Then why didn’t you help me? Why did you just walk out? She doesn’t ask these questions. What answer would be a good one? Instead, she sits trying, just for fun, to imagine Ricky enthralled by a baby.

Her father lives at the center of the old town. The apartment is vast, occupying the top floor of a four-story building with steps up to a roof garden. Cate hasn’t seen all of it, even after many visits. There are corridors off hallways; everything, even the still, cool air, is dark. Every time Cate visits, the passage from hot to cool makes her grateful for air-conditioning until she remembers there isn’t any, that the apartment’s sepulchral coolness is the product of heavy shutters, lazy ceiling fans, and walls that are two feet thick. The building’s stucco exterior is—her father tells her—painted the red of fresh rust (49-16-C) with dark green (638-7C) louvered shutters. She suspects he just makes up the color numbers, but she’s not certain. The apartment, the whole building actually, belongs to Seneca, her father’s companion. It has been in her family for generations. She is older than Alan, somewhere in her seventies. Physically, she is ample but with gravity rather than weight. She moves in a slow, smooth way, as though her tendons are silk cords. Her dark hair is shiny, almost reflective. She sits up straight and stands tall. Cate can see her as a girl, practicing with a book balanced on her head.

Cate thinks of her as Alan’s companion because she is unclear about the nature of their relationship. It doesn’t seem romantic exactly. They sleep in separate rooms. Cate sees their bond as adventurers in friendship. They shift deferentially around each other in these dark, cavernous rooms, then meet up at dinner, for which they dress. Whatever, it’s clear the congeniality makes her father happy. Before they met, he was solitary in a way that didn’t seem unhappy. But he is very different now. When Seneca comes into a room, he looks like he has spotted her across a vast train station, after too long apart. He has told Cate that he feels so lucky to have found her, to be with her.

Today, they find her in her office, across a small courtyard from the rest of the apartment. Walls lined with dark wood floor-to-ceiling bookcases, filled with books in dark—ruby, evergreen, navy—bindings. She is at her desk, a stack of folders to one side. Although the stack is at least a foot high, everything is tidy, squared at the corners.

“Catherine.” Seneca looks up, takes off her glasses. “How wonderful that we have you here. I woke up this morning feeling I had presents to open.”

Seneca is a lawyer. The common thread running through her clients is that they all suffer from injustice or injury.