But a golden one this time. I wandered through the rooms, running my hands over the smooth tile and the supple suede. This apartment was even more luxurious than our apartment in Chelsea. The clothes hanging in the closet were even more luxurious than those I used to wear. It was too much. It was all too much. Nothing came for free.

I needed to talk to Mark Ivins and find out his price.

I TOOK A long shower under the rainfall. It felt so hedonistically self-indulgent that I didn’t care that my perfect blowout was getting wet. Then I stood naked in front of my new closet with all of my new clothes. How to dress for drinks with Mark Ivins? I had too many options. Again it occurred to me—if I’d had this many changes of clothes back in February, the cops wouldn’t have been nearly so suspicious of me.

But it was no use trying to revise the past. What I needed to do now was control the future.

I decided on the same jeans and sweater I’d worn out of Saks, with a pair of ankle boots that made me four inches taller and more powerful. Then I let myself out the door to the street. The black SUV was still there, I noted, but nobody emerged from it as I ran up the steps and into the refuge of Mark Ivins & Associates.

It was after six by then. The reception desk was unstaffed, and most of the crystal and gilt light fixtures were dimmed. My boot heels echoed across the marble tiles to the staircase, where an intricate red-and-gold-patterned rug unspooled upward, held in place on each riser with a gleaming gold stair rod. The second-floor landing gave me a glimpse of a conference room on one side and a law library on the other, both unoccupied. The third floor housed a more conventional office space, with an array of computer workstations and carrels, and a handful of women still at work. The fourth floor showed only a long corridor of closed doors where most of Mark’s associates must have had their offices. They gave off a low hum of voices, the drones in the hive.

The fifth-floor landing was the smallest, with one door marked Private and the other concealing the elevator. From there a set of narrow, uncarpeted steps led to the roof. I climbed up and opened the door at the top of the stairs. A gust of wind sent my no-longer-perfect blowout streaming behind me. A garden stretched before me, with full-grown trees filigreed in spring blossoms and a cherubic fountain cheerfully burbling and thick-cushioned teak lounge furniture all around. The view was of other rooftops like this one to the north and east, high-rises to the south, and to the west, the great open expanse of Central Park.

“Over here,” Ivins called. He was at the edge of the roof, arms and ankles crossed as he leaned back against the glass-panel wall. He wore a different suit from his staid go-to-court suit that morning. This one was a stylish pale silver, the coat cut shorter, the pants sleeker, and he wore it with a vivid turquoise T-shirt.