Dimly, he was aware that all of his efforts—pursuing a writing career, getting engaged and married and even buying the house in Charlotte—had been, in some ways, about succeeding in areas his older brother overlooked. Mark didn’t care about art, he didn’t care about relationships—money was his muse and his wife and his children. “Mark does very well for himself”: that was how Eric’s mother put it, when someone complimented a bracelet or noticed the cruise line brochures on her coffee table. Of course she’d been proud of Eric too—both of his parents had dutifully come to readings, and dragged cousins and neighbors and friends along too. But Copper Creek had never provided anything tangible to his family, no tennis bracelets or winter vacations. After he took the high school teaching job, they studiously avoided talk about his career.

And so Eric wanted the next book, the next relationship, the next thing, whatever it was, to be about something bigger and truer than what he’d done so far. He wanted something that would last at least as long as Mark’s portfolio. Longer.

He still had Marianne’s diamond solitaire (Christine, after their impromptu engagement, wanted to design her own ring). Just the other night, after Marianne kicked him out, he’d rummaged for it in the pocket of his suitcase, pulling out a lint-covered black velvet box, which traveled with him everywhere, even to Dubai. It opened with a familiar snap, and he was relieved to see that inside, everything was pristine. The white gold band had not been nicked or scratched, and the ring still had a satisfying heft in his hand. Long ago, a jeweler told him that the diamond quality was exceptional, but who could really tell? Eric turned the ring this way and that, watching as the stone caught and reflected light.

Eric sat grimly in the Ranch’s office, his laptop on Marianne’s desk, the door locked and the bank of fluorescent lights turned off. In the small Skype box that showed his own image, he saw a tired-looking, sallow-skinned, slump-shouldered man. Next to his laptop, a cardboard box spilled its contents across the desk: two large black smartphones and their various chargers, headphones, and GWGW-themed accessories—blue cross-embossed cases and blue styluses and microfiber screen cleaners.

“So I’m gonna give it to you straight,” Mark told him. Mark believed in bad news first, let’s-get-this-over-with, no sugarcoating. Nothing to cut the sting. Mark liked the sting, the risk of teetering, then toppling failure. It was what allowed him to do what he did, Eric assumed, all that financial roulette playing. But Eric didn’t like things straight—couldn’t Mark remember that much, at least, from childhood? His medicine had to be hidden in yogurt, the bad news of pet deaths or new schools or sick grandparents softened with ice cream or merry-go-rounds.