A small crowd was forming and the guard retrieved a butterscotch candy from the corner of the painting, where it had landed and stuck at Jesus’s pale, curled feet. “Why we don’t allow food in here,” she said, frowning as she handed it over in a tissue. Janine accepted the candy as if it were a relic or work of art, some sacred or holy thing.

“I almost died,” she kept saying, and for the rest of the tour, Davonte kept overhearing her tell and retell the story. He wondered if he could work it into his book somehow—except in his book the threat should be more dramatic than a butterscotch. Maybe Damian saves someone from drowning? Or rescues her from a fire? Or pulls her from a wreck? A Halle Berry type, he thought. She was a terrible driver.

“You are meant for big things,” his mother used to say to him, on the way to piano lessons or the ballet—she even took him to the ballet! She would look at him as she said it, but with a stern expression, as if to say: Don’t mess it up, son. Giftedness, in her world, was the same as a limp or a bad eye or some other affliction—something that had nothing to do with you. It was how you dealt with it that showed who you were.

10

Eric called his brother while he got ready for dinner, shaking out his rumpled button-downs one by one and hanging them in the shower. He didn’t have a tie, or even an iron. He should have taken a polo shirt while he had the chance.

“I just want to make sure, Mark, that the expectations are clear,” Eric said, when his brother finally answered. He set the phone on the vanity while he got out shaving soap and his badger brush and a razor and filled the sink; he could at least be clean-shaven. “The deal we’re entering into—Frances is still going to be the majority owner of the school, right?”

“Frances has never been an owner of the school, per se. She owns something better.” Mark’s voice, echoing off the bathroom walls, sounded distant and tinny; he was probably doing something else too.

“Which is what?”

“A significant equity interest in the offshore LLC that now owns the hotel property, and that we believe will soon be party to a very lucrative ten-year commercial lease with the school as sole tenant.”

“Mark. Who owns the school at this point? At least tell me you still own it.”

“We have something better: lucrative consulting contracts with a separate offshore LLC I set up to manage the school’s intellectual property assets, which it’s leasing back from another offshore LLC, giving us a massive tax advantage for a for-profit institution. I’ve already entered into mine, and soon you’ll have one too. The lawyers are drawing it up.”