After driving through heavy traffic for ten minutes, Desmond’s back was plastered to the seat with sweat. Anticipating the heat, he’d worn a sleeveless T-shirt and hung his brand-new dress shirt (sale price $112) on a hook in the back seat. It was important to make a good first impression on Jane, his last best hope for professional redemption, and impossible to do so with a sweatdampened shirt clinging to your nipples.

Jane and Thomas lived in a shady enclave in Brookline. The streets were quiet, cool, overhung with towering maple trees and sycamores; he felt as if he’d entered a gated community even though the main shopping street was a mere two blocks away. The houses were enormous, ranging in architectural style from Tudor to Bauhaus, all filtered through a Marie Antoinette fever dream of gracious living. But that wasn’t fair either; there was some overlay of New England discretion—or was it Puritanical shame?—in the neighborhood. All the immense houses were practically blushing with modesty, peeking up over a carefully sculpted privacy hedge, or revealing just enough of themselves through a screen of pine trees to let you know the essence of what you were missing. The Miller-Cody manse was at the loop end of a cul-de-sac. By the standards of this neighborhood, their house looked almost shabby-—a generous Queen Anne Victorian with a turret, a wraparound porch, and a lot of lacy ornamentation skirting the eaves, all of it in need of a fresh coat of paint. Unlike its neighbors, it was fully exposed to the street with only a hint of unkempt lawn separating it from the sidewalk.

He parked just beyond the driveway, took off his T-shirt, and wiped down his back with it. He slipped on the dress shirt standing on the street and gazing up at the house.

Jane answered the door, talking into a cordless phone she had cradled against her neck. It was the same woman he’d seen the week before, dressed in the same creamy blouse and colorful Bakelite necklace. She motioned him into the house and made a gesture of annoyance toward the phone. Her voice had the tone of husky, almost bullying self-confidence which he’d heard her use on the street and which he found inexplicably reassuring. Desmond didn’t want to appear to be listening, but there wasn’t much to look at in the front hallway: a chair, a brass coat rack, and a little table with letters on it.