“On the one hand, it doesn’t matter,” Myron said. “Kitty hasn’t been part of my life for a long time.”

Win nodded. “And on the other hand?”

Brad. That was what the other hand, the first hand, both hands, every hand—the chance, after all these years, to see and maybe reconcile with his baby brother. Myron took a moment, shifted his seat. Win watched and said nothing. Eventually Myron said, “It can’t be a coincidence. Kitty in the same nightclub—same VIP room even—as Lex.”

“It would seem unlikely,” Win said. “So what’s our next step?

“Find Lex. Find Kitty.”

Myron stared at the Yoo-hoo label and wondered, not for the first time, what the heck “dairy whey” was. The mind stalls. It dodges, weaves, finds irrelevancies on soda cans, all in the hopes of avoiding the unavoidable. He thought about when he first tried this drink, in that house in Livingston, New Jersey, he now owned, how Brad always had to have one too because Brad always wanted to do what big brother, Myron, did. He thought about the hours he shot baskets in the backyard, letting Brad have the honor of fetching him rebounds so Myron could concentrate on shooting. Myron spent so many hours out there, shooting, moving, getting the pass from Brad, shooting again, moving, hours and hours alone, and while Myron did not regret one moment of it, he had to wonder about his priorities—the priorities of most top athletes. What we so admire and call “single-minded dedication” was really “obsessive self-involvement.” What in that exactly is admirable?

An alarm clock beeping—a truly grating ringtone the BlackBerry people had for some reason labeled “Antelope”—interrupted them. Myron glanced down at his BlackBerry and flicked off the offending noise.

“You might as well take that,” Win said, standing. “I have somewhere to go anyway.”

“At two thirty A.M.? You want to tell me her name?”

Win smiled. “Maybe later.”

Given the demand for the one computer in the area, two thirty A.M., Eastern Daylight Time—seven thirty A.M. in Angola—was pretty much the only time that Myron could get his fiancée, Terese Collins, alone, if only technologically.

Myron signed on to Skype, the Internet equivalent of a videophone, and waited. A moment later, a video box came up and Terese appeared. He felt the heady rush and the lightness in his chest.

“God, you’re beautiful,” he said to her.

“Good opening line.”

“I always open with that line.”

“It doesn’t get old.”

Terese looked great, sitting at the desk in a white blouse, hands folded so that he could see the engagement ring, her bottle-brunette hair—she was normally a blonde—pulled back into a ponytail.

After a few minutes, Myron said, “I was with a client tonight.”

“Who?”

“Lex Ryder.”

“The lesser half of HorsePower?”

“I like him. He’s a good guy. Anyway, he said the secret of a good marriage is being open.”

“I love you,” she said.

“I love you too.”

“I didn’t mean to interrupt, but I love that I can just blurt that out. I never had that before. I’m too old to feel this way.”