Chapter 15

Evan

There were thunderstorms over New York that December night, earsplitting booms and low rumbles that would have kept me awake if I hadn’t been already. I lay fully dressed on top of the covers in the midtown hotel room, counting down the hours until it was time to go back in.

David Kleinman had been stuck in DC because of the storm. The thwack of helicopter blades overhead greeted me as I hurried into the lobby on Tuesday morning. I arrived on the floor just as he did. Kleinman walked through the silent hallways without meeting anyone’s eyes. He went straight to his office, dusty from the previous few months, and slammed the door behind him.

Roger plopped down across from me with a wolfish smile. “How’d you sleep, my friend?”

I stared at my steaming coffee, willing it to cool so I could start drinking it.

“Listen, you lawyered up yet? Huh? Hey, I’m talking to you here.”

“No, Roger. I haven’t.”

“You haven’t? Shit, Peck, what are you waiting for? You know they’re gonna be after your ass.”

“Knock it off.”

“Whoa, whoa. So hostile. I’m just trying to help.”

“It’s none of your business.”

He snorted. “You’re kidding, right? You don’t think you and Michael made it my business when you decided to fuck everything up for the rest of us? When you broke the law?” Roger shook his head. “You could have said something, you know. Why didn’t you go to Kleinman?”

He waited, but I didn’t have an answer.

I went past Michael’s office that morning, but it was empty and dark. Wanda’s desk was vacant, too. Rumors raced like wildfire: Michael had hired a security detail to protect him and his wife. He’d fled to Europe. He’d lawyered up and was refusing to talk. He’d come in at dawn via the freight elevator and cleared out his things. No one knew what was true and what was false. It wasn’t like the market crash back in September. We weren’t in this thing together. This time, everyone fractured into distinct modes of panic, scrambling for seats on invisible lifeboats. Some claimed they’d seen it coming. Others were already on the phone with headhunters. I came around a corner in the hallway and heard a pair of angry voices, one of them saying he couldn’t believe what Michael had done. But when the pair saw me, they shut up. That’s how it went that day. Conversations halted when I came too close. I was persona non grata.

Kleinman gathered everyone that afternoon in the same conference room where he’d addressed us on the day he left for Washington. The mood was more somber this time. He once again emphasized that this crisis—a new crisis, one of our own making—would not be the undoing of Spire. This was an aberration, one rogue actor. A man who didn’t stand for what Spire was. Spire would be cooperating fully with authorities. The rest of the firm was clean. Kleinman wasn’t going to let this destroy us. Us. Us. That’s what I focused on. I was still there, still part of the team.

A hand touched my elbow as I filed out. David Kleinman’s secretary, giving me a sympathetic look. “Evan? He’d like to see you.”

Kleinman was waiting inside his office. A grandfather clock ticking in the corner marked the silence. He watched me sit, fiddle with my cuffs, shift in my chair, like he was waiting for a truth to reveal itself. Or did he want me to speak first?

At last he said, “I hear you were the one working with Michael on this deal.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’ll have access to a lawyer, one of ours. From now on you shouldn’t say a single thing about this without your lawyer present. Okay? Complete silence unless the lawyer is there. Not to your mom, your friends. Your girlfriend, whatever.” I swallowed; my mouth went dry. “But right now is the exception. Right now I need you to be totally straight with me. What did you know and when did you know it?”

After I told him everything—the beginning of the deal, what I’d overheard in Vegas, the briefcase for Chan, the $20,000 in cash from Michael—he nodded and dismissed me. Kleinman didn’t say anything about where Michael was, or what was going to happen to him. Maybe it would have been stating the obvious. On the walk back to my desk, I noticed a team of strange men in dark suits in the conference room. Files and stacks of paper and laptops covered the table. The blinds were lowered on the windows. They looked like they were setting up for war.

  

The SEC took over one conference room, and our lawyers took over another. The nameplate outside Michael’s office had been pried off by the end of the first week.

Kleinman’s speech his first day back didn’t do much good. The death spiral began immediately. Investors pulled their money. No one bought what Kleinman was selling—that this was a contained crisis, the mistake of one greedy egomaniac. Michael had been the acting CEO. His fingerprints were on everything. Any deal conducted during his tenure was tainted. Every last skeleton was going to be dragged out of every last closet. We were getting hammered.

“Michael fucking Casey. I could murder this fucking guy,” one trader said to another in the kitchen. People had stopped bothering with silence around me. They didn’t care anymore, or maybe they’d already forgotten who I was.

The other guy laughed bitterly. “You’re gonna have to get in line.”

I felt my throat tighten as I stirred milk into my coffee.

“Fine. I’d settle for just pissing on his corpse if I had to.”

By that point, it was clear to me that Michael was almost certainly going to jail. And the odd thing was, I felt pity for him. If we hadn’t been caught, those same guys would have declared him a hero. They would have admired his brilliance and ballsiness for pulling it off. But in this game, you didn’t score points with hypotheticals. Execution was the only thing that mattered.

Christmas snuck up on me. It was just another day to get through: reruns, takeout, a quiet apartment. My parents called, and so did Arthur. They had seen the news when it broke a few weeks earlier. They knew the outlines of what had happened, but I let the calls go to voice mail. I didn’t feel like talking about it, not yet. There was too much that I hadn’t made sense of. How was I supposed to feel? Guilty, contrite, apologetic? What was I supposed to say? I understood, intellectually, how bad it looked to other people. To people like Arthur and my parents. Normal people. But there was some of me that still saw the upside in what Michael had done. I felt guilt over the wrong thing—over the role I’d played in making the news public. The deal had been working. It was going to make Spire an enormous amount of money. I wasn’t ready to let go of that yet.

  

After the holidays, I was sitting at my desk when I felt a tap on my shoulder. A man with a crew cut and an ill-fitting suit told me to follow him. We went into the conference room, where another man who looked just like him sat at the table. One was named John, the other Kurt, both of them from the SEC. I immediately forgot who was who.

“Have a seat,” one of them said. “Help yourself to water or coffee or whatever.”

“Thanks,” I said, although their hospitality seemed pretentious when it was our conference room they were occupying.

“You have a good holiday?” one of them asked.

“Um, yeah. It was fine.”

John looked over at Kurt, or vice versa. “Did I tell you I had to drive all the way to Short Hills on Christmas Eve? For that new Elmo doll. Jesus.” He rolled his eyes, then said to me, “Don’t ever get married, okay?”

I laughed. At that moment, the door to the conference room opened. A blond woman in a skirt suit came in, brandishing a briefcase in one hand and a large Starbucks in the other. She stopped, froze. “What did you say to them?” she said, her eyes wide.

“We were just shooting the shit,” John or Kurt said. “Don’t worry.”

“Never talk to him without me here. Understood? That goes for you, too,” she said to me. “You really should know better, Evan.”

But I didn’t even know why I needed a lawyer. The questions that John and Kurt asked were easy, straightforward. I nodded, confirmed, clarified, helped them establish the particulars of the deal: the timeline, the players. As the week went on, my fear started to dissipate. They were treating me like I had done nothing wrong. Maybe I’d be okay. Maybe all wasn’t lost just yet.

  

“Hold that?”

I pushed the Door Open button. Roger hurried into the elevator. “Oh,” he said, catching his breath. “Thanks, Evan.” I think it was the only time he’d ever thanked me for anything. It was definitely the only time he’d ever used my first name.

“Good weekend?” I asked.

He glanced away, staring instead at the ticking floor numbers as we zoomed up the skyscraper. “Yeah. What about you?”

“Fine,” I lied. The weekends felt endless without the distraction of work. I went through a case of beer without even trying. I had no idea what to do with the time.

We were silent for the rest of the ride up. Both of us were in early. Roger was working on some big new deal with Steve. And I’d been coming in early because I knew that appearances mattered. I needed to prove that I was ready to hit the ground running when this mess was over. I’d been removed from every project, every e-mail distro, but things would be back to normal soon enough.

As Roger and I approached our desks, I saw an unfamiliar woman standing near my chair. A spark of hope: maybe she was there to give me a new assignment.

“Evan Peck?” she said, and I nodded. “Could you come with me, please?”

She led me to the other side of the floor and stopped in front of what I’d always assumed was a supply closet, tucked in the building’s core, far away from the windows. She balanced a stack of binders in one arm while she shuffled through a ring of keys with the other hand. “Do you mind?” she said with a smile, handing me the binders. She was kind of cute.

“Here we go,” she said, finally finding the key. She opened the door and flipped the light switch. It was a small, windowless office. A bare desk, a computer, a chair. It smelled like paint. Yes, I realized, I had in fact seen the janitor opening and closing this door just the other week. “This is nicer, isn’t it?” Her voice had gone up an octave. “Your very own office.”

“I’m supposed to work here?”

“You know, I’ve never heard of an analyst getting his own office before.”

“But why? Why are you moving me?”

She turned on the computer, swept her hand across the desk, nodded at the whole array. “It’s nice in here, actually. Nice and clean and quiet. Don’t you think?”

“So I just…are people going to know where to find me?”

“Well, it sounds like you’ve been spending most days in deposition with the SEC. While you’re tied up with that, we figured we’d move you in here so we could free up your old desk.”

“Free it up for who?”

“I’m really just here to help you get settled. Actually, I have to go. I have a nine o’clock on another floor. Here’s the key. The door locks automatically.”

There was a forgotten industrial-size bottle of window cleaner in the corner. I used that to prop open the door while I settled in. A minute later, I looked up to see that the door was pushing the heavy bottle across the carpet, gradually trying to close itself against the outside world.

  

The following week, when I walked into the conference room for our usual 9:30 start time with the SEC, something had changed. I couldn’t put my finger on it at first. Then, as I poured myself a cup of coffee from the setup at the side of the room, I realized that John and Kurt were both silent. My heart started beating faster. They were staring purposefully at the papers in front of them instead of engaging in their usual stupid banter.

My lawyer arrived, and John or Kurt turned on the recorder. “So Evan. We have new testimony from Michael that we need to ask you about.”

“Okay,” I said, glancing over at my lawyer. She nodded.

“You’ve stated that you were unaware of Michael’s relationship with the Chinese officials until the night of”—he looked down at his papers—“November thirteenth, 2008.”

“Right. The first night in Las Vegas.”

“Now, Michael has testified that you were aware of his relationship with the Chinese officials from the beginning. Since”—he looked down again—“August eighth, 2008.”

“No. I didn’t know anything until Vegas. I wasn’t even supposed to hear that. They didn’t know I was—”

“Michael stated that you were aware of his trip to China, taken in August, to facilitate the initial meeting with the officials.”

“No. I mean, yes, I knew about the trip, but I didn’t know what it was for.”

“Michael stated that you did.”

“I didn’t! He didn’t say anything about it, except that he was going to China.”

“Michael said, and I’m quoting here, ‘Evan knew exactly what we were doing.’”

“Can we have a minute, please?” my lawyer said.

We stepped out into the hallway. Her high heels brought her up to my eye level. “Evan. Point-blank, is there anything you haven’t told me? I don’t like surprises.”

“No. Nothing. Why would Michael say that?” My heart was beating even faster.

“It could be part of his strategy. Make it seem like you had more responsibility than you actually did. So he’s not the only one who looks bad.”

“Do you think I look bad?” My voice cracked.

She cocked an eyebrow. “It doesn’t matter how I think you look. It matters that I protect you. Understood?”

We went back into the conference room. I could feel John and Kurt staring as I took a small sip of coffee. The scratching of pen against paper, the buzz of the fluorescent light above. A dull ache throbbing through my temple.

“Are we good?”

“Go ahead,” my lawyer said.

“Evan, you turned over the twenty thousand dollars that Michael gave you on November twenty-fourth, 2008. You had said, in previous testimony, that Michael gave you this money as a—I’m quoting here—a token of his appreciation. Is that correct?”

“Yes. That’s what he said.”

“But you didn’t deposit or spend any of the money.”

“Right,” I said, relieved. “It’s all there.”

“Why didn’t you spend any of it? What were you waiting for?”

“I’m sorry—what?”

“Twenty thousand dollars is a lot of money. Is there a reason you were so hesitant to touch it?”

“Is this really relevant?” my lawyer said.

“Do you think you deserved that money?”

“I—I didn’t ask for it. Michael just gave it to me.”

“But you didn’t turn it down. You didn’t give it back. Clearly you thought you were entitled to that money in some respect. Except that you didn’t spend any of it. See, that’s what doesn’t make sense to me, Evan. You make it seem like you were just a low-level player. But Michael Casey wouldn’t be giving you a twenty-thousand-dollar payoff unless you were intimately involved with this deal.”

“It wasn’t a payoff!”

“Then what was it?”

“A…a bonus. It was a bonus.”

“Spire didn’t give out bonuses last year.”

“Can we move on?” my lawyer said. “I don’t see that we’re getting anywhere with this.”

“Fine,” John or Kurt said. “The next thing we’d like to ask you about is Wenjian Chan. Has he been in touch with you since you saw him in Las Vegas?”

“I already told you. No. I never heard from him.”

“Well, it’s possible he might have reached out to you since we took your testimony the other week. Has he?”

“Why would he do that? He knows we’re being investigated.”

“Maybe he wanted to find out what exactly you were telling us. Maybe he wanted to make you an offer for your cooperation.”

I felt like I was going to throw up. “Don’t you think that I would have told you? That I would have told you if I’d heard anything from him?”

“Come on, Evan,” John or Kurt said. “You don’t exactly have a great track record with that. That’s the whole reason we’re here.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“Evan,” my lawyer said, in a warning tone.

“It means you kept this deal a secret long after you knew the truth. It means you chose to keep silent about Michael’s plan even though you knew it was wrong. It means we can’t trust you to give us the full picture unless we ask.”

“I didn’t keep it a secret!”

“Then who did you tell about it?”

“Okay,” my lawyer said, shutting her briefcase with a firm click. “I think that’s enough. Let’s take a break.”

  

My lawyer and I had lunch together that day at the Indian place on 9th Avenue. Roger and the other analysts were at another table in the restaurant. I hadn’t been invited to lunch with them in months.

My lawyer spent most of the meal on her BlackBerry. “Sorry,” she said. “My nanny has the flu. We had to use the backup. Now the kids are sick, too. It’s a fucking nightmare.” She noticed my untouched food. “Hey. You okay?”

“No.”

She put her phone down. “You know it’s not personal, right? The things they were saying back there. They really don’t give a shit about you.”

“It doesn’t feel like that. It feels like they’re after me.”

“They’re only trying to get as much out of you as they can. So they can nail Michael and the Chinese. You’ve got the testimony they need. But you’re small fish, Evan. I mean that in a good way.”

Roger and the others walked past on the way out. Roger bumped into my chair. “Oops. Didn’t see you there, Peck,” he said, grinning. “Hot date, huh?”

After we finished eating, after she paid and we stood up to put on our coats, she asked: “What did you mean before? When you said that you didn’t keep it a secret?”

“Oh.” I was hoping she had forgotten about that. “I didn’t really mean anything. Just that, um, I didn’t consciously keep it a secret.”

When we returned to the conference room, John and Kurt looked up in unison. “Actually, we’re done,” one of them said. “For now, at least. We don’t need anything else. You can go back to work.”

“That’s it?” I said.

“We might need to call you back for a few things as they crop up. But yeah, that’s it. You’re done. Thanks for your help.”

“You must be relieved,” my lawyer said, walking me back to my office-slash-closet. “Now you can go back to normal, right?”

“I guess.” I did feel relieved—that weak but good feeling that comes after you’ve finally thrown up—but I also felt confused. Shortchanged somehow. What would come next? What was going to happen to me?

We stopped outside my door. “Well,” she said. “Good luck, Evan.”

*  *  *

My life went soft at the edges. The same feeling permeated the hours at work, the hours at home: emptiness, futility, like a bucket with a hole in the bottom. The SEC investigation had been my last vestige of purpose. For a few weeks I continued to arrive early, stay late, and keep my closet door propped open so that anyone walking past might imagine me hard at work. Then I left a little earlier. Arrived a little later. Started shutting my door at lunch so I could watch the postgame highlights with the sound on. January became February, then February became March. Eventually I gave in to it. I punched in and out. I ate dinner; I drank. I’d go entire weekends without speaking, so that my voice felt scratchy and strange when I greeted the security guards on Monday mornings. I arrived hungover and shut my door for long stretches to take naps on the coarse industrial carpet, letting time pass like high clouds drifting through the upper atmosphere.

I realized at a certain point that I’d been celibate for nearly three months. It was the longest by far I’d gone without having sex. In high school, it was only ever a few weeks at a time, and in college, too, and after that came Julia. It was like a portal to an earlier time. The texture of this frustration was identical to what I’d felt as a virginal teenager. It was almost as if, by going so long without sex, I had become my younger self again. I felt confused and melancholy in a way I hadn’t in a decade. I could have gone out to a bar and ended the celibate streak with a one-night stand easily enough. But in a way, I liked being alone with my former self. I indulged it. I liked recalling how it felt when adulthood was still a distant mystery. When the concrete details—an apartment in Manhattan, a high-paying job—would have been sufficient by themselves. I hadn’t realized, back then, how messy it actually was. I wanted to go back and hide inside that ignorance.

I kept waiting for the SEC to come knocking, to ask the question I’d never answered. What did you mean, you didn’t keep it a secret? I had blurted it out without thinking, and they treated it like a throwaway. A pathetic, confused, nonsense lie. But it was the truth; I hadn’t kept it a secret. I was the whole reason the SEC was there, shining a bright light on the dirty deal. No one ever asked about the leak. Maybe they always assumed it was me, the young analyst gone nervous and blabby, or maybe they just didn’t care. It was a paltry defense in any case. I had told somebody, but not the right somebody.

One day in March I lay down for a nap after lunch, intending to sleep off another hangover. When I woke up, it was late—past 8:00 p.m. I’d slept for almost five hours. On my way to the elevator, I passed the other analysts, gathered near Roger’s desk.

“Steve’s riding you that hard?” one of them was saying to him.

“Go without me,” Roger said. “I’ve got at least six hours left here.”

Roger’s face was puffy and pale, exhaustion and caffeine lending a nervous twitch to his features. But when he noticed me approach, he grinned like his old self. “Look,” he said. “Peck can take my place. Make him pick up the tab. He’s rich.”

Everyone had heard about the $20,000. They knew I had to turn it over, but it was fodder nonetheless. Roger laughed. “Still can’t take a joke, huh, Peck?”

“You can come along if you want,” one of the other analysts mumbled, a residual politeness kicking in. The group walked slow, including but not quite acknowledging my presence. No one knew what to say to me. I glanced back over my shoulder at Roger. He was staring so closely at his screen that it looked like he was going to tip over. Just as I must have looked, so many nights during the previous year. It was like coming across a photograph of myself that I didn’t remember being taken.

When had I become so invisible? I thought as the elevator descended and the analysts traded stories I knew nothing about. When had I become an afterthought? Other people made mistakes and were forgiven. I didn’t know how much longer I could endure this. I knew it was fucked up, but I missed Michael. Or maybe it was more that I missed the way Michael made me feel. Like I was part of something bigger.

The neon sign for McGuigan’s glowed ahead of us in the darkness. It was the same as always—the stale beer smell, the jukebox, the crack of cue against billiard ball, the rattle of ice. But before I could follow my coworkers to the usual booth in the back, my eye caught another familiar sight.

“Evan?” she said. Her eyes wide, uncertain. Almost regretting it.

Then she smiled.

  

I nursed my Guinness. It wasn’t until late, long after my coworkers had gone, leaving bills stuck to the damp table, that Maria came and sat next to me.

“Do you want another?” she asked, pointing at my empty glass.

“I’m okay.” For the first time in a while, I didn’t feel like getting drunk.

“Sorry. I meant to come over earlier. It was a crazy night. How are things?”

“Good, I guess.”

Good? I missed the way things had been between us in the fall, but I didn’t know how to go back to that. I doubted it was possible.

“I have to say something,” Maria said at last. “I should have said this a long time ago. I’m sorry things got kind of weird when I started dating Wyeth. That was bitchy, bringing him in like that. I should have told you.”

“Oh,” I said. “That. That’s fine. You didn’t owe me an explanation.”

“That’s not true. I really liked you, Evan.” Her voice wavered. “I just—I kept waiting. You know? I kept waiting for you to make a move or do something or say something. Eventually it seemed like you didn’t want anything like that. And Wyeth was cute, and he asked me out. So I said yes.”

She shrugged. “You seemed pissed afterward. Then you didn’t come around for a long time. But you’re back now, and—I don’t know what I’m trying to say. I don’t know what’s going on in your life or why you’re back, but I want us to be friends again. I’d like that. If you want to.”

I stared down at the bar, blinking, willing the seams to hold together.

“Are you okay?” she asked in a soft voice.

I shook my head. “God, Maria. I’m sorry. I’m a jerk.”

“No, Evan. I shouldn’t have put you in that position. I—”

“No. I’m an asshole. I didn’t make a move last year because I had a girlfriend.”

“A girlfriend?”

“I should have said something. I’m sorry.”

“Oh, my God. That makes so much sense. A girlfriend!” She laughed, then stopped. “Wait. Did you say ‘had’?”

“Yeah. We broke up a while ago.”

“Oh.”

“It was complicated. It’s better that it’s over.” Was that true? Was that what I really thought? “It had been dragging itself out for a long time.”

“What happened?”

“Well,” I said. “How much time do you have?”

  

The next morning, as I passed Roger’s desk, I noticed that he was wearing the same clothes as the day before. Shirt wrinkled, tie stained with oil, smelling and looking like he hadn’t slept in days. It was the first morning in a long time that I had woken without a hangover. I’d picked up breakfast, which I never did, the toasted bagel radiating heat through the white bag. I stopped next to Roger’s desk.

“Want breakfast?” I said, extending the bag toward him. He raised an eyebrow. “They messed up my order,” I lied. “I asked for sesame but they gave me an everything. So they did it over, but they gave me both.”

“Um. Okay. Thanks,” he said warily, taking the bag.

“You’re welcome,” I said. Then, before I lost my nerve: “Do you need any help?”

He tore off a bite of the bagel. “Help?”

“With whatever you’re working on. It looks like you’re slammed.”

He stared for a beat. “You’re joking, right?”

“Nope. Not joking. I’ve got time to pitch in.”

Then he laughed. “Well, yeah. Duh. They can’t staff you on anything. The investors would freak out.”

My stomach turned at the smell of the warm cream cheese.

“They told us not to talk about any live deals in front of you,” Roger continued. “It’s a liability. You’re going to be gone soon, anyway.”

“A liability?”

Roger’s expression softened. “Look,” he said quietly. “I’m not trying to be a dick. Do you want my advice? Just cash your checks and ride this out. Then you can move on to another firm. Start fresh. Somewhere else, they won’t even care.”

Down the hall, the other employees were arriving for the day. Roger rearranged his face back into its usual smug grin. “Thanks for the bagel, but just get out of here, okay?” he said under his breath. “I shouldn’t be talking to you.”

  

I went back to McGuigan’s that night, and the next, and the next. I drank Coke, and I watched whatever was on the TV—a Yankees game, Jeopardy!, the local news—killing time, waiting for the bar to quiet down enough for Maria to take a break. She was the only person I had talked to in months. I couldn’t lose her again.

That first night, I told her the whole story: Michael, the bribery, the trip to Las Vegas. The Julia part, too. I figured it was fine. The investigation was nearly finished, and the findings were going to be public soon enough. Maria stared at me, rapt.

“Have you heard from her since you broke up?” she asked at the end.

“Nope.”

“But you haven’t called her, either?”

“There’s nothing to say.” I jabbed at a melting ice cube with my straw. “She checked out a long time ago. I don’t think she was ever going to come back.”

“Why are you still here, then?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why stay? I mean, you must be miserable at Spire, right? And you always said you weren’t that crazy about New York. You could go somewhere totally different. Don’t you want to start over? Leave it all behind?”

But where would I go? How could I explain? I couldn’t leave, because for the first time, New York finally felt like home. Last year the city was a backdrop separate from my life, something I was only borrowing. But the shift had happened not long ago, when I realized that I had changed. That the city had been witness to different versions of myself. It gave me a new claim over this place. I had tried, failed, collapsed, but I was still here. The city was still here. The scale of the place had become newly comforting. It had a way of shrinking my pain to a bearable smallness. It was nothing compared to the towering skyscrapers or the teeming crowds. Any given day, in any given subway car, there were people who were happier than I, people who were sadder than I. People who had erred and people who had forgiven. I was mortal, imperfect, just like everyone else. It was good to be reminded of that.

But that mortality also made me old. I felt like I might vanish in a second. I realized—knowledge that arrived all at once—how much the world would continue to change after I was gone. Someday, people would look back on this era in the same way I had looked back on the settlers of the New World or the cowboys of the West in the slippery pages of my schoolbooks, strangers whose lives were distilled down to a few paragraphs and color illustrations. They would shake their heads, not believing that we could have known so little. It was nearly impossible to imagine the continuity. Then they would turn away from the past and continue their lives in a world transformed by technology or disease or war. By rising oceans or collapsing economies or by something that we—we soon-to-be relics—couldn’t even imagine.

But I wanted to. I wanted to imagine, and then to see. I clung to the time I’d been given. I didn’t want to leave.

  

On my fourth night in a row at McGuigan’s, Maria said, “I’m off early tonight. You want to get dinner? I can cook.”

A cat was purring atop the refrigerator when she opened the door to her studio apartment, up in the northern reaches of Morningside Heights. “Make yourself at home,” she said, turning on the stove with the click and hiss of gas igniting. She handed me a beer, and I wandered around. I liked her apartment right away. She had houseplants on the windowsill, a rag rug, a desk covered with textbooks and notes from law school, a refrigerator layered with family pictures and yellowed recipes. I stood at the other side of the room and watched Maria at the stove—apron tied around her waist, humming along to the radio—and I remembered the night I came home to Julia cooking in our tiny kitchen. How she had glowed from a happiness that I thought belonged to both of us. That was the worst part: I’d been misreading it all along. It was why I couldn’t bear to think about Julia, not even the good parts, because I couldn’t be sure that there ever were good parts.

After dinner, after sex that was surprisingly intimate for a first time, we lay in Maria’s bed, which was tucked in the corner next to an open window. I was half asleep when she climbed out of bed, wrapped herself in a robe, and turned on the desk lamp. “Stay there,” she said. “I’m going to study for a few hours.” She was taking the bar exam that summer. Her cat had been asleep on top of Maria’s stack of textbooks. The cat unfurled and stretched, purring regally as she hopped down to the floor and made way for her owner.

  

The next morning, Maria kissed me good-bye, and we made plans for dinner the following night. It was while I was shaving in front of the bathroom mirror back at home that I felt it. I’d told someone the truth. The actual, whole truth. And it was okay.

Was it that Maria had finally given me the thing I had craved for so long? Acceptance and forgiveness; grace? I thought so at first, but I realized that wasn’t it, because she wasn’t the one whose forgiveness I needed. What Maria had given me was simply a reminder that the loneliness didn’t have to last forever. I didn’t have to know what came next in order to have hope.

*  *  *

One morning in early May, Kleinman summoned me to his office.

“Peck. Have a seat. You’re aware that we’re approaching a settlement with the SEC in the WestCorp case.”

“I had guessed as much, sir.”

“And you probably know about the compromised state of the firm right now. We’ve taken a lot of hits in the last few months. We’re starting a round of layoffs later today. Someone from HR will be calling you around eleven to go over your package. But I wanted to give you a personal heads-up.”

I had been expecting this for a long time, but it was still strange to hear the words actually spoken. Kleinman smiled at me.

“You know, I can see why Michael liked you so much. You’re loyal, and that goes a long way. In another life, you probably would have had a great career ahead of you here. But you understand why we can’t keep you on.”

I nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“You’re Michael’s guy. He made you his guy. If I kept you around while laying off a bunch of people who had nothing to do with this—you know how bad that would look. People would hate you, to be frank. And then they’d hate me. You’d just remind everyone of what came before. What we need here is a fresh start. We’re going to be a lot smaller, but we’ll rebuild eventually.”

Kleinman stood up and extended his hand. “Well. Best of luck, Peck. Thank you for your cooperation these last few months.”

The HR woman fetched me shortly afterward. It was the same woman who had moved me into my windowless closet office. I wondered whether she felt guilty about her earlier deception; she must have known, even then, that she’d have to deliver this news eventually. There was a piece of paper that listed my severance package: several months’ salary, a one-time payment in exchange for my signing a nondisparagement agreement. It was a lot of money. She cleared her throat delicately.

“Mr. Peck, I should also remind you that your visa will run out eventually, given that you’re no longer employed by Spire. You can, of course, obtain sponsorship from your next employer. We have excellent contacts at other firms in the city and in Connecticut. Mr. Kleinman has offered to write a glowing reference. We’re confident you’ll find a good home. Would you like a—”

“No, thank you,” I said loudly. Then I stood up. “Is that everything?”

She looked startled. “Yes. That’s it. Just turn in your badge at reception.”

I had purposely avoided thinking too much about what came next. But now that the time had arrived, I knew one thing for sure. This wasn’t what I was meant to do. Five minutes later, I turned off the computer and shut the door for the last time, leaving the keys dangling in the lock for the janitor.

  

“So should we celebrate?” she said when I walked into McGuigan’s at midday.

“Celebrate me getting fired?”

She grinned. “I can’t think of a better reason.”

Maria got someone to cover the rest of her shift. We bought tallboys of beer in paper bags and picked up Sabrett hot dogs and ate them in Columbus Circle. I thought of Julia, the night we had spent out here, drinking wine and watching the traffic swirl. That moment felt distant and immediate all at once. The city was like that, layered with memories that existed in multiple tenses. Ever since I had started sleeping with Maria, five weeks earlier, I had been thinking about Julia more. Memories of her were creeping back in. But Julia only existed as that, I reminded myself—as a memory, as the past.

“Was it weird? Finally saying good-bye to that place?”

“A little. Mostly it’s a relief.” I shook my head. “It’s sort of surreal, you know? I can’t believe all that shit actually happened. I can’t believe I just went along with it.”

“Well,” she said, crumpling up her ketchup-stained napkin. “It’s amazing what people can rationalize. Humans are a delusional bunch.”

“You’re gonna have to tone down that sympathy when you start prosecuting the bad guys instead of serving them their drinks.”

She laughed. “You criminals are humans, too.”

The previous week, Maria had gotten a job offer at the district attorney’s office. The pay was miserly, the hours long, but it was work that actually made a difference. I envied her sense of purpose, her accomplishment, but it was easy to forget the years of hard work that had led her to this point. I put my arm around her and pulled her in for a kiss.

“Actually,” she said. “That reminds me. I’m getting together with my new coworkers tomorrow night, so I won’t be able to do dinner after all.”

“No problem. I can come over afterward?”

“Sure, if you want.”

She leaned back against the stone steps and tilted her head up toward the sun. Already it was slipping away. The bar exam was in a few months. Her start date at work was soon after. Maria had carved out a life for herself in this city long before I arrived. I knew she liked me, liked what we shared, but the need was one-directional. Maria brought me back into the real world, but I was seeing that it stemmed from compassion rather than love. She asked nothing of me; there was nothing I could give her that she didn’t already possess. And maybe I didn’t need love right then. Being with Maria was the first time I felt remotely like a grown-up. Like a person capable of surviving on my own.

She stood up. “Do you want to walk home?” Her home, not mine: she never once set foot in my apartment. “It’s a beautiful day.”

  

There were several guys from the hockey team also living in the city, Sebi and Paul and a few others. Most of them worked in finance. When we got together for drinks a few days after my firing, they were envious of my situation.

“You are fucking lucky, man,” Sebi said. Late on a weeknight at a bar in Murray Hill, which was so similar to McGuigan’s that if you squinted you couldn’t tell them apart. “I would quit my job in a second if I got that kind of package.”

“What are you gonna do next?” Paul asked.

“Don’t really know. I thought about joining a league, just for fun.”

“You should,” Sebi said. “Actually, one of my buddies plays up in Westchester, in a midnight league. They’re always looking for players. I’ll give you his number.”

Which was how I found myself lacing up rental skates one night the following week. The other players were men mostly older than me, fathers going gray and potbellied, but I was rusty from so many months off, and we were evenly matched. The team I was on for the scrimmage lost, but it still felt good. After the game, just as I’d cracked a Coors in the locker room, one of the guys on the team came over to me.

“Evan Peck?” He extended his hand. “I’m Frank Donovan. Call me Donny. Sebi told me about you. I heard you might be looking for work.”

“Oh,” I said. “Yeah. Well, yes, sort of.”

“I’ve got something to offer you for the next few months, if you’re interested in hearing about it.”

A few weeks later, I was back on a train to Westchester. I had to call my parents and get them to ship my hockey stuff back to New York. I was going to work as an assistant coach at a summer hockey camp for middle schoolers up in Westchester. Donny needed someone to help with his program, running drills and reffing games. I got to the rink early on the first day, before any of the campers arrived. After the first lap around the glassy ice, I felt dizzy and short of breath. I had to pause and lean against the boards. The sound of my blades against the ice, the smell of the cold air, the mustiness of the rink—it was almost too much to bear. Hockey had always been more than a sport to me. It had been the thing that rescued me from the suffocation of a small town, and when I escaped it, it was the thing that I clung to in a strange new world. But I realized—chest heaving, heart aching, my breath escaping in curls of white fog—that it wouldn’t work this time. I couldn’t hitch my dreams to it anymore. I couldn’t love it the way I used to.

Donny dropped me off at the train station at the end of the first day. We chatted during the drive about the kids and how the day had gone. I had to stifle a yawn when we said good-bye—I hadn’t worked so hard in months. Before I closed the car door, he asked, “You gonna be back tomorrow?”

I laughed. “Wouldn’t miss it.”

  

The week went fast. That Friday night, I called Maria.

“Hey, stranger.”

“Hey, I know. I’m sorry.” All week I’d been coming home, making dinner, and going straight to bed. My new routine was already digging grooves: apartment, Metro-North station at 125th Street, grocery store. McGuigan’s felt like another universe.

“Yeah, I know how it goes. First week on the job and all.”

“Can I see you tonight?”

“I’m off at midnight. Come over then?”

A few hours later we lay in her bed after having sex, the sounds of the street floating in through the open window. Maria had turned on the fan, which rotated toward us every few seconds. There was something different that night. The way she lay there with her eyes open, when normally by then she’d be drifting off, or back at her desk. Her silence had an alert quality. I could sense her thinking.

“Hey,” I said, running my hand along her arm. “Is everything okay?”

She turned to face me, resting her chin on my chest. A serious gaze.

“Evan, you know, we don’t need to keep pretending for no good reason.”

“Maria.” I swallowed. A lump formed in my throat.

“This has been fun. I’m going to miss you,” she said.

Something within me was finally falling. My fingers were being pried away when I wasn’t ready to let go.

“Can’t we just…” I said. “We don’t have to do this right now, do we?”

She propped herself up on one elbow, rested her hand on my chest. Her palm covered my heart. “It’s time.”

Maria stood up and padded into the bathroom. I heard the sound of the bath running. Her cat was atop the refrigerator, purring loudly in her sleep. I got dressed and hovered outside the bathroom door, my hand almost touching the doorknob. I could smell the candle she liked to burn while she was in the bath. And then I stopped. I withdrew my hand. I let myself out, looking around the apartment one last time to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything.

  

Arthur was passing through the city the following weekend. He had been accepted to all the top law schools in the country—no surprise there—and was making up his mind about where to go. He was in town to visit NYU and Columbia before swinging up to see Harvard and Yale, and he was staying with me for the night.

“This is weirdly good,” Arthur said. “I had no idea you knew how to cook.”

“I’m learning.” Enchiladas, nothing special. It was Friday night, a week since I’d last seen Maria. I thought about her, but only occasionally. She had been right. Arthur and I sat on the futon, plates balanced on our knees. “So you’re really up for spending another three years in New Haven?”

“There are worse things. I don’t think it would be anything like undergrad. It would probably feel like a totally different place. Different people. You know what I mean?”

“Yeah, I think I do.”

“You going to be ready to go in a minute?” he asked. Arthur’s phone kept buzzing. A friend from college was throwing a party that night in her Williamsburg apartment. Really more Arthur’s friend than my friend. He had a lot of people to see during his short visit to the city. “What’s the best way to get there?”

“The six to the L, I think.”

When we got to the party, I recognized a few people from school. I asked one guy what he’d been up to since graduation, and he cocked his head. “Same thing as before, man,” he said, taking a long draw from his beer. His tone was odd, almost offended. And then I fuzzily recalled: it was this guy. I’d talked to him at a party not so different from this one, several months earlier. Back when I was still at Spire and still with Julia. “Sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “Shit. Sorry. I knew that. I have a bad memory.”

My memory was fine. But memory was beside the point when I wasn’t even noticing things in the first place. The thing that kept me going through the months at Spire—it was the same thing that had kept me alive through playoffs and postseason intensity in the past. An adrenalized tunnel vision, everything else dropping away into background noise. And maybe that was okay in short bursts, but there was a danger when it went on for too long. For months at a time. It was like a hole in my brain. There was an entire section missing.

A little later, I felt a hand on my elbow. I turned around and saw Abby.

“Evan,” she said after we hugged. “Wow. It’s so nice to see you.”

“Been a while, huh? How are things?”

I didn’t really have to ask. Her happiness was obvious.

“Well, I’m in the home stretch.”

“School’s almost done for the year?”

“Praise the Lord.” She laughed.

People came in and out, rearranging our corner of the room. Abby and I didn’t get to talk for much longer. I caught her eye a few times and started to move toward her, but then someone else would get in the way. Her gaze said the same thing—we were both thinking about the one thing missing from this night. The hip-hop on the stereo, the keg in the bathtub, the Solo cups scattered across the kitchen counters. It was almost like college. Almost, but not quite.

“Hey,” Arthur said, coming over. “Ready to go? I’ve got an early train.”

I glanced back over at Abby, stuck in conversation with some close talker. I took a deep breath. I wanted to interrupt. This merited interruption, didn’t it? A chance for news of the person I had spent four years of my life with and hadn’t heard from in months? But Arthur was already holding the door open, waiting for me.

We took the subway back to the Upper East Side. “Pizza?” Arthur pointed at the neon sign of the slice joint on Lexington. It was just like old times. Two pepperoni for me, one cheese for him.

“Was it weird?” he said on the walk back to the apartment. “Seeing Abby?”

“Kind of.”

“You don’t talk about her much, you know.”

“Who? Julia?”

“No, the Mona Lisa. Yes, dummy. Julia. The girl you used to live with?”

I shrugged. “What is there to say?”

“Well, you don’t have to be so stoic. You can admit that you’re upset. Or mad or whatever. You don’t have to pretend like nothing happened. It’s kind of strange.”

“I’m not. I’m just…” I shrugged again. “I’ve learned to live with it.”

We walked for a while. By silent agreement we sat down on the stoop outside my building, finishing our pizza. I felt a click, the temperature rising a notch. “Why?” I said. “Did you want to say something about Julia? Do you have something you need to say?”

“What do you mean?”

“Come on. You’re not tempted to say ‘I told you so’? That you could have seen this coming all along?”

“I’d never say that.”

“Aren’t you the one who called her self-centered? Don’t you remember?”

“Yes,” he said, picking at his pizza crust. “But I didn’t mean like that.”

“What did you mean, then?”

Arthur was silent for a long time. Finally he cleared his throat. “Okay. Yeah, maybe I thought you guys shouldn’t have lived together. That wasn’t a great idea. I’ll stand by that. But it doesn’t mean I don’t like her. It doesn’t mean I think she’s some terrible person, that you should never think about her or talk to her again. I mean, she made some pretty big mistakes. But so did you, right? You guys both screwed up. I just don’t think it does anyone any good if you keep hanging on to it. If you don’t let yourself move past it.”

“You think I’m hanging on to it?”

“Aren’t you?”

It was almost exactly a year earlier that Arthur and I had our big fight. A night just like this: late walk home, pizza, warm air. Part of me was itching for a redo. To shout until my throat was raw. To scream even if no one was listening. But there was a difference, a big one. Last year, I hadn’t been able to hear what Arthur was saying. I was so focused on the idea of what came next. On the idea of packing up the last of my boxes and putting them in the U-Haul with Julia’s and arriving later that week at our apartment in New York, beginning the next chapter of our life together. That’s all that had mattered, the continuation of the present into the future, the uninterruption of that dream.

“Do you see what I mean?” Arthur said. Arthur knew the whole truth of what had happened by then, but this was the first time he’d voiced the other side. That I’d screwed up. That as much as Julia had betrayed me, I had betrayed her, too.

“I’m just saying,” he continued. “Don’t act like it’s nothing. But don’t be so hard on yourself. And don’t be so hard on her. I don’t know. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to give her a call. I can tell you’re still thinking about her.”

“How?” I said. Was it that obvious? In the previous few weeks, she’d come back into my mind, memories growing stronger and stronger. That was the real reason I couldn’t leave. I needed to know whether the Julia I had known and loved was the real Julia; whether that Julia would ever come back. I had no idea how long I’d have to wait.

He shrugged. “I’m your friend, Evan. I just can.”