Tim already knew the view. He’d paced the Promenade just days earlier in the moments before his interview with Dr. Millicent Vandeventer, the controversial headmistress and founder of Montague Academy. It was a quick interview, and he was hired, because Dr. Millicent Vandeventer was in desperate need of a teacher. Had she more time, Tim believed, she’d have kept looking; had a car not crashed into a restaurant window in Cambridge, Massachusetts, running over nearly twenty people and killing four, one of whom was Sadie Brier, the recent Phi Beta Kappa graduate from Harvard, who had been hired to teach history at Montague. Had this not happened, Tim never would have gotten the job, nor would he have formulated one of his most popular teaching games—Bad News/Good News. An example: It was bad news that William McKinley was assassinated. It was good news that Teddy Roosevelt became president. Or: It was bad news that they crucified Jesus, because it’s not nice to kill God’s only son. It was good news that they crucified Jesus, because He had the good fortune to be God’s only son, and if they hadn’t . . . and so forth, so on, etc. Tim’s idea is that one way to soften life’s cruel blows is to understand that your bad news is quite likely someone else’s good news. But the reverse is also true: Our good fortune came at the expense of young Sadie Brier, who never got to teach at Montague. And now, to add to the pile, I had just been offered a tasty job at a rather inflated salary, while my former boss, Bruno Schwine, was not only facing a summer of treatments for colon and prostate cancer, he also had a constellation of suspicious moles on his backside that may very well have been melanoma. Bad news, indeed.

That afternoon when I returned home, I found the boys standing at the top of our stairwell, begging me to hurry up the steps. “You got a box!” Teddy shouted. The boys hoped for toys, but Tim knew better, because the box was a crate, and on the side was stamped HEIGHTS LIQUOR.

Tim said, “It was just delivered.”

“Mommy, open it, open it!”

Tim used the claw from our hammer to pry open the crate. Inside were twelve bottles of expensive wines, reds and whites. Inside a second, gift-wrapped smaller box was a bottle of Cristal. “Yippee,” Tim said, pleased, because he drinks only champagne.

Disappointed, the boys returned to the living room/dining room/ toy room, where they had been watching a video. I wanted to tell Tim about Bruno’s proposal, but he insisted I open the small envelope taped to the box, so I did. The note was written on Frida Fabritz’s personal stationery.

Kate—

For the biggest single home sale (by far) in the history of the Heights, I have you to thank. My client says that you, and you alone, made the difference.

Enjoy.

TIM

OH, WE WERE DRUNK, AND IT WAS LATE, AND KATE HAD BEEN CRYPTIC AT BEST. AND I, barely a drinker, kept draining the champagne from my flute (really a glass) while begging for details. Since the work was with Bruno, it would be important but low-paying. “Au contraire,” Kate said. The money? Spectacular. How much? Kate was almost embarrassed by the figure. How was she to wrap her mind around the fact that by quitting work to have children, that by virtue of being out of the loop for a fistful of years, she would have increased her value threefold . . .