Chapter One

David

This morning starts trying to kill me at 5:15.

The alarm goes off, and I’m already behind.

By 5:22 I’m out of the shower, dripping onto Italian tile while I drag a towel over my hair and stare at myself through a mirror fogged completely white. My phone starts vibrating across the marble counter before I’ve managed to get one arm into my shirt.

Incoming Call: East Coast Investors.

Perfect.

I answer with a wet thumb and wedge the phone between my shoulder and ear while I button a shirt that costs more than my first car.

“Morning, everyone.”

I take a bite of yesterday’s whole wheat bagel because apparently this is what success looks like now: eight figures under management and stale carbohydrates before sunrise.

The coffee is fresh, at least, although it’s hot enough to burn all the way down.

Nobody on the call bothers saying good morning back.

The first client wants full liquidation. The second wants to move everything into cash. The third informs me, in the careful voice rich people use when they want you to know they’ve already spoken to somebody else, that his family office has advised him to reduce exposure immediately.

By the time I fasten my cuff links, twelve accounts are gone.

Not twelve retirees with eighty grand and a dream, either. These are real accounts, families whose money has been sitting with this firm longer than half our junior analysts have been alive. These are people with homes in three countries, art collections worth more than office buildings, and enough money tucked into trusts that their grandchildren’s grandchildren could develop cocaine problems without ever touching principal.

People like that don’t panic easily, which means when they do, everybody notices.

I spend the ride downtown calling the ones I think can still be saved.

“They’ll lift the sanctions.”

“The checkpoints are temporary.”

“The curfews are precautionary.”

I would also like to tell one man that liquidating thirty million dollars because CNN has dramatic graphics is probably not a sound investment strategy, but I manage to keep that particular opinion to myself.

Instead, I remind him that markets have absorbed political instability before. I tell another client that selling into fear is how people lock in losses, then move on to patience, fundamentals, long-term positioning and every other phrase people like me have been trained to deploy when everyone else starts looking for the exits.

I’m good at this. I’ve been good at it for a very long time.

Today it doesn’t matter.

They’re scared, and there is nothing more dangerous than a terrified rich person with immediate access to his money.

By the time I reach the office, the bullpen has the controlled chaos of an emergency room staffed entirely by people in Hermès belts. Phones ring everywhere while analysts stare into screens full of red numbers and junior brokers whisper to one another as though lowering their voices might keep the market from hearing them.

One of my associates nearly walks into me while carrying two laptops and a coffee.

“Sorry, David.”

“Don’t apologize. Just don’t drop Bloomberg.”

He gives me a nervous laugh, although I’m not joking.

I get to my office, throw my jacket over the back of the chair and pull up my positions. Thirty seconds later, an alert fills my screen.

Emergency All-Partner Meeting. Conf Room A. 9:30 Sharp. Mandatory.

“Of course.”

I cancel three client calls I absolutely do not want to cancel because those accounts are still wobbling. I’ve spent two days trying to convince them that civilization is not ending, or at least that if it is ending, cash probably isn’t going to save them anyway.

At 9:28, I walk into Conference Room A.

The place smells like burnt coffee and anxiety, and every partner is already there, which tells me more about the situation than any report could. Half these men usually consider 9:30 an aspirational arrival time.

The junior analysts are lined against the glass wall with tablets in their hands, trying very hard not to look like people who know they may be watching their bonuses disappear in real time.

Danny Fullerton sits at the head of the table.

He looks calm because Danny always looks calm. A building could be burning down around him and he’d ask somebody to confirm whether the insurance rider covers smoke damage before bothering to stand up.

His jacket is off, his sleeves rolled neatly to his elbows, and he leans back in the leather chair with his arms folded. Anyone else would think he’s relaxed.

I notice his fingers tapping against his forearm.

Once, then twice.

“We need to do some damage control,” he says without bothering with a greeting. “Now.”

The room goes silent.

Danny hired me fifteen years ago, when I was twenty-something, hungry, divorced from common sense and absolutely convinced exhaustion was a personality trait. He told me I had sharp eyes and a closer’s gut, and I probably would have taken a bullet for him over that sentence.

Ten years ago, he made me partner.

I thought I’d made it. Corner office. Equity. Club memberships. A compensation package my father would have considered obscene.

Turns out obscene money still doesn’t buy a second Saturday.

My apartment looks like the lobby of a boutique hotel because I hired somebody else to decorate it and then never spent enough time there to care what she chose. There’s a twelve-thousand-dollar sofa nobody sits on, a wine refrigerator filled with bottles I don’t drink, and art I bought because the adviser told me it was important. Half my shirts come home from the dry cleaner still wrapped in plastic because I’m usually gone again before I need them.

My daughter was four when her mother and I split.

She’s seven now, blonde like her mom, missing one front tooth, and currently obsessed with some animated mermaid whose name I keep forgetting even though she’s explained the plot to me at least six times.

I’m supposed to have her every other weekend.

Sometimes I do. Sometimes Hong Kong opens badly, or London has a problem, or a client worth nine figures decides Saturday morning is an appropriate time to experience existential dread.

Then I tell myself she’ll understand when she gets older.

That excuse sounds worse every year.

I have a girlfriend now too. Three months. Vogue, Cosmo, runways, campaigns. She’s beautiful enough that restaurants find tables when there aren’t any, and she says she likes that I work so much because she’s busy too.

Maybe that’s true.

Maybe she likes me because I never ask where she is and she never asks why I’m not home.

It’s an efficient relationship.

“David.”

Danny’s voice snaps me back into the room.

Every head turns toward me.

“How many accounts bailed this morning?”

There it is. My public execution before ten.

Diane appears beside me with a glass of sparkling water on a folded linen napkin.

God bless Diane. The world may collapse, but that woman will still make sure we have Pellegrino.

“Twelve,” I say.

Danny’s face doesn’t move.

“Twelve?”

“Yes.”

“Top-tier?”

“Mostly.”

Somebody shifts in his seat, and I pick up the water because it gives my hands something to do.

“I did everything I could, Dan.”

“I know.”

“They don’t want reassurance.”

“What do they want?”

“Time travel?”

A few people laugh.

Danny doesn’t.

I set the glass back down. “They want certainty. They want me to tell them exactly what Washington does next, exactly when the sanctions lift, exactly how long the checkpoints stay in place and exactly where the market bottoms.”

“And you can’t.”

“No. Unfortunately, I misplaced my crystal ball somewhere between the divorce and my last quarterly review.”

Danny gives me a look.

“David.”

“I know.”

I lean back in my chair. “They’re seeing curfews, military movement, sanctions and a twenty-four-hour news cycle treating every development like the opening scene of World War Three. They don’t give a shit what our historical models say.”

Nobody argues with me.

“I’ve been on the phone since before sunrise. These people didn’t leave because I failed to call them. They left because they’d already made the decision before they picked up.”

That quiets the room because everybody sitting at this table knows exactly what that means.

Once the client stops calling for advice and starts calling to give instructions, you’re already dead.

“Sir.”

Avery speaks from the back wall, and Danny turns toward him.

Avery is one of our better analysts. He’s twenty-five, maybe twenty-six, and looks approximately fourteen when he wears a suit, but I would trust his numbers over half the people sitting at this table.

“I’ve been running the outflow models since six,” he says. “If redemptions continue anywhere near the current pace, we could lose close to half our assets under management by next quarter.”

The room goes completely silent.

One of the junior brokers slowly lowers her pen.

Danny stares at Avery. “Half?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How aggressive is that model?”

“It isn’t.”

Well, fuck.

I sit back and rub my thumb against the side of my index finger beneath the table while Danny’s jaw flexes.

“Worst case?”

Avery glances at his tablet. “I don’t think you want that one yet.”

I look at him.

Neither does Danny.

“Give me the current.”

Avery nods. “The outflows aren’t concentrated. Institutional accounts are moving. High-net-worth clients are moving. Retirement groups, family trusts, legacy money. If confidence keeps deteriorating, the pace increases because clients start reacting to other clients leaving.”

“Bank-run psychology,” I say.

Avery looks at me. “Essentially.”

Wonderful.

Except instead of people lining up outside a branch trying to withdraw grocery money, these assholes are moving forty million dollars from the back of a Gulfstream.

“This isn’t a blip,” Avery says. “It’s a sustained slide.”

Danny leans back.

For the last week, we’ve used every euphemism finance has ever invented: correction, volatility, political uncertainty, temporary dislocation, market anxiety. Nobody wants to use words like panic because the second investors hear panic, they start wondering whether they should panic too.

But this isn’t anxiety anymore.

This is bleeding, and if Avery’s right, strategy may already be beside the point.

We need a miracle.

“I’ve been talking to some friends in D.C.,” Danny says.

Everyone turns back toward him.

“They’re seeing the same thing. Confidence is shot. Some funds are already reporting forty and fifty percent redemption requests. Retirement groups are taking hits. Trust managers are going heavy cash. This is broader than us.”

He looks slowly around the table.

“But this is where we hold the line.”

There it is. Danny Fullerton’s favorite phrase whenever the building is on fire.

“You call your clients,” he says. “Then you call them again. If they don’t answer, you have your teams call. If they want information, give them information. If they want access, give them access.”

He points toward the table.

“And stop treating retention like it ends with portfolio performance. Anything we can legally give them, give them. Concierge services. Travel. Boxes. Broadway. Private dining. Wine tastings. Golf weekends. Whatever keeps the relationship warm.”

I stare at him.

These people think the western financial system may be heading into a death spiral, and apparently our counteroffensive is Hamilton and Cabernet.

Excellent.

“David.”

Danny’s eyes settle on me.

“I know what you’re thinking.”

“I seriously doubt that.”

“You’re thinking it sounds ridiculous.”

“I was thinking Broadway may finally save capitalism.”

Someone snorts.

Danny points at me. “And if Broadway keeps twenty million under management, I’ll buy them the fucking theater.”

Fair.

He’s got me there.

“I’m serious,” he says. “Your team brings you something that might retain a client, expense it.”

“No cap?”

“No cap.”

That wakes everybody up.

Danny Fullerton once rejected a forty-two-dollar lunch receipt because somebody forgot to specify which managing director ate the Cobb salad.

“No questions,” he says. “No approval chain. No briefs. No waiting for three people upstairs to decide whether somebody’s hotel suite is too expensive. Your people bring it to you, you approve it, and we deal with the paperwork at the end of the quarter.”

“Jesus,” one of the partners mutters.

Exactly.

Danny exhales and rubs a hand over his mouth. For the first time today, he looks genuinely tired.

Not boardroom tired or I-flew-private-overnight-from-Geneva tired.

Just tired.

“God willing,” he says, “we get this under control by January.”

January.

Five months of men with nine homes calling me at midnight because their portfolio dropped three percent. Five months of women with foundations named after themselves suddenly discovering the concept of liquidity. Five months of my associates eating dinner at their desks while their spouses text asking whether they’re coming home.

Five months of telling terrified people that history rewards patience while silently checking whether history has any intention of cooperating.

Five months of bleeding and bluffing.

My phone vibrates against the table, and for one second I hope it’s my daughter, which is stupid because she’s at school.

It isn’t her.

It’s another client.

Call me ASAP. Need to discuss full exit.

There goes lucky number thirteen.

I flip the phone facedown while Danny starts assigning work. Avery needs revised models by noon. Legal needs to prepare for expanded sanctions. Communications needs new talking points before the European close.

The room wakes up around me as laptops open, phones come out and chairs scrape across the floor. Everybody suddenly has somewhere to be.

I stay seated for another second and catch my reflection in the dark screen of my phone.

Fifteen years ago, Danny could say hold the line and I’d practically run through drywall for him. Ten years ago, I would have heard opportunity in those words, and five years ago, I probably would have smelled money.

Now I mostly wonder what exactly I’ve spent fifteen years building and whether my daughter will remember any of it.

The phone vibrates again.

I pick it up because existential crises are for people without quarterly targets.

Danny talks, and I move.

That’s always been the arrangement.

I’m just starting to wonder whether January is going to arrive long after the damage is already done.
**********************************************
The rest of my morning bleeds into one long, brutal stretch of what Danny calls damage control.

It’s anything but.

I spend hours on the phone offering every perk in our arsenal as though a Broadway ticket might somehow compensate for the possibility of financial collapse. Luxury cruises, private dining, boxes at the Garden, golf weekends, whatever the client likes enough that somebody in this building has written it down beside their name.

None of it sticks.

These people don’t want perks. They want stability. They want assurance. More specifically, they want me to guarantee that their wealth will still be sitting exactly where they left it when whatever the hell is happening in this country finally settles down.

I can’t give them that.

Five more accounts are gone by lunch.

I type each one into the loss log, and the memo updates automatically, which means Danny gets to watch my morning deteriorate in real time. Seventeen accounts now. Seventeen clients who woke up today and decided they would rather trust cash, gold, foreign banks or whatever else they’ve convinced themselves will survive this better than we will.

By twelve-thirty, I need to get out of the office.

There’s nothing like soup on a stressful day.

I’ve always been obsessed with soup. My favorite is probably split pea with ham, mostly because my mom used to make it for us when we were small. When I got old enough, I found her recipe and started making it myself after delivering papers, mowing lawns, and occasionally stealing Dad’s food stamp card when there wasn’t anything else in the house.

My brother liked it too.

He always said it tasted like Mom.

I’m thinking about that when Kevin Willerton and I reach the sandwich shop two blocks from the office.

“Please stop, sir. ID.”

The voice pulls me back to the sidewalk.

I fish my wallet from my coat while Kevin, one of the seven partners I work with every day, keeps walking with his phone pressed to his ear.

“Sir, please end your phone call and show me your ID.”

Kevin stops and rolls his eyes at the guard.

I wouldn’t.

The rifle hanging across the man’s chest gives me plenty of incentive to cooperate. I was a Marine. I know what an AK-pattern rifle can do, and I have no interest in discovering how much patience the guy holding it has left after standing on a Manhattan sidewalk all morning checking licenses.

“I’m certain you have more important people to identify,” Kevin mutters as he finally lowers his phone. “I’m an investment broker. We come here for lunch every day. You scanned my ID yesterday.”

The guard doesn’t react.

“Sir. Your ID.”

Kevin looks at me like I’m supposed to participate in his outrage.

I don’t.

Yesterday doesn’t mean shit anymore. That seems to be the entire point of the checkpoints.

Kevin sighs and hands his license to one guard while I give mine to the other.

The scanner passes over the back of my New York State driver’s license. There’s a beep, a brief flash, and then the light turns green.

“Thank you, Mr. Jansen.”

He hands it back.

“Thank you.”

Kevin looks at me.

“What?”

“You thanked him.”

“He has a rifle.”

“So?”

“So I’ve developed a lifelong policy of being polite to people carrying assault rifles.”

The corner of the guard’s mouth moves. Barely. It disappears so quickly I’m not sure I actually saw it.

Kevin gets his license back and immediately puts his phone to his ear again.

I shove mine into my wallet and push through the door of a sandwich shop I’ve been coming to for fifteen years.

Same scratched wooden tables. Same faded menu board. Same refrigerated case full of bottled drinks. Same soup steaming behind the counter.

If it weren’t for the soup, I probably would have stopped coming here years ago.

Grace is the other reason I never did.

I met her here completely by accident on a lunch break, back when I was still young enough to leave the office for forty-five minutes without checking my phone every thirty seconds. She was sitting alone near the window with a sandwich and a Diet Coke, reading something while she ate, and I noticed her immediately.

Then I did absolutely nothing about it.

I came back the next day at the same time hoping she would be here again.

She was.

So I came back the day after that too, and then again the day after that. By the sixth lunch, I had spent an embarrassing amount of money on sandwiches I didn’t particularly want because I kept telling myself that today would be the day I finally talked to her.

Six times I walked through this door, found her somewhere near that window and pretended I hadn’t arranged my entire lunch break around the possibility that she might be here.

On the sixth day, I finally managed to walk over.

“Do you get cell service in here?”

That was what came out of my mouth.

Not hello. Not I’m David. Not even can I sit down?

Do you get cell service in here?

Grace stared at me for a second before looking down at the phone sitting directly beside her hand.

“Yes.”

“Okay. Good.”

Then I stood there like an idiot because apparently I had put all my mental energy into approaching her and none into planning what happened if she actually answered.

She laughed.

That saved me.

I sat down, and somehow the worst opening line in Manhattan turned into coffee after work, then dinner a few nights later, then Grace.

For years afterward, every time we came back here, she would look at me across the table and ask, completely straight-faced, “Do you get cell service in here, David?”

Every single time.

I glance toward the windows without meaning to.

Different table now. Different people.

Same place.

Same soup.

“What’re you getting?” Kevin asks, already studying the menu.

“Split pea.”

He makes a face. “That looks disgusting.”

“That’s because you have no culture.”

“It looks like baby food.”

“My mother made it.”

Kevin looks at me.

I point at him. “Choose your next words carefully.”

He laughs and orders a turkey club.

I get the split pea with ham and a piece of sourdough, and for twenty minutes we sit by the window pretending this is an ordinary lunch on an ordinary workday.

Kevin spends most of it talking about clients. One of his is moving twelve million to Switzerland. Another wants to liquidate a commercial real estate position before the end of the week. He talks between bites, mostly irritated rather than afraid, as though the entire geopolitical situation has been constructed specifically to fuck with his quarterly numbers.

I listen and eat my soup.

It isn’t as good as Mom’s.

Nobody’s is.

Still, there’s something about the salt and the ham and the soft peas that settles me for a while. Maybe it’s nostalgia. Maybe I’m pathetic enough at thirty-something years old that one bowl of soup can still make me feel like a kid sitting at my mother’s table.

Or maybe this place has always had a way of convincing me that my life is simpler than it actually is.

I met my wife here.

I used to bring her back here.

Now I’m sitting in the same place with another investment broker while armed guards stand outside checking identification.

When Kevin and I leave, they scan us again.

Kevin complains again.

I don’t.

By the time I’m back upstairs, police vehicles are parked at both ends of the street.

My phone vibrates before I’ve even sat down.

For one second, I assume it’s another client calling to tell me how much money he no longer trusts me with.

It isn’t.

Brea: Hey! So they moved our shoot up a couple hours earlier today. We’re already done.

My shoulders loosen slightly.

I pick up the phone.

Me: Great. Dinner tonight?

Her answer comes almost immediately.

Brea: Hmm. Mexican?

A smile pulls at my mouth before I can stop it.

Me: Holy frijoles.

Brea: Nerd. How about 6:30? La Calle?

Me: Sounds good. See you then.

A few seconds pass.

Brea: It might take you longer. There’s more roadblocks all over the city. They’re making people show ID everywhere they go. Did you hear?

I glance toward the window.

Me: Yeah. Got stopped going to lunch. I’m sure it’s fine. I’ll see you later.

Brea: K ❤️

I lower the phone.

I’m sure it’s fine.

That’s apparently what I tell everybody now.

Clients. Brea. Myself.

I turn my chair toward the windows.

My office towers over the city, high enough that on a normal day Manhattan looks almost manageable from here. Streets become neat lines, cars become dots and people disappear completely.

Today, flashing red and blue lights pulse between the buildings.

Traffic is backed up all the way through the financial district, cars packed bumper to bumper while officers funnel them through checkpoints one lane at a time. Barricades have gone up at two intersections I could swear were open this morning.

From forty floors up, it almost looks organized.

That may be the strangest thing about it.

There aren’t people running through the streets. Nobody is rioting. Buildings aren’t burning. People are still carrying briefcases, ordering coffee, complaining about traffic and trying to make lunch reservations.

It’s controlled.

Polite, even.

The kind of panic New Yorkers can apparently conduct while still checking their watches.

I lean back in my chair.

It’s been like this for more than a month now.

At first, the checkpoints were sporadic. A few intersections, transportation hubs, bridges and tunnels. The official explanation was verification of legal status and public safety, making sure residents were protected while the government dealt with whatever new threat was being discussed that week.

Then there were more of them.

Now I can’t walk two blocks for soup without showing a government-issued ID to a man carrying a rifle.

Maybe Brea is right to mention it.

Maybe I shouldn’t have told her it was fine.

The problem is that I don’t know what else to call it.

I turn back toward my desk and pull up the loss log.

Seventeen.

I stare at the number.

That’s only today.

The selling started weeks ago, quietly at first. A few clients reducing positions here and there. Shifting money overseas. Increasing cash. Nothing dramatic enough to send anybody running into Danny’s office, especially with sanctions looming and the markets already jumpy.

Except the people selling weren’t hobbyists.

They weren’t the guys who panic because the Dow drops two hundred points and CNBC uses the color red.

They were the real players.

Billionaires. Family offices. Men who own enough of certain companies that they can call the CEO directly when they’re unhappy.

They don’t liquidate assets they’ve held for twenty years because they saw something scary on television.

They move because they know something.

Or because they think they do.

I’ve tried asking.

The answers changed weeks ago.

Don’t ask.

Not your concern.

Just do what I say, David.

People who used to spend twenty minutes asking about my daughter or inviting me to golf suddenly don’t want conversation. They give instructions, and I execute them.

That’s the job.

Keep your head down. Make the trade. Keep the client happy.

Except now every trade feels like somebody quietly getting into a lifeboat while the rest of us are still being told the ship is fine.

My eyes drift toward the photograph at the far corner of my desk.

Margot.

She’s frozen mid-laugh with her blonde hair tangled across her face and sunlight catching in her eyes. The picture is beginning to curl at the edges because apparently, despite everything I own, I’ve never managed to buy a frame for it.

I wasn’t there when it was taken.

Grace sent it to me.

No caption. No explanation. Just Margot laughing on what looked like a beach somewhere.

That was three years ago, back when Grace still occasionally sent me pieces of their life without making me ask for them.

We barely speak now unless it concerns Margot.

School schedules. Visitation. Tuition. Whether she has a fever. Whether I’m picking her up Friday or once again discovering at the last minute that something at work is apparently more important than my daughter.

Every conversation feels careful.

Grace and I used to be able to talk about absolutely anything. Now I can spend fifteen minutes deciding whether a period at the end of a text sounds hostile.

I look at my phone.

For the first time today, I seriously consider calling her.

Not texting.

Calling.

Something’s happening.

I can already hear how insane that sounds.

But I’ve spent fifteen years around people who know things before everybody else knows them. Half of finance is pretending information is equally available while paying obscene amounts of money to make sure yours arrives thirty seconds earlier.

And something is wrong.

The checkpoints are multiplying.

The sanctions keep expanding.

Clients who ordinarily treat market corrections like clearance sales are liquidating assets they’ve held for decades.

They’re not afraid of a bad quarter.

They’re preparing for something.

Maybe an exit.

Maybe something worse.

My hand moves toward the phone.

I could tell Grace to keep Margot close for a few days. Make sure she has cash. Keep the car fueled. Avoid unnecessary trips into the city.

I could tell her I’m worried.

My hand stops.

Grace would ask why.

Then I would have to explain that my evidence consists primarily of paranoid billionaires, traffic checkpoints and a feeling in my gut.

After everything between us, I don’t get to drop fear into her life without being certain.

She’ll think I’m overreacting.

Worse, she’ll think I’m using Margot as an excuse to insert myself into hers.

Maybe she’d be right.

I pull my hand away.

If I’m wrong, I become the ex-husband calling in the middle of the workday to announce that civilization may be collapsing because a hedge-fund manager sold stock.

If I’m right, I don’t know what happens next.

I don’t finish that thought.

Instead, I look at Brea’s message again.

Mexican at six-thirty.

Brea is easy.

Pretty, funny, uncomplicated Brea.

We met at a charity function three months ago. She laughed at my jokes, touched my wrist while I talked and somehow made me feel interesting instead of exhausted.

She’s a model. Vogue, Cosmo, campaigns I pretend to recognize when she shows them to me.

She’s younger than I am and careless in ways I haven’t been able to afford to be in years. She scrolls through her phone during movies, leaves half-finished glasses of wine on my nightstand and tells me my suits make me look “very Succession.”

She likes my money.

I’m not stupid.

She likes the restaurants, the car, the apartment and the fact that when she mentions wanting to go somewhere, I can usually make it happen.

I don’t particularly resent her for it.

I like that she’s beautiful. I like that she looks good across a table from me. I like that sex with her is uncomplicated and that she doesn’t ask why I wake up at four in the morning to check overseas markets.

We’re both getting something.

Maybe that’s enough.

Because whatever Brea and I are doing, it isn’t what I had with Grace.

Nothing ever will be.

I loved Grace before I had the office, before the partnership, before my suits cost four figures and people cared where I made dinner reservations. She knew me when I was still trying to convince people I belonged in rooms like this.

She knew the kid who delivered newspapers.

The one who mowed lawns.

The one who stole his father’s food stamp card and made his mother’s split pea soup because his little brother said it tasted like her.

She knew the guy who spent six straight lunch breaks walking into the same sandwich shop because he was too scared to talk to her.

The idiot who finally worked up the nerve and asked whether she got cell service.

Brea knows David Jansen, partner.

Grace knew David.

There’s a difference.

I lean forward and rub both hands over my face.

Outside, another line of flashing lights moves between the buildings.

A siren rises somewhere below, then another answers it farther away.

The city keeps moving because New York always keeps moving.

Phones ring. Markets trade. People order lunch. Armed guards scan identification outside sandwich shops.

And somewhere in all of it, I have the increasingly uncomfortable feeling that everyone who actually knows what’s happening has already started leaving.

My phone vibrates again.

This time it’s work.

Of course it is.

I pick it up and turn away from the window.