Two years ago, Gorham had made assistant vice president. He was on his way. All he needed now to complete the picture was the perfect corporate wife. He’d had several girlfriends, but none that seemed quite right to be Mrs. Gorham Master. He wasn’t worried about that, however. There was plenty of time.

At seven thirty, Maggie O’Donnell walked out of the Croydon rental building on Eighty-sixth Street, turned up Madison, walked a few blocks, past the Jackson Hole where she got her burgers, up to the tiny, enterprising restaurant where they served a very reasonable prix fixe menu with minimal choice, which changed every night. The Carnegie Hill area, lying as it did at the very top of the Upper East Side, contained a lot of young professionals who were glad of a chance to get an inexpensive meal in amusing surroundings, and the little restaurant’s half-dozen tables were seldom empty.

She was going to meet her brother Martin. If he turned up.

To be fair to Martin, he had been quite specific. The bookstore where he worked had an author reading that evening. If he was needed, he’d have to take a rain check. If not, he’d see her at the restaurant.

Maggie had organized her time efficiently. She’d scheduled her doctor’s appointment, for a check-up, at five thirty. That was on Park in the Eighties. It gave her time to return home afterward, do the laundry she hadn’t been able to do the previous weekend, then go out to the restaurant. After she’d eaten, she’d take a taxi back to her Midtown office, and work until maybe midnight or one o’clock on a contract she was preparing. Maggie was a lawyer. She worked for Branch & Cabell. And like all the young associates at the big Manhattan law firms, she worked very hard. The lawyers at Branch & Cabell were almost immortals. They did not need to pause for rest or sleep. They worked in their wood-paneled skyscraper, advising the powerful, and sent out their mighty bills for the midnight hours.

Maggie was happy with her life. She’d been born in the city, but when she was eight years old, her parents had moved out. Her father Patrick, whom she sometimes suspected was more interested in baseball than he was in being an insurance broker, always liked to say that after the Giants had departed the city for San Francisco, and the Dodgers for Los Angeles, he couldn’t think of a damn reason to stay there. But the truth was that her parents had been just one of hundreds of thousands of white, middle-class families who, in the fifties and sixties, had deserted the increasingly troubled streets of Manhattan for the peaceful suburbs.