THE SUMMER PASSED, and in September I resumed my regular weekly stayovers at Marco’s house. Alicia, his daughter, had moved in recently, along with her partner. Hanan was also staying there, having given up the lease on her own apartment. She was a Lebanese-born Australian, with a background in finance, who’d got into film after raising money for a documentary on the looting of antiquities in war zones, and divided her time between Sydney and New York. She always seemed a bit absent when I met her. Polite but distracted. I attributed this to the remoteness of her origins from the little world of Brooklyn, which I imagined must have seemed a bit frivolous to her—a village of pampered neurotics. But it might just as easily have been jet lag, or a lack of interest in me personally (she did seem to have trouble remembering why I came to stay at the house every week). She and Marco had a quiet, undemonstrative relationship. She was quite a bit younger than him, but they seemed content, and well matched. She’d taken over the money side of his A Crime and a Place series, which was by now officially in development after preliminary financing had been agreed on by a consortium she’d put together. The household was livelier than usual, and Marco seemed to be thriving in it.