middle-of-the-night shower before breakfast prep, long hours of cooking in a windowless room that moved in rough weather, walks on the deck in rain and in sunlight, sleeping with Geoffrey, overtime hours, three months of hard labor and dreamless sleep while the ship moved on a sixty-eight-day cycle from Newark down to Baltimore and Charleston, from Charleston over to Freeport in the Bahamas, from Freeport to Port Elizabeth in South Africa, up to Rotterdam in the Netherlands and Bremerhaven in Germany, then back across the Atlantic to Newark again. Most of the men on board—she was the only woman—worked for six months straight and then took three months off, and she’d decided to do the same.

Geoffrey smiled but didn’t look up. He was folding a tiny origami swan. She’d told him his cabin was bleak and he’d agreed with her, so they were making little swans and hanging them from his curtain rod. “I had such romantic visions of going to sea,” he said, “as a boy, I mean. You know, see the world, that kind of thing. Turns out most of the world looks very much like a series of interchangeable container ports.”

“And yet you’re still here.”

“I’m still here. One gets sucked in. Did you read that book I gave you for your birthday?” He held up a swan, turning it between his fingers, and passed it to Vincent.

“I’m almost halfway done. I love it.” Vincent pierced the swan with her needle—the commissary sold sewing kits—and drew the fishing line through.

“I thought you would. If you’re halfway through, then you’ve got to the part where they go fishing for birds, haven’t you?”

“Yes. I loved that image.” The book he’d given her was a collection of narratives written by the captain and crew of the Columbia Rediviva, an American trading ship that circled the globe in the last decade of the eighteenth century, and it contained an image that would never leave her: On the last day of 1790, two hundred miles off the coast of Argentina, the air filled with albatrosses. The crew gathered on deck and cast fishing hooks baited with salt pork into the ocean, to pull in the birds diving out of the sky.

“I loved it too. I read the book when I was sixteen, and after that, going to sea was a fixation of mine.” He was having trouble with his latest origami swan: he frowned at it, smoothed out the paper, and started again. “Would you like to hear something mildly devastating?”

“Sure.”

“My father once told me that he’d dreamed of being a pilot. Why, you may ask, might one find this devastating?”

“Because you told me he was a coal miner.” Vincent was standing on his chair to hang swans from the curtain rod, which was otherwise unused, because Geoffrey’s window was always blocked by the container stacks. “God, you’re right, Geoffrey, that’s ghastly. You dream of flying, but instead…”

“I didn’t want to regret not going to sea.”

“That makes perfect sense.”

“Do you like it?” He was holding up another swan, an orange one, a little lopsided.

“Do I like what, your swan?”

“No, all of this. Being at sea. Your life.”

“Yes.” She realized the truth of this as she spoke. “I like all of it. I love all of it. I’ve never been so happy.”

4

Back at the office, Harvey carried the paper shredder and then the Xavier files from the conference room to Alkaitis’s office. Alkaitis wouldn’t be needing his office anymore, and he felt someone might as well enjoy this room in these last few hours before the end. Harvey loved Alkaitis’s office. It was all dark wood cabinetry and expensive fixtures, thick carpet and ornate little lamps. Tonight the room shone like an oasis, a pool of warm light in the chaos, and by nine-thirty Joelle had hauled a paper shredder and a few boxes of folders upstairs to join him. Harvey took the desk chair, Joelle sat on the sofa, and they shredded evidence together. It was almost pleasant.

“What did you tell your husband?” Harvey asked, after they’d been at it for a little while. He’d exchanged a series of increasingly terse text messages with his wife.

“About staying so late, you mean? Emergency at work.” Joelle had been crying earlier, but now she seemed detached, almost dreamy. Harvey wondered if she’d taken something for her nerves.

“Seems pretty general,” Harvey said. He was shredding documents in a steady rhythm, but he’d positioned himself in such a way that Joelle couldn’t see that he was rescuing every third or fourth page. He’d decided to save the most damning pages, because earlier he’d been struck by a thought that was no less horrific for being completely irrational: What if he confessed and no one believed him? What if they thought he was crazy?

“What do you mean?” Joelle asked.

“I mean, that’s kind of a vague excuse.”

“But that’s where people get tripped up with their excuses,” Joelle said. “They get nervous and throw in all these excessive details, and that’s how you know they’re lying.” Was Joelle saving documents too? Harvey couldn’t tell. She stopped sometimes to look at one document or another, but she seemed to be shredding everything, unless she’d left certain key files down on Seventeen.

“My husband never asks for details anyway,” Joelle said. Harvey concluded from this statement that Joelle’s husband was likely having an affair but decided not to share this insight. Harvey was shuffling papers around in a complicated way, winnowing out the most incriminating documents with a casual glance, letting these slip into the open garbage bag behind Alkaitis’s desk instead of putting them through the shredder.

“My wife will want details,” Harvey said after a while. “I’ll get home, she’ll be like, ‘What kind of emergency forced you back to the office after a holiday party?’ ” He was quiet for a moment, fixing a paper jam. “Would you like a drink?”

“Does Alkaitis keep alcohol in this office?”

“He does,” Harvey said, rising with some difficulty. His knees were bothering him. Alkaitis’s workspace arrangement involved a lot of discreet cabinetry, so it took him some time to locate the scotch. Harvey poured a tumbler for Joelle and used Alkaitis’s coffee mug for himself. The nice thing about the coffee mug was its opacity. Joelle couldn’t see how little Harvey had poured for himself, so he could stay more or less sober while he saved the evidence of their crimes.

5

At that moment, Oskar was standing by the window of Alkaitis’s pied-à-terre in a high tower on Columbus Circle, drinking wine with Vincent. He’d waited until Alkaitis was gone before he went after her. Vincent had been walking slowly, hands deep in the pockets of her coat, staring at the sidewalk.

“Excuse me,” Oskar had said.

She looked at him.

“Oskar.” She managed a smile. “What happened to your coat?”

He’d left it at the party. “I misplaced it. Can I walk with you?”

“Yes.” They walked in silence for a while. The rain had subsided to a drizzle that made the sidewalk sparkle and left a glittering mist on Vincent’s coat, her hair, on Oskar’s folded arms when he looked down at himself. He walked alongside her and willed his mind to go blank. There is only this moment, he told himself. Don’t think of anything else, prison for example, just walk up the street with this beautiful woman. It doesn’t matter that she isn’t yours.

“Where are you headed?” he asked finally.

“Columbus Circle,” she said. “We have—Jonathan has a pied-à-terre by the park. Would you like to come up for a drink?”

“I’d love to.” Columbus Circle was still a half mile away, a half mile as measured by ten uptown Manhattan blocks, ten blocks of night and cold drizzle and headlights, traffic signals and shop-windows and the blank shutters of small businesses closed for the night, steam rising from a plastic chimney in the street, that steam turned luminous by streetlights. At Columbus Circle, two dark glass towers rose over a crescent-shaped shopping mall, facing the darkness of the park. Vincent stopped just outside the entrance to the mall, staring into the heart of the traffic circle, the ring of illuminated benches around the statue of Columbus.

“Everything okay?” He wanted to get upstairs before she changed her mind.

“Do you see a woman sitting there?” She was pointing, and just for a second he did think he saw someone, an impression of movement, but it was a trick of the light, a passing shadow between the beams of headlights as cars pulled in and out of the traffic circle. The benches were empty.

“I thought I saw someone for a second,” he said, “but I think it was maybe just some kind of reflection or something.”

“I keep thinking I see my mother,” Vincent said.

“Oh,” he said, at a loss for the appropriate response to this. Did her mother live in New York? Did she have a habit of trailing Vincent around the city? The moment passed. Vincent was expressionless in the white light of the shopping concourse, but she seemed to him to be someone who was enduring something, and he didn’t want to ask but of course she knew, she had to, why else would she have been in Alkaitis’s office for so long before the party, why else would she have refused to get in the car, don’t think about it, don’t think about it. We all know what we do here. They were ascending on the escalator to the mezzanine level, a more rarefied elevation where the shops were even more expensive, Vincent’s gaze fixed on some indeterminate point in the middle distance.

“This way,” Vincent said, and Oskar thought he understood some of the appeal of this place; if you were a person with an enormous amount of money who craved privacy, and if you came in here during normal shopping hours, it would be possible to mingle with the crowds right up until the moment when you slipped through the discreet door that led to the upper lobby, this tastefully lit room with sound-muffling carpets, two doormen, and a concierge, who nodded to Oskar and said good evening to Vincent.

“Good evening,” she said. Did she have a slight accent? He’d never noticed before. She didn’t sound like she was from New York. In the elevator, Oskar glanced at her—the silence between them was becoming a third presence, like another person who’d elbowed in between them and was taking up space—and saw that her gaze was fixed on the camera above the elevator buttons.

“Is it always this quiet?” Oskar asked when they stepped out onto the thirty-seventh floor. They were in a silent corridor of heavy gray doors and low lighting.

“Always.” She’d stopped before one of the doors and was searching in her wallet. She produced a key card, and the door unlocked with a soft beep. “The building’s mostly empty. People buy these places for investment purposes and then show up once or twice a year, if that.”

“Why did you and your husband buy here?”

She was leading him into an aggressively modern apartment, all clean lines and sharp angles, with a gleaming kitchen in which he suspected no one had ever cooked anything. A floor-to-ceiling window looked out over Central Park.

“He’s not my husband.” She took off her shoes and padded into the kitchen in her stockings. “But to answer your question, to be perfectly honest, I have no idea why he bought this apartment or anything else.”

“Because he could,” Oskar suggested. He was trying to understand the first thing she’d said, in light of the wedding ring on her finger. She saw him looking at it, twisted it off, and calmly dropped it into the kitchen garbage.

“Probably. Yes, that was probably the reason.” There was a certain flatness in her voice. “All we have to drink is wine. Red, or white?”

“Red. Thank you.” He was standing by the window with his back to her when she appeared at his side with two glasses, but he’d been watching her reflection as she approached.

“Cheers,” she said. “Here’s to making it to the end of the day.”

“Was your day as bad as mine?”

“Probably worse.”

“I doubt that.”

She smiled. “Today Jonathan told me he’s a criminal. What was your day like?”

“It was…it was, uh…” It was what? We all know what we do here. Today I realized that I’m going to prison, he wanted to tell her, but of course there was no reason to believe she wasn’t working with the FBI. Maybe Oskar could go work for the FBI, if only so he could stop wondering if everyone around him was working for the FBI, this exhausting paranoia, but of course that would entail confessing and accepting his punishment, and what if there was still a chance, what if he could somehow get lost in the shuffle, maybe the investigators would swoop down on Alkaitis and his top guys, Enrico and Harvey, and leave the rest of us—“You know what,” he said, “how about we talk about anything other than today.”

She smiled. “That’s not the worst idea I’ve heard this evening. This wine’s not great, is it?”

“I thought it was just me,” he said. “I don’t know that much about wine.”

“I know too much about wine, but I can’t say I’ve ever found it all that interesting.” She set her glass on the coffee table. “So. Here we are.”

“Here we are.” He felt a touch of vertigo. She was standing very close, and her perfume was going to his head.

6

“In theory,” Harvey said, after a long period of shredding evidence and not speaking, “couldn’t a person flee the country and take their kids?”

“Uproot them from everyone they know, somehow get your spouse on board so you don’t get charged with abduction, and then drag them where, exactly?” Joelle stopped shredding documents for a moment, to take a sip of scotch.

“Somewhere nice,” Harvey said. “If you’re going to flee the country, you’re headed for a tropical paradise, right?”

“I don’t know,” Joelle said. “What kind of an upbringing would that be?”

“An interesting one. ‘Where did you grow up?’ ‘Oh, I was on the lam with my parents in a tropical paradise.’ You could do a lot worse, childhood-wise.”

“Maybe we could stop talking about children,” Joelle said.

“Listen,” Harvey said, trying to save her from visions of prison visitation rooms, “I think there’s a very good chance we’ll get off with probation. At worst, maybe an electronic monitoring bracelet, a few months of house arrest.”

“It’s a bit like an out-of-body experience,” Joelle said later, “isn’t it?”

“I’ve never had an out-of-body experience,” Harvey said. He knew what she meant, though. The moment didn’t seem quite real.

“I have,” she said. “I was shredding paper for hours, and getting drunker and drunker, and then the next thing I knew I’d literally died of boredom and I was floating above the scene, looking down at my hair from above…”

Sometime around eleven-thirty, Joelle fed a final page into her paper shredder, dusted off her hands with theatrical flair, and rose carefully. “I’m going down to my office for a minute,” she said, then turned and walked slowly in the direction of the elevators. Harvey found her in her office on Seventeen, curled up under her desk. She was snoring softly. He covered her with her overcoat and returned to Alkaitis’s office. Harvey wasn’t drunk at all, but after all these hours, several regions of his brain seemed to have shut down, and he was having a harder and harder time determining which documents to keep and which to put through the shredder. The words on the pages held less and less meaning, letters and numbers squiggling away from him.

At midnight in the winter city, Harvey was alone in his office with ten file boxes of incriminating evidence. He’d numbered them. Later he’d go through them all to make sure of what he had, he decided, and maybe make footnotes in his confession: See staff memo in box #1, Relevant correspondence in box #2, etc. Although how much time would that take, all that cross-indexing? Probably too much time. Probably more time than he had. He was tired but he felt so light. Maybe he could ask Simone to help. Harvey was thinking about this as he left the building. Simone was a poor idea, he decided, since she was so new and had no firm loyalties. He couldn’t count on her not to call the police before the indexing was done. He hailed a taxi and watched the streets slip past, the lights and the late-night dog walkers, the sheer walls of towers, the delivery people on bicycles with hot food swinging in bags from the handlebars, the young people in packs or paired off and holding hands. He felt such love for this city tonight, for its grandeur and indifference. He woke with a start, the cabdriver peering through the partition, “Wake up buddy, wake up, you’re home.”

At two in the morning:

Harvey was pacing the rooms of his house, trying to memorize every detail. He loved his home, and when he went away to prison he wanted to be able to return here, to walk from one room to another in his mind.

Simone was drinking wine with her roommates in Brooklyn. There were three of them sharing a two-bedroom, so they had no living room and gathered around the table in the kitchen when they wanted to socialize. They were up late because the youngest, Linette, had been groped by a chef at the restaurant where she waited tables and had come home in tears, and then the conversation had shifted to other jobs and Simone had been getting some mileage out of the shadow hanging over Alkaitis’s office. “Sounds shady as hell,” Linette was saying. “You’re sure that’s exactly what you heard?” “ ‘We all know what we do here,’ ” Simone quoted again, pouring wine for the others. “But I’m telling you, it wasn’t just those words, it was also the atmosphere, like everyone was upset about something that had happened just before I walked in…”

In the Gradia Building, Joelle was sleeping under her desk.

Oskar was sleeping too, but naked and lying next to Vincent.

Enrico was on a southbound plane. He was staring at a movie but neither saw nor heard it. He’d been trying to imagine the life he was flying into, but he kept thinking of Lucia, his girlfriend abandoned in New York. He wished he’d realized he loved her before he left.

Jonathan Alkaitis was at his desk in his home office, writing a letter to his daughter. Dear Claire, the letter began, but he wasn’t sure how to continue and had been staring into space for some time.

7

At three in the morning, Oskar woke in Alkaitis’s pied-à-terre. He was desperate for a glass of water. Vincent was asleep beside him, breathing quietly, and her hair was like a pool of ink in the room’s dim light.

He wasn’t sure what to do. The thought of stealing away in the darkness made him feel sleazy, but on the other hand, what would the morning be like if he stayed? He’d read somewhere that the FBI liked to arrest people in the early hours of the morning, four or five a.m., on the theory that suspects are at their least dangerous when they’re sleep-addled and in disarray. He had every reason to believe that the Arrangement was collapsing, in which case he might be arrested within hours, and surely it would be less embarrassing for everyone if he wasn’t arrested at Alkaitis’s apartment. He rose and dressed as quietly as possible.

When Oskar stepped out into the living room, he was momentarily blinded. Oskar and Vincent had left all the lights on in their hurry to get to the bedroom, and the apartment was too bright, a nightmare of track lighting and reflective surfaces. He stood with his hands over his eyes for a moment, adjusting, and when he finally looked at the room, the first thing he saw was the painting. He hadn’t really noticed it before, but it was large, maybe five feet by six feet, a portrait of a young man, mounted with its own lighting fixture on the wall by the kitchen. The man sat on a red chair, wearing only jeans and combat boots. He looked too pale and too thin. There was something unsettling about the portrait, but it took Oskar a moment to register the faint streaks of bruises on his left arm, the shadows running along his veins. Oskar drew near, to see if he could decipher the signature in the lower right corner of the painting, and found that he could: Olivia Collins.

He recognized the name. Harvey had told him to give her a higher-than-normal rate of return, because Alkaitis liked her, and this was something he’d carefully avoided thinking about until this moment. Some of the investors were institutions. Some of them were sovereign wealth funds. There were charities and retirement funds, unions and schools. There were individuals who lived at a level of wealth that Oskar could barely imagine, even after all these years in the city, even standing here in an apartment in the sky in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the world. But there were also people like Olivia Collins, people who’d come into a little money or had been able to save over a lifetime. Of course Jonathan Alkaitis would have one of Olivia Collins’s paintings in his pied-à-terre. She was an old friend, in Oskar’s understanding. It wasn’t that she was about to lose everything, it was that she’d already lost everything and just didn’t know it yet. Oskar fled the apartment with tears in his eyes.

8

At four a.m., Joelle woke under her desk. The room was dark. I’ve been abandoned, she thought, and she knew she was still drunk because this thought flooded her with purest grief. But then she realized that someone had pulled her overcoat over her, and she was so moved by this that she had to blink away tears. It was warm under the desk, under the overcoat, so she closed her eyes and drifted back to sleep.

9

At four-thirty in the morning, Alkaitis was jolted from sleep by a ringing doorbell.

10

Oskar was home by then, lying awake in his own bed, staring at a complicated pattern of shadow and light cast through a window of glass bricks on his bedroom wall. He was thinking of the beginning, a conversation with Harvey that he could replay in memory like a film. Not the beginning beginning, the job interview where he’d sat there trying to explain why Alkaitis should hire him even though he’d just dropped out of college and didn’t have especially good grades or much of an employment history. The other beginning, the moment when he’d understood his job. Over a decade had passed since Harvey walked into his office and asked him to backdate a trade.

“Backdate it,” Oskar said. “As in, falsify an account statement?”

“He’s our biggest investor,” Harvey said, as though that explained the request.

“I know,” Oskar said in a tone that made it clear that the explanation fell short. The investor, Lenny Xavier, had three billion dollars in his Alkaitis accounts.

“And he’s requested no losses on his accounts going forward.” Harvey sounded so calm, but he must have been sweating. “You’re an intelligent guy, Oskar. You’ve seen some things by now.”

“I…” Yes, he’d seen some things. There were things that didn’t make sense and other things he was ignoring, because he was being absurdly overpaid and he had his own office.

“I almost forgot,” Harvey said, “here’s your Christmas bonus.”

Could the buy-off have been any more obvious? Oskar was embarrassed for both of them. The envelope Harvey passed across the desk contained a check that made Oskar gasp involuntarily.

“You’ve entered into a higher degree of trust,” Harvey said, “and that means that the bonus payments increase accordingly. Look at Xavier’s account statements for the past month, read through the correspondence, then backdate the trade and go buy yourself a boat or something.”

“A boat,” Oskar said absently, still looking at the check.

“Or a vacation. You look like you could use some sun.” Harvey rose with some effort. There was a heaviness about him even then, so long before the end. Oskar watched him leave the room and then turned to Lenny Xavier’s file.

The account statements: $2.92 billion dollars.

The correspondence: a letter from Xavier to Alkaitis, requesting a withdrawal of $200 million. A letter from Alkaitis confirming a withdrawal of $126 million. A second letter from Xavier, confirming receipt of the same.

A confirmation, of sorts, of something Oskar had been wondering for a while. There were only two explanations: Either Xavier and Alkaitis had had some unrecorded conversation, come to an understanding that Xavier had changed his mind and only wanted $126 million after all, and proceeded accordingly. Or Alkaitis had shorted him, because there wasn’t enough money in the accounts to pay Xavier the full $200 million, and in return for Xavier’s generosity in remaining silent, from now on Xavier’s accounts would show no losses, hence the backdated trade, oh god oh god oh god.

In a ghost version of his life, a version of himself that he’d been thinking about more and more lately, Oskar closed the door to his office and called the FBI.

But in real life, he called no one. He left the office in a daze, but by the time he reached the corner he realized that he couldn’t pretend to be shocked, and he knew he was going to deposit the check, because he was already complicit, he was already on the inside and had been for some time. “You already knew this,” he heard himself murmuring, speaking aloud. “There are no surprises here. You know what you are.”

The meeting finally unwound, the room breaking into small groups or rushing away to get to a conference session that had already started. Leon walked out alongside Daniel. “Are you going to the economic outlook panel?” Daniel asked.

“Skipping it, I think. I’ve been up to my neck in economic outlooks for the past four months.”

“Haven’t we all.” The corridor was several degrees colder than the conference room, the wintry chill of Las Vegas air-conditioning. Two young hotel employees were clearing dirty mugs from the coffee and pastry stations. “I’m going to go call my wife,” Daniel said. “Catch up with you at dinner?”

“Looking forward to it.”

It was a pleasure to be away from other people for a moment, with no one making obvious proclamations about economic collapse or pulling him into hysterical conversations about the chartering horizon. Leon poured himself a hazelnut coffee and stepped out into the atrium.

Miranda had left the meeting ahead of him and was sitting some distance away on an industrial sofa, writing something in her legal pad. No, not writing, sketching: the pad was angled away from him, but he watched the movements of her wrist with some interest as he approached. She’d started out at the company as his administrative assistant, which all these years later seemed like a faintly unbelievable rumor. He cleared his throat, and she flipped a page over as she set the pad on the marble coffee table, so that he couldn’t see whatever she’d been working on. He’d seen her perform this motion a hundred times, at least, and as always, he made a point of not asking. Leon held strong opinions about privacy.

“You’re skipping the economic outlook session too,” she said.

“This entire conference is an economic outlook session. I decided coffee was more important.”

“I like your priorities. That’s an interesting idea, by the way, parking ships off the coast of Malaysia.”

“Do you mind if we talk about literally anything other than the economic downturn?” he asked.

“Not at all. I’m thinking about making an excuse and leaving early tomorrow.”

“What, you’re not enjoying the atmosphere of barely suppressed panic?”

“There’s something almost tedious about disaster,” Miranda said. “Don’t you find? I mean, at first it’s all dramatic, ‘Oh my god, the economy’s collapsing, there was a run on my bank so my bank ceased to exist over the weekend and got swallowed up by JPMorgan Chase,’ but then that keeps happening, it just keeps collapsing, week after week, and at a certain point…”

“I know what you mean,” Leon said. “It’s the surprise that bothers me, personally, the way everyone I talk to seems shocked by the downturn in the industry.”

“Yeah, so, true story, one of our colleagues pulled me aside today, I’m not naming names, and he said, ‘I just can’t believe what’s happening to our industry, can you?’ And I’m trying to be patient with these people, I really am, but I had to ask him, which part is surprising to you? Let’s break this down. What is it you can’t believe, exactly? That people don’t want to buy goods when the economy collapses, or that people don’t want to ship goods that nobody’s buying?”

“Predictable outcomes, and all that.” Leon remembered at that moment that his accountant had called earlier and absently checked his phone. She’d called again, ten minutes ago. “Sorry,” he said, “I think I have to call this person.”

“If you don’t see me at dinner, it means I successfully escaped.”

“I’ll be silently cheering you on from the sidelines,” he said as he rose, and wandered away from her, toward the glass atrium wall, toward the phone call that would split his life neatly into a before and an after.

“I’m going to assume you haven’t heard the news,” his accountant said, “or you would’ve called me already.”

“What news? What’s going on?”

“You didn’t hear?”

“Obviously not.” He’d never liked her. Bit of a robot, he remembered Miranda telling him when he’d asked if she could recommend a good accountant, but the best I’ve ever worked with. She sees all the angles. Although what was the point of hiring the best accountant you’ve ever worked with if you’re going to ignore her advice and park all your retirement savings in a single investment fund?

“Leon”—and she didn’t sound like a robot at all, she sounded human and deeply shaken; she was conveying information, he realized just before she told him, that she very much didn’t want to convey—“Alkaitis was arrested this morning.”

“What?” He sank gracelessly into the nearest sofa, staring at an embankment on the other side of the glass, red gravel dotted with cacti under a garishly blue sky. “I’m sorry, did you say—what?”

“It’s all over the news,” she said. “He was a con man. The whole thing was a fraud.”

“The whole…what?”

“It was a con,” the accountant said.

“What do you mean? All the money I invested, you’re saying…?”

“Leon,” she said, “I’m so sorry, but your money wasn’t invested.”

“That isn’t possible. The returns have been excellent, we’ve been living off of them, we—”

“Leon.”

“I don’t understand,” he said. “I just don’t understand what you’re telling me.”

“What I’m telling you is that Alkaitis was running a Ponzi scheme,” she said. “The money you gave him, he didn’t invest it. He stole it. Your account statements were fictional.”

“What does this mean?” he asked, but he knew what it meant.

“Your money’s gone,” she said softly.

“All of it?”

“Leon, it wasn’t real. None of it was real. Those returns…” She didn’t add that I told you seemed almost too good to be true, because she didn’t have to. They both remembered the conversation. How could he have been so stupid? He was staring at the sky, inexplicably out of breath. He didn’t remember hanging up on the accountant, but he must have, because now he was no longer speaking with her, now he was reading a news story on his phone about the arrest of Jonathan Alkaitis at his home in Greenwich that morning, about a Ponzi scheme’s collapsing when one too many investors pulled out, more arrests expected, the SEC and FBI investigating, and somewhere in that morass was Leon’s retirement savings, or rather the ghost of his retirement savings, the savings themselves having been spirited away.

“This isn’t a disaster,” he whispered to himself. Time had skipped again; he was no longer looking at his phone; he was standing by the wall of glass. The economic outlook panel had apparently just broken up, his colleagues spilling out into the corridor and mobbing the coffee stations, a rising tide of overlapping voices. He had to get out. He crossed the plains of gray carpet and floated down the escalator, through the lower atrium and past the casino, out into the thin air of the winter desert. The sidewalk was crowded and the tourists walked in slow motion. Why was a shipping conference being held in a desert city? Because Las Vegas hotel rooms are cheap. Because the desert is a sea. It isn’t a disaster, he told himself, we will not be destitute. He could say he was robbed and that wouldn’t be inaccurate, but on the other hand, these were the facts of the case: he’d met Alkaitis at a hotel bar, Alkaitis had explained the investment strategy, Leon hadn’t understood, and he’d given Alkaitis his retirement savings anyway. He didn’t insist on a detailed explanation. One of our signature flaws as a species: we will risk almost anything to avoid looking stupid. The strategy had seemed to adhere to a certain logic, even if the precise mechanics—puts, calls, options, holds, conversions—swam just outside of his grasp. “Look,” Alkaitis had said, at his warmest and most accommodating, “I could break it all down for you, but I think you understand the gist of it, and at the end of the day, the returns speak for themselves.” It was true, Leon could see it for himself, a steadiness in that column of numbers that appealed to his deepest longing for order in the universe.

A pair of showgirls walked by, eighteen or nineteen years old in matching outfits, holding heavy headdresses of plumed feathers in their hands, their faces set hard with exhaustion and makeup. Not real showgirls, just girls who collected tips for posing with tourists on the sidewalk. He kept passing middle-aged men and women in red T-shirts that read GIRLS TO YOUR ROOM IN 20 MINUTES, handing out flyers that presumably said the same. The people passing out flyers had thousand-yard stares and were worn down in a manner suggestive of a difficult life, or was Leon imagining this? He didn’t think he was imagining it. He stepped into a hotel lobby, he hardly noticed which one, just to get off the sidewalk. He was thinking about the girls: if they could be in your room in twenty minutes, then probably they were already here somewhere, on the Strip, waiting. Picture the hotel suite where the girls are waiting, the air thick with cigarette smoke and perfume, girls staring at their phones, doing lines in the bathroom, talking about whatever it is that twenty-minute girls discuss, waiting, counting hours, counting money, hoping the next date isn’t a psychopath. The vision made him profoundly sad. He could live without retirement savings. No one in this country actually starves to death. It’s just one future slipping away and being replaced by another. He had his health. They could sell the house. He found a padded bench away from other people, near the entrance to the hotel casino, and called his wife.

“I saw the news,” she said before Leon could say hello. The fear in her voice was unbearable. “How bad is it, L?”

“It’s a disaster, Marie.” He realized that he was crying, for the first time in well over a decade. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart, I am just so sorry, it’s an absolute disaster.”

4

Ella Kaspersky was on CNN that night. Olivia and Leon were both watching, Olivia at her sister’s apartment in New York and Leon in a hotel room in Las Vegas. “Well, of course it occurred to me that the returns could be legitimate, Mark,” she said to the interviewer, “but it’s just that that would make it the first legitimate fund in history whose returns could be graphed on a nearly perfect forty-five-degree angle, so you’ll understand my skepticism.”

Oskar and Joelle were watching too, at a bar in Midtown. They’d comforted themselves over the years by telling themselves that Kaspersky was a marginal figure, but on the other hand, of course she’d always been perfectly correct about the nature of Alkaitis’s asset management unit, and Oskar had read her furious and disconcertingly accurate blog posts.

“There’s no pleasure in having been right,” she said now, elegant and impeccable in a CNN studio. She was telling her story—approached by Alkaitis in a hotel lobby; did her research and concluded that the returns were impossible; contacted the SEC, who bungled the investigation to such an egregious degree that there was talk now of congressional inquiries; tried for years to get the story out and was written off as a crank—and even though Oskar knew all of this to be correct and knew Kaspersky was in the right, he still wanted to throw his shoe at the screen. Why are the righteous so often irritating?

“She couldn’t be happier,” Joelle said. “She loves that she was right.”

5

In the morning, the investors were back at the Gradia Building. Harvey, who had turned off his phone and spoken to no one, was surprised that people were already in position at seven-thirty, a dozen of them in an anguished knot on the far side of the sidewalk, where they’d apparently been banished by building security. He tried to waft by without making eye contact, but a woman reached out and touched his arm.

“Harvey.”

“Olivia.” He’d met Olivia a few times over the years, in Alkaitis’s office. She wore a white coat and yellow scarf, and in the unrelenting gray of Manhattan in December, she looked like a daffodil.

“You work with him, right?” Another investor was interrupting his vision, a red-faced man with terror in his eyes. “With Alkaitis?”

Harvey stared at Olivia, who stared at Harvey. He wished he could be alone with her, so that he could confess everything without these extraneous people crowding in.

“Harvey,” she said, “is it true? Did you know?”

Another investor had joined them, no, two more, the scene becoming angrier and more crowded, Olivia radiant in her white coat and the others in their New York winter monochromes, black and gray, standing too close with their fear and their coffee breath. Harvey was afraid for his life. They would be entirely justified, he felt, in picking him up and throwing him in front of a passing car. They looked like they wanted to. He was a big man, but they could do it, six of them together. The street was right there.

“I have to go upstairs and see what’s going on,” he said.

“Oh, you’re not going anywhere,” one of them said, “not until you tell us—”

But the last thing they’d expected was for him to bolt like a startled horse, so no one was able to catch him before he darted away. When had he last run? It had been years. He hadn’t realized how fast he could be. He was already across the lobby. He swiped his card and got through the turnstiles while they stood dumbfounded on the sidewalk, staring. He was in terrible shape, though, so now he couldn’t breathe. He’d done something to his ankle—no, both ankles. In prison, Harvey decided, he was going to be one of those men who work out all the time, push-ups in his cell, weights and jogging in the yard. When he arrived on Seventeen, he found that the door to the office suite had been propped open. A police officer was standing by the door. The people in the suite registered, at first, as a mass of undifferentiated shadow: dark suits, dark jackets with FBI or ENFORCEMENT on the back.

There are moments in life that require some courage. Harvey didn’t turn around and walk back to the elevators and take a cab to JFK and leave the country, although at that point he still had possession of his passport. Instead, he walked into the heart of the swarm and introduced himself.

Harvey’s office was populated this morning by agents of both the FBI and the SEC, several of whom were very interested in speaking with him, why don’t you just take a minute to gather yourself and we’ll all take a seat in the conference room.

“I just need to get something out of my desk,” Harvey said.

They offered to get it for him, possibly fearing a hitherto-unnoticed handgun.

“If you look in the top left drawer,” Harvey said, “under the files, you’ll find a legal pad with my handwriting on it. Several pages of writing. I think it’ll be of interest to you.” He floated ahead of them to the conference room.

Oskar passed him on the way in. “What is all this?” he asked, white around the mouth.

“You know what this is,” Harvey said. Oskar looked like he wanted to be sick, but the odd thing was, Harvey didn’t actually feel that bad. None of this felt real to him. Oskar texted Joelle, so she didn’t come in at all. She drove to her kids’ school and signed them out midmorning, took them to F. A. O. Schwarz and told them they could have anything, smiling all the while, but the youngest burst into tears because if they could have anything then obviously something was drastically wrong. Later the children remembered this as a long, uneasy day of trooping around Manhattan in the cold, in and out of toy stores and hot chocolate dispensaries and the Children’s Museum while their mother kept saying “Isn’t this fun?” but also kept tearing up, alternately lavishing them with attention and disappearing into her phone.

Claire Alkaitis was where Simone had left her, in the backseat. “Thank you,” she said, “I appreciate this.” Her voice was barely above a whisper. She took the box from Simone, studied the photograph—an artifact of a civilization that had recently ended—and looked at the books as if she’d never seen them before. She lowered the window slightly, in order to push the crystal figurine through the crack. It made a pleasant tinkling sound as it shattered on the pavement. “Gift from my father,” she said. The driver carefully avoided making eye contact with her in the rearview mirror. “Where do you live, Simone?”

“East Williamsburg.”

“Okay. Aaron, can you take us to East Williamsburg?”

“Sure, you got an address for me?”

Simone gave it to him. “Don’t you have to get home?” she asked Claire, who had closed her eyes again.

“Home’s actually the last place I want to be, just at the moment.”

An interlude of quiet, then, while the car moved south toward the Williamsburg Bridge. Outside, it was beginning to snow. Simone had been in New York City for six months by now, and she thought that she was starting to understand how a person could become very tired here. She’d seen them on the subway, the tired people, the people who’d worked too long and too hard, caught up in the machine, eyes closed on the evening trains. Simone had always thought of them as citizens of a separate city, but the gap between their city and hers was beginning to close.

“How many people knew about it?” Simone asked eventually. They were passing through the East Village.

“I assume everyone in the asset management unit. Everyone who worked on the seventeenth floor.” Claire didn’t open her eyes. Simone was beginning to wonder if Claire was sedated.

“All of them? Oskar, Enrico, Harvey…?”

“It turns out that’s literally all they were doing on that floor, running a fraudulent scheme.”

“Did anyone else know? Up on Eighteen?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. The companies were always kept completely separate. Everything’s still so unclear.” The car was rattling over the Williamsburg Bridge, and now the snow was falling in a frenzied way that Simone found hypnotic. “You’re so lucky,” Claire said.

“I don’t feel lucky.”

“You know what you are?”

“Unemployed?”

“That’s a temporary condition. You know what’s permanent? You’re a person with a really excellent cocktail story. Ten, twenty years from now, at a cocktail party, you’ll be holding a martini in a circle of people, and you’ll be like, ‘Did I ever tell you about the time I worked for Jonathan Alkaitis?’ ” Claire’s voice cracked when she spoke her father’s name. “You get to walk away untarnished.”

Simone didn’t know what to say.

“One seventy Graham Avenue,” the driver said.

“Okay,” Simone said, “this is me. Are you going to be all right?”

“No,” Claire said dreamily.

Simone glanced at the driver, who shrugged.

“Okay, well, thanks for the ride.” She left Claire in the SUV and let herself in through the iron gate, then the front door, into the shadowy and never-cleaned foyer. The light over the stairs buzzed unpleasantly. Her roommate Yasmin was in the kitchen, eating ramen noodles and reading something on her laptop.

“How’d it go?” Yasmin asked.

“I just took the most awkward car ride ever with Claire Alkaitis.”

“She’s the wife?”

“Daughter.”

“What was she like?”

“Like she’d taken three Ambien,” Simone said. “Also kind of hostile. She was like, ‘You get to walk out of this with a story for cocktail parties. In twenty years, you’ll be telling this story to people over martinis.’ ”

“Yeah, but she’s right,” Yasmin said. “I mean objectively. Twenty years from now, you’ll literally be telling the story at cocktail parties.”

Oskar walked out of the Gradia Building and into the beginning of the snowstorm, the first light flakes drifting down. He didn’t notice the detectives until they were almost upon him, a block from the office. There were two of them, a man and a woman, flashing their badges as they got out of an unmarked car that had pulled to a smooth stop in front of a fire hydrant.

“Oskar Novak?”

In a parallel version of events he might have run, and in his ghost life, his honorable life, his non-Ponzi life, he was never here at all. But in this world Oskar stopped in his tracks, and standing there on the sidewalk in the first snow of that winter, seconds away from his first pair of handcuffs, he was surprised to realize that what he felt was relief.

“FBI,” the woman said. “I’m Detective Davis, and this is Detective Ihara.” In a distant way he realized that they’d been merciful; they must have been tracking him since he walked out of the Gradia Building, but they’d waited until he was out of sight of the investors and the reporters gathered outside.

“You’re under arrest,” Detective Ihara said calmly. The few people passing on the sidewalk eyed him surreptitiously or openly stared, but all of them gave him a wide berth. The detectives were reciting their lines—You have the right to remain silent, anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law, you have the right to an attorney—and Oskar stood still, accepted the handcuffs without protest, snow falling on his face, while here and there, in the city and in the suburbs, the rest of us were being arrested too.

6

At the sentencing hearing six months later, Alkaitis’s lawyer appealed to the judge on compassionate grounds. “If we are to be honest with ourselves,” the lawyer said, “who among us has never made a mistake?” But this was an error, Olivia saw that immediately. The judge was giving the lawyer an incredulous look, because sure, yes, everyone makes mistakes, but those mistakes are typically more on the order of forgetting to pay a phone bill, or leaving the oven on for a couple hours after dinner, or entering the wrong number into a spreadsheet. Perpetuating a multibillion-dollar fraud over a period of decades is something entirely different.

Could the lawyer see the error too? Impossible to tell. Veer Sethi was a sleek, expensively dressed person with silvery hair and a sense of performance. The man sitting next to Olivia—a fellow investor, a retired dentist who all but quivered with rage when he talked about the fraud—had told her that Alkaitis’s lawyer was one of the most expensive criminal defense attorneys in the city, but Sethi didn’t strike Olivia as a particularly formidable person. He’d made a mistake but he pressed on with the story, like a boy following a dwindling trail into the woods at nightfall: Once upon a time there was a family, Jonathan and Suzanne and then a daughter, Claire. (Speaking of which, where was Claire? Olivia had attended three hearings without seeing her.) They lived in a small house in an unfashionable suburb, then a slightly larger house, Jonathan working long hours and Suzanne working a little too, brief and inexpensive summer vacations in places that could be reached by car, Christmases with her family in Virginia or with his family in Westchester County, the inevitable struggles of starting a business, the business’s ever-increasing success, Claire goes to Columbia and then takes a job in her father’s brokerage company—the legitimate company, Sethi wished to stress to the courtroom, the company that had absolutely nothing to do with the crime—and then Suzanne is diagnosed with an aggressive cancer.

“I don’t suggest that anything in this excuses my client’s actions,” the lawyer said. “But I’ve been married to my wife for thirty-five years, and as a husband, I can only imagine what those days must have been like for that family.” Vincent had shown up, which Olivia thought must have required a certain courage. She was a few rows up and on the other side of the courtroom, sitting very still in a gray suit.

“And while no measure of grief can excuse his actions, it was during that period,” the lawyer continued, “that the fraud began.” He seemed to be trying to convey the impression that the Ponzi was something that happened, the way weather happens, as opposed to a premeditated crime coldly perpetuated and covered up with the assistance of a dedicated staff. (If only the staff were here! Olivia would have liked to personally kill them. She would start with Harvey Alexander. He would beg. She would be merciless.) The judge was writing something. Sethi was going on about hospitals and surgeries and rounds of chemotherapy, Alkaitis’s vanishing from the office for weeks at a time, distracted and not paying as much attention as he should have been. He’d been heavily invested in several dot-com companies and had been caught flat-footed when they imploded. There’d been signs that the tech bubble was ending, but he’d been distracted by his wife’s illness and death, and he hadn’t read the signals correctly.

“And this was the moment,” the lawyer said, “when my client made his fatal mistake.” How many times could he drop the word mistake into a single address? Was his strategy as transparent to the judge as it was to Olivia? She couldn’t tell. The judge was impassive. “My client took a loss, and he thought, You know what, I can cover this. He made a terrible, terrible error in judgment, a terrible mistake. He decided to cover his losses with income from new investors. He was embarrassed. He thought he could make up for the shortfall over a month or two, and no one would know. Why would he do such a thing? Why would he make a mistake like that?” Here, a pause for dramatic effect. Veer Sethi had been handed an impossible task. He was performing to the best of his abilities.

“What I believe, Your Honor, is that it comes down to a question of fear. Every life contains a measure of terrifying moments. My client had lost his wife. He was desolate. All he had left was his work, his job. And the fraud started, this terrible mistake of his, because he could not bear to lose his work, which at that moment was the last thing he had.” Which wasn’t particularly flattering to Claire, Olivia thought. Perhaps she should have followed her sister Monica to law school. She felt she could do a better job than this guy was doing. The courtroom was too warm. Olivia let herself drift for just a moment, back to a particular afternoon in the studio in Soho, sitting on the sofa with Renata during one of those violent August rainstorms, taking a break from painting, listening to the rain, drinking wine, Renata saying, “I couldn’t join the working world even if I wanted to,” but in a way that sounded like she was trying to convince herself, which Olivia suspected was why the moment had stayed with her. Renata had made it to 1972 before she succumbed to her habit. 1973? No, definitely ’72, because Olivia remembered watching reports of Watergate and wondering what Renata would have thought about it, if Renata were still alive, Renata who’d left her politician father and secretly alcoholic mother in the Maryland suburbs to come here, Renata who claimed not to care at all about that world but who carefully followed politics all her life.

Back in the courtroom, Veer Sethi was still talking. “When you look at my client,” he said, “you are not looking at an evil man. You are looking at a deeply flawed man, a man who, at the moment when it mattered, at the moment when he realized that he had losses he couldn’t cover, did not find his courage. You are looking at a decent man who made a mistake.”

It was impossible not to notice, as Sethi thanked the judge for his consideration and resumed his seat at the table, that the lawyers for the state were smirking and shaking their heads. Alkaitis was making careful notes in a legal pad. Sethi and his two junior sidekick lawyers were conferring and shuffling papers in order to avoid looking at anyone, especially not at the state. The state was rising from the prosecution table, the state was buttoning its suit jacket, the state was beginning, with barely disguised contempt, to rip holes in the timeline that the defense had laid out. It was curious, the state noted, that the Ponzi scheme was supposed to have begun around the time of the dot-com crash, when one of Alkaitis’s employees—a Harvey Alexander—had confessed to participating in a scheme that had begun in the late seventies. Olivia’s mind wandered. She hadn’t been sleeping well. She’d given up her apartment and moved in with Monica, and the bed in Monica’s guest room was uncomfortable. Was there any point, actually, in staying to listen to more of this?

But Olivia stayed till the end. The sentence, when it came, was like something from a fairy tale: there once was a man locked away in a castle for one hundred and seventy years.

The intake of breath in the courtroom was audible. A hundred and seventy years, someone repeated nearby. A soft whistle. Some muted cheers. Olivia sat very still and felt absolutely nothing.

She’d set out before dawn with a sense of embarking on a mission, but after the verdict came down, she almost wished she’d stayed home. She couldn’t have hoped for a longer sentence, and yet there was a curious sense of anticlimax. She was slow leaving the courthouse and went unnoticed when she finally straggled out. She didn’t mind her cloak of invisibility, in this instance. She wasn’t feeling very well. There’d been a time when a New York City heat wave wouldn’t have bothered her, but that time had passed. The media were clustered around other investors. “Look, it’s just, it changes nothing,” she heard the dentist say. He was right, she supposed. Jonathan was going to prison forever, but Olivia still lived in her sister’s guest bedroom. She made her way uptown through the furnace of the subway system and observed the way the life of the city continued around her, indifferent and uninterrupted. When she’d boarded the downtown train that morning she’d had the thought that she was witnessing history, but would history remember Jonathan Alkaitis? Just another empty suit in a time of collapse and dissipation, architect of an embarrassingly unsophisticated scheme that had run for a while and then imploded. The heat was too much. The subway was crowded. When she finally emerged into the Upper East Side, a few blocks from her sister’s apartment, she had to walk very slowly so as not to faint. A man walking in the opposite direction almost walked into her; he frowned as he stepped out of the way at the last minute, as if she were entirely at fault.

“This is academic,” the judge had said, “but I’m required for technical reasons to impose a period of supervised release following your sentence.” Idea for a ghost story: there once was a man who remained under supervised release for three years following the end of his 170-year prison term. Idea for a ghost story: there once was a woman who drifted unseen through the city of New York until she faded into the crowds and the heat.

“They were fairly discreet,” said the chief engineer. “I mean everyone knew they were seeing each other, because when you’re stuck on a ship everyone knows everything, but they weren’t showy about it.”

“Did you know she was an artist?” asked the other third mate, the one who wasn’t Geoffrey Bell. “I don’t know if that’s the right word. She did this video art thing that I thought was kind of cool.”

“She was competent,” the steward said, Vincent’s former boss. His name was Mendoza. “More than competent, actually. She loved her job. I liked working with her. Never complained, good at her work, got along with everybody. Maybe a little eccentric. She liked to shoot videos of nothing.”

“Nothing?” Saparelli asked, pen poised over notebook.

Mendoza nodded.

“As in, for example…”

“As in she’d literally stand there on deck filming the fucking ocean,” the steward said. “Pardon my language. Never saw anything like it in my life. I caught her doing it once, asked her what she was doing, but…”

“But?”

“She just kind of shrugged and kept doing it.” He was quiet for a moment, eyes on the floor. “I respected that, actually. She was doing a strange thing and she felt she didn’t owe me any explanation.”

“Did she ever seem at all depressed to you?” Saparelli asked. Leon had heard this question in every interview today and knew already what the answer would be. “It’s difficult to know how anyone will respond to stress, but if someone told you that she’d left the ship of her own accord, if she’d jumped, would that idea seem plausible to you, given what you observed of her temperament?”

“No, she was a happy person,” Mendoza said. “She’d work nine months, then take three months off, and when she came back she’d always have these great stories. The rest of us, we mostly just go home and hope our kids remember us, but she had no family, so she’d just travel. She’d come back, I’d ask where she’d been, and she’d been hiking in Iceland, or kayaking in Thailand, or learning how to do pottery in Italy or something. We used to joke about it. I’d say, when are you going to get married, settle down? And she’d laugh and say maybe in the next life.” A silence fell over the table. Mendoza wiped his eyes. “Did I say I liked working with her? I loved working with her. I considered her a friend. You know how rare it is to work with someone who loves their life?”

“Yeah,” Saparelli said quietly. “I do.”

Vincent’s cabin was as she’d left it. The bed was unmade. Her personal effects were minimal: some toiletries, some clothes, a laptop computer, a few books. The books mostly concerned a ship called the Columbia (Hail, Columbia; Voyages of the Columbia to the Northwest Coast; etc.). Saparelli swiftly packed her belongings into her suitcase and a duffel bag while Leon flipped through the books and shook them over the bed. Nothing fell out. Leon wasn’t really sure what he was looking for. Incriminating letters from Bell? Threatening marginalia?

“If you’ll take the duffel bag,” Saparelli said, “I’ve got the suitcase.”

Leon took the bag and they stepped out onto the upper deck. The cranes were lowering new containers onto the lashing bridges. He thought he remembered having read about the Columbia, now that he thought about it. A ship out of Boston, eighteenth or nineteenth century. He’d look it up later. It was late afternoon, and the cranes cast a complicated shadow over the deck. In memory, these last few minutes on board took on an unwarranted vividness and weight, because they were also the last few minutes before Mendoza reappeared. In all the ambient noise, the clanking and grinding of cranes and boxes and the constant vibration of the engine, Leon didn’t notice the steward until he was very close. “I’ll walk you down,” he said. They were near the top of the gangway stairs.

“No need,” Saparelli said, but there was something about the way the steward was staring at them, so Leon nodded and let Mendoza lead the way. Saparelli shot Leon an irritated look.

Mendoza spoke quietly over his shoulder as they descended. “I saw him hit a woman once.”

Saparelli visibly flinched. “Who? Bell?”

“This was a few years ago, when we were on rotation together on another ship. There was a woman on board, an engineer, she and Bell had a thing. We had a barbecue on deck one night, I heard her and Bell arguing, so I turn my back, you know, give them some privacy—”

“Wait,” Leon said, “you were all out on deck together?”

“Yeah, this was back before they banned alcohol on the ships. It used to be possible to have a drink with your colleagues after work in the evening, just like a normal adult. Anyway, I turn my back, pretend I’m interested in the horizon, and then I hear a slap.”

“But you didn’t see it,” Saparelli said.

“I know what a slap sounds like. I turn around fast, and it’s obvious he just hit her. She’s standing there holding her hand against her face, crying a little, they’re both staring at each other, like in shock or something. I’m like, what the hell just happened, what’s going on here, she looks at me and says, ‘Nothing. I’m fine.’ I say to him, ‘You just hit her?’ and she’s like, ‘No, he didn’t hit me.’ Meanwhile there’s practically a handprint on the side of her face, this red mark appearing.”

“Okay.” Saparelli exhaled. “What did Bell say?”

“Told me to mind my own business. I’m standing there, trying to figure out what to do, but if she’s insisting nothing happened, who am I to say something did? I didn’t actually see it.” Mendoza was walking down the stairs very slowly, so Leon and Saparelli were walking slowly too, struggling to hear him. “She looks at me,” Mendoza said over his shoulder, “she looks at me and says, ‘No one hits me. You think I’d let someone hit me?’ And I’m a little exasperated, I mean, it’s so goddamn obvious, but what can I say? So I leave them and walk away a little, and I hear her say to him, ‘You do that again, I’ll throw you overboard.’ ”

“Then what. What did he say.” Saparelli’s voice was flat.

“He says, ‘Not if I throw you overboard first.’ ”

They’d reached the bottom of the stairs. Leon’s heart was beating too hard, and Saparelli looked like he wanted to be sick. Leon was imagining the report: Upon investigation, it emerged that Geoffrey Bell previously threatened to throw a woman off a ship.

“When was this?” Saparelli asked.

“Eight years ago? Nine?”

“No similar incidents since then?”

“No,” Mendoza said, “but you don’t think that one incident is kind of bad?”

“Did you report the incident to the captain?”

“I talked to him the next day. He told me he’d keep an eye on Bell, but if the woman’s insisting nothing happened, then what can we do? It’s hearsay, my word against theirs, except I didn’t even see it.”

“Right,” Saparelli said. “Where’s that woman now? The engineer he was dating?”

“Raising her kids in the Philippines, last I heard.” Mendoza looked away. “Keep my name out of it, will you? When you put this in your report.”

“I can do that,” Saparelli said, “but why didn’t you tell me any of this in our interview earlier?”

“Because I liked Geoffrey. This thing I’m telling you about, it doesn’t mean Geoffrey had anything to do with whatever happened to Vincent. But after I talked to you earlier, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Thought you should know.”

“Thank you. I appreciate you telling me all of this.”

Leon and Saparelli didn’t look at one another in the car, but both wrote in their notebooks. Leon was recounting the conversation, as close to word-for-word as he could remember, and he assumed Saparelli was doing the same. At the hotel by the airport, they checked in and Saparelli took Vincent’s duffel bag from him. “Good night,” Saparelli said, when they had their room keys. It was the first thing he’d said to Leon since the port.

“Good night.” Instead of going upstairs, Leon went to the bar for a while, because he was in his seventies and had no money for travel and this was probably the last time in his life he was going to have a drink at a bar in Germany, but the flattening influence of the nearby airport meant that everyone was conversing in English. He wished Marie were here. He finished his drink and went upstairs, ironed his other button-down shirt, and watched TV for a while. Trying to imagine what that last conversation would look like in the report: An interviewee reported that Geoffrey Bell once threatened to throw a female colleague overboard. He and this colleague were involved in a romantic relationship at the time. The interviewee reported the incident to the captain. However, no mention of the incident appears in Bell’s personnel file, which leads to the conclusion that the company took no action. He lay awake all night, rose at four-thirty a.m., and drank four cups of coffee before he went downstairs to meet Saparelli and catch their car to the airport.

“Is that the same suit you were wearing yesterday?” Saparelli asked. They were sitting together in the business-class cabin, an hour into the flight. Saparelli looked as terrible as Leon felt. Leon wanted to ask if Saparelli had been awake all night too, but it seemed too intrusive.

“Short trip,” Leon said. “Didn’t think I needed two.”

“You know what I was thinking about?” Saparelli was staring straight ahead. “The way a bad message casts a shadow on the messenger.”

“Is that Nietzsche?”

“No, that’s me. May I please see your notebook?”

“My notebook?”

“The one you were using in the car yesterday,” Saparelli said.

Leon extracted it from the front pocket of his bag and watched as Saparelli flipped to the last page of notes, read it over quickly, then tore off the last two pages and folded them into an inside pocket of his jacket.

“What are you doing?”

“We actually have similar interests,” Saparelli said. “I was thinking about this last night.”

“How are your interests served by taking pages from my notebook?” Leon felt that he should be furious about the notebook, but he was so tired that he felt only a dull sense of dread.

“I know you’re not retired,” Saparelli said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I know you live in campgrounds and work in fulfillment warehouses at Christmas. I know you spent last summer working at an amusement park called Adventureland. Where was that again, Indiana?” He was staring straight ahead.

Leon was quiet for a moment. “Iowa,” he said softly.

“And the summer before, I know you and your wife were campground hosts in Northern California. I know you were recently employed doing menial labor at a Marriott in Colorado. I know that that’s your only suit.” He turned to look at Leon. “I’m not saying it’s your fault. I read up on the Ponzi scheme when I came across your victim impact statement. Obviously a lot of smart people got blindsided there.”

“Then what are you saying, exactly? I’m not sure what my employment history has to do with—”

“I’m saying that you want more consulting contracts, and I want to be able to walk down the hall without everyone thinking Oh, there’s that guy who wrote that awful report that leaked to the press and got people fired. You want that too, by the way. You want to walk down the halls and have people not look at you like you’re some kind of avatar of doom or something.”

“You’re thinking of not including that last conversation in your report.”

“Anything outside of the official interviews, well, that’s basically just a question of memory, isn’t it? I recorded the interviews, but nothing outside of that.”

Leon rubbed his forehead.

“We may or may not have heard an unsettling anecdote,” Saparelli said softly. “An unsettling anecdote that proves nothing. The facts of the case are unchanged. The fact remains that we’ll never know what happened, because no one else was there.”

“Geoffrey Bell was there.”

“Geoffrey Bell disappeared at Rotterdam. Geoffrey Bell is off the grid.”

“It doesn’t seem suspicious to you that he walked off the ship at the first stop after she…?”

“I have no way of knowing why he walked off the ship, Leon, and we both know no police force is ever going to interview him about it. Look at it this way,” Saparelli said. “No matter what I write in my report, Vincent Smith will still be dead. There would be no positive outcome whatsoever in including that last conversation. There would only be harm.”

“But you want an accurate report.” Everything was wrong. The sunlight through the cabin windows was too bright, the air too warm, Saparelli too close. Leon’s eyes hurt from sleep deprivation.

“Let’s say, theoretically, the report includes every conversation we had on that ship. Will that bring Jonathan Alkaitis’s girlfriend back?”

Leon looked at him. Upon inspection, he was certain Saparelli hadn’t slept either. The man’s eyes were bloodshot.

“I just wasn’t sure,” Leon said. “I wasn’t sure if she was the same woman.”

“How many women named Vincent do you know? Look, I was a detective,” Saparelli said. “I look into everyone and everything, just as a matter of professional habit. Seems like a bit of a conflict of interest, doesn’t it? Your accepting this consulting contract, involving the former companion of a man who stole all your money? Does Miranda know?”

“I’ve never hidden anything,” Leon said. “It’s all publicly available—”

“Publicly available isn’t the same thing as recusing yourself. You didn’t tell her, did you?”

“She could have looked. If she just typed my name into Google—”

“Why would she? You’re her trusted former colleague. When was the last time you Googled someone you trusted?”

“Gentlemen,” the flight attendant said, “may I offer you something to drink?”

“Coffee,” Leon said. “With milk and sugar, please.”

“Same for me, thank you.” Saparelli leaned back in his seat. “If you think about it,” he said, “you’re going to realize that I’m right.”

Leon had the window seat; he gazed out at the morning Atlantic, vastly upset. There were no ships below, but he saw another plane in the far distance. The coffee arrived. A long time passed before Saparelli spoke again.

“I’m going to tell Miranda that you were extremely helpful to me and I appreciated having you along, and I’ll recommend that we bring you on board for future consulting gigs.”

“Thank you,” Leon said. It was that easy.

4

After Germany, Leon began to see the shadow country again, for the first time in a while. For the past few years he hadn’t noticed it; after the initial shock of the first few months on the road it had faded into the background of his thoughts. But a few days after he returned from Germany, at a truck stop in Georgia, Leon happened to be looking out the window when a girl climbed down from an eighteen-wheeler nearby. She was dressed casually, jeans and a T-shirt, but he realized what she was at the same moment he realized that she was very young. She disappeared between trucks.

At a gas station that night, he saw another girl climb down from another truck, a hitchhiker this time, wearing a backpack. How old? Seventeen. Sixteen. A young-looking twenty. He couldn’t say. Dark circles under her eyes in the harsh blue light. She saw him watching her and fixed him with a blankly appraising look. You stare at the road and the road stares back. Leon knew that he and Marie were luckier than most citizens of the shadow country, they had each other and the RV and enough money (just barely) to survive, but the essential marker of citizenship was the same for everyone: they’d all been cut loose, they’d slipped beneath the surface of the United States, they were adrift.

You spend your whole life moving between countries, or so it seemed to Leon. Since the collapse of the Ponzi, he’d often found himself thinking about an essay he’d read once by a man with a terminal illness, a man who wrote with gratitude of the EMTs who’d arrived when he woke one morning and found himself too sick to function, kind men who’d ferried him gently into the country of the sick. The idea had stayed with Leon, and after Germany, in the long quiet hours behind the wheel of the RV, he’d begun formulating a philosophy of layered and overlapping countries. If a medical misfortune sends you into the country of the sick—which has its own rituals, customs, traditions, and rules—then an Alkaitis sends you into an unstable territory, the country of the cheated. Things that were impossible after Alkaitis: retirement, a home without wheels, trusting other people besides Marie. Things that were impossible after visiting Germany with Michael Saparelli: any certainty of his own morality, maintaining his previous belief that he was essentially incorruptible, calling Miranda to ask about other consulting opportunities.

A week after he returned from Germany there was an email from Saparelli, with a link to a password-protected video. The email read, “We examined Ms. Smith’s laptop and reviewed hours of video. Several videos like this one, some shot in very bad weather. Thought you should see it; supports our conclusion that her death was most likely accidental. Remember weather was bad the night she disappeared.”

It was a short clip, five minutes or so, shot from a rear deck, at night. Vincent had recorded several minutes of ocean, the wake of the ship illuminated in moonlight, and then the camera angle changed: she stepped forward and peered over the railing, which on this particular deck wasn’t especially high. She leaned over alarmingly, so that the shot was straight down at the ocean below.

Leon played it twice more, then closed his laptop. He understood that Saparelli was doing him a kindness, sending him evidence to assuage Leon’s conscience and support the narrative of the report. Leon and Marie were in Washington State that night, in a private campground that was almost deserted in the off-season. Night was falling outside, the branches of fir and cedar silhouetted black against the fading sky. The video proved nothing except a certain recklessness, but the video also made it easy to fill in a narrative: rough seas, high winds, a distracted woman on a slippery deck, a low railing. Perhaps Bell had walked off the ship because he’d killed his girlfriend, but on the other hand, perhaps he’d walked off the ship because the woman he loved had disappeared.

“This is such a beautiful place,” Marie said one night, a year after Leon returned from Germany. There had been no more consulting contracts. They’d just spent the pre-Christmas season at a warehouse in Arizona, ten-hour days of walking quickly over concrete floors with a handheld scanner, bending and lifting, and had retreated to a campground outside Santa Fe to recuperate. Difficult work, and it got harder every year, but they’d made enough money to get the engine repaired and add to their emergency fund, and now they were resting in the high desert. Across the road was a tiny graveyard of wood and concrete crosses, a white picket fence sagging around the perimeter.

“We could do a lot worse,” Leon said. They were sitting at a picnic bench by the RV, looking at a view of distant mountains turning violet in the sunset, and he felt at that moment that all was well with the world.

“We move through this world so lightly,” said Marie, misquoting one of Leon’s favorite songs, and for a warm moment he thought she meant it in a general sense, all of humanity, all these individual lives passing over the surface of the world with little trace, but then he understood that she meant the two of them specifically, Leon and Marie, and he couldn’t blame his chill on the encroaching night. In their late thirties they’d decided not to have children, which at the time seemed like a sensible way to avoid unnecessary complications and heartbreak, and this decision had lent their lives a certain ease that he’d always appreciated, a sense of blissful unencumbrance. But an encumbrance might also be thought of as an anchor, and what he’d found himself thinking lately was that he wouldn’t mind being more anchored to this earth.

They sat watching the sunset fading out behind the mountains, they stayed out well after dark until the sky blazed with stars, but they had to go in eventually and so they rose stiffly and returned to the warmth of the RV, performed the various tasks of getting ready for bed, kissed one another good night. Marie turned out the light and was asleep within minutes. Leon lay awake in the dark.

“We’re not in touch,” Paul said. For Paul, Vincent existed in a kind of suspended animation. On the first night of his run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, back in 2008, he walked out onto the stage and saw her. She was in the front row, at the far end; his eyes fell on her and his heart sped up. He got through the opening somehow, and when he glanced up again, no more than ten minutes later, she was gone, an open seat yawning in the shadows. That night he procrastinated for two hours before he left the theater, but she wasn’t waiting for him outside the stage door. She wasn’t there the next night, or the next; he expected to see her every night when he exited the theater, and she was never there, but he imagined the confrontation so many times that it began to seem like something that might actually have happened. Look, all those years you lived in Vancouver, you left the videos boxed up in your childhood bedroom, he’d tell her. Obviously you weren’t going to do anything with them. You didn’t even notice they were gone. And you thought that meant you could take them? she would ask. At least I did something with them, he’d tell her, and after days of imagining this conversation he almost began to long for it. It turned out that never having that conversation with Vincent meant that he was somehow condemned to always have that conversation with Vincent. It had been exactly a decade since the performances at BAM and he was still talking to her, the imagined Vincent who never materialized outside the stage door. Do you mean to tell me, she’d ask, that you’ve built a whole career on my videos? Not a whole career, Vincent, but composing soundtracks for your videos led to collaborations with video artists, live performances at art fairs in Basel and Miami, the residency at BAM, my fellowship, my teaching position, all of the success that I’ve found in this life. Does that justify it? she’d ask. I don’t know, Vincent, I’ve never known what’s reasonable and what isn’t. But for whatever it’s worth, after the BAM performances I never did another public performance with your tapes. Do you think that redeems you? No, I know it doesn’t. I know that I’m a thief.

“Still with me?” Ella said, and he realized that he may have been staring into space for a while.

“Sorry, yes. I’m a bit wrecked from traveling all night.”

“Parties are a bit much under those conditions,” Ella said. “Let’s get out of here, and I’ll buy you a drink somewhere.” Ten minutes later they were at a pub around the corner, an old-time kind of place with a bright red door and a forest’s worth of wood paneling inside.

“So,” Ella said, when they’d slid into a booth. “Forgive me, but you look terrible.”

“I’ve been awake for two days.”

“That’ll do it, I suppose.” But she was giving him a certain kind of look. He had trouble with names and faces but didn’t have trouble recognizing the question she was refraining from asking. It was a look he’d been seeing more and more of lately.

“How did you end up at that party?” he asked, to distract her. He was acutely aware of the little plastic bag in the inside pocket of his jacket.

“My husband’s a theater director.”

“Small world.”

“The smallness of the world never ceases to amaze me.”

A waitress took their drink orders, and Paul excused himself to shoot up in the men’s room, not a lot, just enough to bleed a little chaos out of the world. He stood very still in the stall for five deep breaths before he returned to the table. He was calmer now, the sharp edge of the jet lag a little blunted. Everything was fine. No one needs to sleep every night. He could save a lot of time from now on, if he just slept every second night.

“So,” she said, “you’ve been busy since I saw you last.”

“Very. It’s been extraordinary.” He hadn’t expected success and still found it disorienting. “I stepped through the looking glass into a strange new world where people actually listened to my music,” he said. I couldn’t possibly have seen this coming, he told Vincent, in his head, I just took the opportunities that arose, I was hustling just like everyone else…The opportunities that arose, like you had no choice in the matter? I couldn’t have anticipated this life, he told her, and actually, why didn’t he ever try to contact her after they’d both left the hotel? Because of his guilt over upsetting her with the graffiti and stealing her videos, obviously, but maybe he should try to find her now? Maybe enough time had passed? The condition of having landed in an unimaginable life was something he thought she might know something about.

“It was such an interesting angle you came up with,” Ella was saying. He’d been half following along while she told him that she liked his work. “One sees so much video art, but that collaboration you did, the programmable soundtrack console, that was a wonderful innovation.” For two separate works of video art, Paul had composed twenty-four hours’ worth of music, arranged as a collection of thirty-minute pieces that could be programmed to play in whichever order the buyer preferred: a night owl might prefer something fast and sharp at three in the morning, for instance, segueing into calm around a five a.m. bedtime, while the early risers might prefer to walk into their living room and hear something bracing as the sun rose.

“Some of those video art projects need a soundtrack to be even halfway interesting, if we’re being honest here,” Paul said. The beer in front of him was a terrible idea. If he drank it, he would lay his head on the table and fall asleep.

“I was curious about your musical influences,” she said.

“Baltica,” he said. “Everything I do sounds like an electronica group called Baltica that used to exist in Toronto in the late nineties.”

“Oh, I didn’t realize you’d been part of a group.”

“I try to compose stuff that sounds different,” he said, “I mean I’ll really try in a concentrated way, and then I get to the end, I play it back, and it somehow always sounds like…” He stopped talking, and looked over his shoulder to cover his unease. “Do you think they have coffee here?” He was deeply shaken. He’d never told anyone about Baltica, and here he’d just blurted it out to her without hesitation.

“I’d imagine so.” She waved, and a waitress appeared at the table.

“A coffee, please.”

“Our coffee’s terrible,” the waitress said. “Fair warning.”

“I think I might want it anyway.”

“If I could possibly dissuade you,” she said. “I mean, if you insist. But I promise that you’ll send it back.”

“Do you have black tea?”

“You’re in Scotland.”

“Something extra-strong,” Paul said. “The strongest tea you’ve got. A lot of it. The more caffeine, the better.”

“I’ll bring you a pot, then,” the waitress said, “and you can let it brew for as long as you’d like.” Paul had the impression he often had in the United Kingdom, of just having been subtly insulted in an obscure way that would take too much energy to parse, and as always he couldn’t tell whether the insult was real or just a typically Canadian case of postcolonial insecurity. Damn it, I know how tea works, he wanted to say, but it was too late, the waitress had departed and he was alone with Ella, who was giving him that look again.

“Do you still play music with that group? Baltica, was it?” She’d misunderstood, but he couldn’t possibly explain.

“We’ve all gone our separate ways,” he said. “I only see them on Facebook now. Annika’s always on tour with like five different bands. Theo’s a family guy. Is the hotel still there?” he heard himself ask, desperate to change the subject.

“It closed after Alkaitis was arrested,” she said.

4

Eight time zones to the west, Walter was standing by the window of his room in the old staff quarters of the former Hotel Caiette. There was still no cellular service here, but some years ago he’d splurged on a cordless phone, in order to wander around his apartment while he talked with the outside world.

“I can’t believe it’s been almost ten years,” his sister said. “Good lord. You’re still not lonely?”

“I’m not sure lonely is exactly the word. No, I wouldn’t say lonely.”

The last guest checked out of the Hotel Caiette in early 2009, two months after Jonathan Alkaitis was arrested, and the rest of the staff left shortly thereafter. Is a hotel still a hotel without guests? Walter was there on the pier when Raphael departed. “Keep in touch,” he said to Walter, and the men shook hands with the mutual understanding that they’d never speak again. Raphael climbed aboard the boat with his overnight bag—his belongings had gone on ahead to Edmonton—and the chauffeur, Melissa, started the motor. She was being paid through the end of the day but hadn’t bothered with her uniform. She was leaving the boat in Grace Harbour and returning home by water taxi. “I’ll stop by next week,” she said to Walter. “Just to check in on you.”

“Thanks,” he said, moved and a little surprised by this. She cast off from the pier and the boat pulled out into the water, arced around the peninsula and out of sight. It was a muted day, the sea reflecting a pale gray sky, the forest dark and dripping from the morning’s rain. Walter stood on the pier until he could no longer hear the boat and then turned back to face the empty hotel. He walked up the path and unlocked the glass doors of the lobby, locked them behind him. Raphael had ceremoniously switched off the lights as he left, but now Walter switched them back on. The dark wood of the bar gleamed softly. His footsteps echoed. The furniture had all been sold off except for the grand piano, which was too costly to move. Walter played a few notes, unnaturally loud in the silence. It was true silence, he realized, not at all like being in the forest, which even at its quietest was alive with small sounds. He walked past Reception, past the bar, to the staircase.

The largest suite, the Coast Royal, was where Jonathan Alkaitis had always stayed. Walter had thought to move in here—it had a splendor that the staff quarters lacked, and surely the hotel caretaker should live in the actual hotel—but the thought of sleeping in the bed where Alkaitis had slept was repulsive, and Walter liked his apartment. He wandered through all of the guest rooms, left the doors open behind him.

What was strange was that he didn’t feel alone in all this space, all of these empty corridors and rooms. It was as though the hotel were haunted, but in the most benign sense: the rooms still held an air of presence, a sense of occupation, as if at any moment the boat might pull in with new guests and Raphael might walk out of his office complaining about the latest staffing problem, Khalil and Larry arriving for the night shift. He walked out onto the terrace. It provided a view of the empty pier, shadowy in the early winter twilight. He stood there for a while before he realized that he was waiting, by habit but completely without logic now, for a boat to come in.

“I can’t quite believe it myself,” he said to his sister, on the phone in 2018, “but I woke up this morning and realized, in February I’ll have been here as the caretaker for ten years.” Difficult to believe, but there it was: ten years of living alone in the staff quarters and playing tour guide to the infrequent potential buyers who arrived by water taxi, a decade of weekly trips to Port Hardy for supplies, cleaning the hotel, mowing the grass, meeting with repairmen when necessary, reading in the afternoons, teaching himself to play piano on the abandoned Steinway in the lobby, walking to the village of Caiette for coffee with Melissa; ten years of wandering by himself in the forest, watching the first pale flowers push through dark earth in the springtime, swimming by the pier in the hottest days of summer and reading on a balcony under blankets in the clear autumn light, sitting alone in the lobby with the lights out for the thrill of winter storms.

“But it seems like you still like it,” she said.

“I do. Very much.”

“Solitary, but not lonely?”

“That’s a fair way of putting it. I wouldn’t have expected this,” he said, “after working in hotels all my adult life, but it turns out I’m happiest when I’m away from other people.”

When he hung up, he left the staff quarters and followed the short path through the forest to the overgrown grass behind the hotel. He let himself in through the back door, making a mental note to sweep and mop the lobby today. Without furniture, the lobby was like a shadowy ballroom, a vast empty space with a panorama of wilderness beyond the glass: inland waters, green shorelines, a pier with no boats.

5

At the pub in Edinburgh, Paul’s tea wasn’t working very well. “I was always ambitious,” he heard himself say, “but I never thought anything would come of it.” Ella nodded, watching him. For how long had he been talking about himself? Did he just fall asleep for a second? He wasn’t sure. It was difficult to stay awake. “All the videos are either beautiful or interesting, but not beautiful or interesting enough, without music added to them.” Did he say this already?

“You seem tired,” Ella said. “Shall we call it a night?”

He glanced at his watch and was startled to find that it was almost one in the morning. She was settling up with the waitress.

“Well, good night, then,” she said, “and good luck, Paul.”

“Do I seem like I need it?” he asked, honestly curious, but she only smiled and wished him good night again. He hated her in that moment, as he rose and left her alone in the bar—the unbearable smugness of the nonaddicted—but of course she wasn’t wrong, he knew he needed luck, he’d OD’d a month ago and woken up in the ER. (“Welcome back, Lazarus,” the doctor had said.) He’d been perfectly functional for nearly a decade on heroin, not just functional but miraculously productive, just a matter of knowing his limits and not being stupid about it, but the problem now was that sometimes the heroin wasn’t heroin anymore, sometimes now it was fentanyl, seeping into the market by mail and by ship, fifty times more potent than heroin and cheaper to produce. He’d been hearing rumors lately of carfentanil in the supply line, which terrified him: one hundred times stronger than fentanyl, approved for the sole purpose of tranquilizing elephants. The other night he’d read about a new rehab facility in Utah, and he’d spent some time on the website, looking at pictures of low white buildings under a desert sky. In a distant, logical way, he knew that going back to rehab wouldn’t be the worst idea. Just do it, get it over with. Outside on the street, the rain had that diffuse quality that Paul associated with both the U.K. and British Columbia, a gentleness about it, coming from all directions at once.

He was almost certain that his hotel was back in the direction of the Royal Mile, which he was almost certain was a left turn at the end of this next street. He was thinking about the Hotel Caiette again, which led to thoughts of Vincent. The street he was on now looked vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t be sure if that was because he was close to the hotel or if it was just that he was going in circles. He stopped walking and sat in a doorway, because he was tired and in his current state the rain wasn’t a problem, sat on the step and rested his head on his arms. Should he try to find Vincent, contact her somehow, offer to share some of his good fortune? No, he needed the money. All of it. I’ve never been able to completely grasp what my responsibilities are, he told her. Sometimes when he spoke to Vincent now, he was the only one talking, while she just watched and listened to him. The doorway was unexpectedly comfortable. He’d just take a little nap, he decided, he’d just rest for a minute and then find his hotel and sleep properly.

But he wasn’t alone. He sensed someone watching him. When he looked up, there was a woman standing just on the other side of the narrow street. She was wearing some sort of uniform, with a long white apron and a handkerchief tied over her hair. She must be a cook from a local restaurant, he decided, perhaps someone who’d just stepped out on a late-night dinner break, but if she was taking a break, she was spending her time very strangely, just staring at him instead of getting something to eat or smoking a cigarette. She looked familiar, she couldn’t possibly be Vincent but—

“Vincent?” he said, and perhaps he’d imagined her, in any event she was gone, but for the rest of his life he would tell the story as if she’d really been there, he’d pull it out like a card trick whenever the subject of ghosts came up—“I was sitting on a step in Edinburgh, and I saw my half sister standing there on the other side of the street, and then she was gone, like she just blinked out. I started looking for her, and what I found out weeks later was that she’d actually died that night, maybe even that minute, thousands of miles away…”—and he would always play it as the real thing, as if he wasn’t hallucinating and the woman he saw was really Vincent and Vincent was really a ghost and the ghost was really there on the street with him, whatever that means—what does it mean to be a ghost, let alone to be there, or here? There are so many ways to haunt a person, or a life—but uncertainty would always pull at him and he could never be sure; later he would wonder if he actually saw her standing there in an apron or if he added the apron to the memory in retrospect when he found out she’d been a cook; and always the question that pulled at him even at that moment, sitting in a doorway in the rain, drifting at the edge of sleep: Did he really see her, standing there on the street? Or was he just drunk and high, lost in a foreign city far from home, delirious with exhaustion and seeing things in the dark?

6

Sweep me up: words scrawled on the window of the school when I was thirteen years old, the letters pale on the glass—

7

A memory I wish I could stay in for longer: Kissing Geoffrey on C deck, beside a wall of shipping containers at the rear of the ship. His hand on the side of my face.

“I love you,” he whispered, and I whispered it back. I’d said it before, but it seemed to me I’d never known what the words meant until that moment—

8

But now Geoffrey Bell and Felix Mendoza are standing on deck by the gangway stairs in a light rain, the orange cranes of the Port of Rotterdam overhead. Geoffrey is unshaven and has dark circles under his eyes. This isn’t a memory.

“You know it makes you look guilty,” Felix says.

“I swear to god I don’t know what happened to her.” Geoffrey’s voice cracks; he swallows hard and closes his eyes for a second, while Felix stares at him, “But I’m afraid if I stay I’ll get blamed for murder.” Felix nods, they shake hands, then Geoffrey turns away and descends the stairs, shoulders squared in the rain. He looks so alone and so bereft, and I wish I could go to him and touch his shoulder and tell him I’m all right, I’m safe now and nothing can hurt me, but there’s some confusion, some distance, he’s receded—

9

I’m in a hotel that I recognize. I think this is Dubai, but this place isn’t like the other places and memories I’ve been visiting. There’s an unreality about it. I’m standing by a fountain in the lobby.

I hear footsteps, and when I look up I see Jonathan. We’re in some nonplace, some dream-place, a place whose details keep shifting. No one else is here. I feel more solid here than elsewhere; Jonathan can see me, I can tell by his surprised expression, and it’s possible to speak.

“Hello, Jonathan.”

“Vincent? I didn’t recognize you. What are you doing here?”

“Just visiting.”

“Visiting from where?”

I’m visiting from the ocean, I almost say, but I’m distracted just then because I think I just saw Faisal walk by the window with a woman who looks vaguely familiar—is that Yvette Bertolli?—and in any event the ocean isn’t exactly where I am, or if I’m there I am also somewhere else—

10

Some time has passed. I’ve been drifting through memories. I visit a street in some distant city where my brother sits in a doorway, because I heard him talking to me, but when he looks up and sees me he has nothing to say; I move for a while through Vancouver, walking the neighborhood where I lived when I was seventeen, although walking isn’t quite the word for the way I travel now; I search for Mirella and find her sitting alone and pensive in some beautiful interior, a loft of some kind, staring at her phone, she looks up and frowns but doesn’t seem to see me there—

11

In memory I’m back at Le Veau d’Or, in the interior of gold and red, listening to my least favorite of Jonathan’s investors talk about a singer. No, not a singer, a Ponzi scheme. “Couldn’t recognize an opportunity,” Lenny Xavier said, talking about the singer. “Whereas me, when I met your husband? When I figured out how his fund worked? That right there was an opportunity, and I seized it.”

I watched Jonathan’s look of alarm, the way he leaned forward as he spoke, his obvious desperation to stop Lenny from talking—“Let’s not bore our lovely wives with investment talk”—and Lenny’s smirk as he raised his glass: “All I’m saying is, my investment performed better than I could’ve imagined.” He knew, but of course I knew too, if not the details of the scheme than the fact that there was a scheme, because I’d been pretending to be Jonathan’s wife for months by then, it was just that I’d chosen not to understand—

12

I look for Paul again and find him in the desert, outside a low white building that seems to shine in the twilight. He just stepped out of the door, and he’s lighting a cigarette with shaking hands. He looks up and sees me, drops the cigarette and then retrieves it.

“You,” he says. “It’s you, isn’t it? You’re really there?”

“I don’t know how to answer either of those questions,” I tell him.

“I was just talking about you,” he says, “in my session just now. I was just telling my counselor all the things I’ve never told anyone.” I can’t see his face clearly in the fading light, but he sounds like he’s been crying. “Vincent, before you go again, can I just tell you.”

“Tell me what?”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry for all of it.”

“I was a thief too,” I tell him, “we both got corrupted,” and I can tell he doesn’t understand but I don’t want to stay here and explain it to him, there’s somewhere else I’d rather be, so I move away from the desert and away from Paul, all the way to Caiette.

I’m on the beach, not far from the pier where the mail boat comes in, and my mother is here. She’s sitting some distance away, on a driftwood log, hands folded on her lap, with an air of waiting calmly for an appointment. Her hair is still braided, she’s still thirty-six years old, still in the red cardigan she was wearing the day she disappeared. It was an accident, of course it was, she would never have left me on purpose. She has waited so long for me. She was always here. This was always home. She’s gazing at the ocean, at the waves on the shore, and she looks up in amazement when I say her name.