And she liked a drink or five, so they had that in common, too. Martini glasses, wine bottles, and whiskey tumblers piled up between them, a miniature metropolis of varicolored glass, while their cell phones and BlackBerries plaintively, futilely tried to attract their attention.

“So tell me,” Emily Greenstreet said, when they’d both imbibed enough to create the illusion of a comfortable, long-standing intimacy between them. “Do you miss it? Doing magic?”

“I can honestly say I never think about it,” he said. “Why? Do you?”

“Miss it, or think about it?” She rolled a lock of her mousy, chin-length hair between two fingers. “Of course I do. Both.”

“Are you ever sorry you left Brakebills?”

She shook her head sharply.

“The only thing I regret is not leaving that place sooner.” She leaned forward, suddenly animated. “Just thinking about that place now gives me the howling fantods. They’re just kids, Quentin! With all that power! What happened to Charlie and me could happen again to any one of them, any day, any minute. Or worse. Much worse. It’s amazing that place is still standing.” He noticed that she never said “Brakebills,” just “that place.” “I don’t even like living on the same coast with it. There’s practically no safeguards at all. Every one of those kids is a nuclear bomb waiting to go off!

“Somebody needs to get control of that place. Sometimes I think I should blow their cover, get the real government in there, get it properly regulated. The teachers will never do it. The Magician’s Court will never do it.”

She chattered on in that vein. They were like two recovering alcoholics, hopped up on caffeine and Twelve Step gospel, telling each other how glad they were to be sober and then talking about nothing but drinking.

Though unlike recovering alcoholics they could and did drink plenty of alcohol. Temporarily revived by a molten affogato, Quentin went to work on a bitter single malt Scotch that tasted like it had been decanted through the stump of an oak tree that had been killed by lightning.

“I never felt safe in that place. Never, not for a minute. Don’t you feel safer out here, Quentin? In the real world?”

“If you want to know the truth, these days I don’t feel much of anything.”

She frowned at that. “Really. Then what made you give it all up, Quentin? You must have had a good reason.”

“I would say my motives were pretty much unimpeachable.”

“That bad?” She raised her thin eyebrows, flirtatiously. “Tell me.”

She sat back and let the restaurant’s fancy easy chair embrace her. Nothing a recovering addict likes more than a tale of how bad it had been in the old days, and how low a fellow addict had sunk. Let the one-downsmanship begin.