At the mention of the last illness, Roger’s eyes lit up. How did Desmond know, he mumbled, that he and his brother both had ADD?

Later in the afternoon, Thomas stuck his head into Desmond’s office. He was about to call Jane. Did Desmond have any messages for her?

“Tell her to hurry up with those Florida tickets,” Desmond said. “I’m dying for a suntan.”

2.

It was a gray afternoon with a low, heavy sky and down on the street, twenty stories below, people were bundled up in sweaters and long coats. From the floor-to-ceiling window where Jane stood, the Public Garden was a distant blur of red and brown. It was windy and the trees were slowly being stripped of their pretty, dying leaves. At long last, a welcome spell of autumnal weather, even if it hadn’t arrived until November. She couldn’t wait for winter, assuming it came this year. She’d like a long spell of Arctic air to settle in and freeze the ground, the ponds, the river, and—what a comforting thought—her own heart. Dale was in the bathroom, shaving and talking on his cell phone. He was a man who needed to be in constant touch with his minions; electricians and plumbers and painters and builders. This dance of codependence was what made the world go round. They had the skills, he had the money. Most important of all, he had the forceful, ruthless male energy needed to hold it all together. When they were married, she’d often watched him at work and thought to herself that she could do what he did and do it with more grace and decency. But listening to him these past few weeks—“Then tell him to go fuck himself,” he was saying over the sound of running water. “We’ll get Tom to do it for half the price.”—she realized how foolish she’d been. There was something about his brash bullheadedness that inspired people; it had inspired her to start this documentary project. And now it was his money that was funding it.

He came out of the bathroom, his dark, damp skin set off by the thick towel he had wrapped around his waist. The Boylston Hotel specialized in thick towels and expensive soaps and cotton sheets, meaningless little luxuries that seemed to mean so much. Dale knew one of the hotel’s developers and so had access to one of the apartments—executive suites, in the silly, ego-stroking language of this world—on the upper floors. She’d rather not know how often he’d used this place and with whom, so she never pressed for details.

“New problems?” she asked.