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He considered for a moment replacing the volume he had just read, and continuing with the next journal on the pile, but then he stopped and thought better of it. Did he want to spoil such a wonderful night, a pleasant evening with his wife? Perhaps the next journal, written longer ago, was less charitable to him, less kind. Maybe it would be better to stop there, basking in his love for her, and in her love for him. Why ruin it? Maybe this was a perfect goodbye, a beautiful way to remember her.

And then he made a promise to himself, the rash kind of promise people make drunkenly, full of alcoholic purpose and resolve, that he would not read her journals again until their next anniversary, and that he would put them away, safely in the attic, so he would not be tempted to read them; he would practically bury them in the upstairs darkness, to give her the kind of proper burial that her suicide at sea had unfairly denied him.

And so he gathered together the bundle of journals – years of thoughts and criticism and insecurity and happiness and hope, all contained in light-blue ink in tightly wound script – and carried the heavy pile in his two arms in front of him, like a sleeping child. He left the bedroom, his footsteps creaking across the second-floor hallway, and he came to the doorway that led to the attic.

He opened the attic door and flipped on the light switch. He walked up a cheaply carpeted flight of stairs, brown and orange like nutmeg, and the air was humid and stale, and the light dim – just a solitary bulb in an enamel socket, without a fixture. He had to bend down to avoid the steep slope of the ceiling. Bent, he walked further into the attic, past cardboard boxes full of hardcover books that they had never unpacked after their move from New York; past two old coffee makers, for some reason being saved, perhaps in the hope that they would spurt back to life; past an old computer monitor, its power cord limply hanging over the cathode tube. He stepped past lacquered decorative baskets and
holiday wreaths, through a tangle of Christmas lights, and finally to the rear of the room, where a tall, narrow window, lined with old lead caulk and brittle putty, was filled with the moon. He looked through the panes. Down below, he saw the dark outline of the old apricot tree, and further on, streetlights humming a sodium buzz.

He bent over and laid the stack of journals on the floor, and when he stood up again he knocked his head into the ceiling. He backed up a step, regained his balance. He looked again at the pile of journals. He thought that he would return to them in exactly one year, on his twenty-first wedding anniversary. Perhaps, he thought, this will become an annual event, to be repeated each August: a glass of wine, and then a few hours alone with my wife, reading her innermost thoughts. He tried to imagine this – this secret ritual to be repeated one dark night each summer. But even then, standing in the attic, bent over, with his head brushing the ceiling, he wasn't sure he could bring himself to do it again.

18

While Timothy drank in his dark house, across the world the sun was shining in Tokyo, and the yen continued its strange rise.

That it should keep rising was more than unexpected, it was unfathomable, because everyone in the world agreed that it could not possibly rise, that there was only one direction it could go: down. And this Timothy found odd, because if everyone agreed it was going down, who was buying yen futures, anticipating that it would go up, driving up the price?

By August 27, Osiris total loss had reached twenty-seven million dollars. A few million more, the Kid explained to Timothy, and the margin calls would start: the brokers – fearful about being on the hook for unrealized losses – would start liquidating Osiris' positions whether Timothy agreed or not, and of course would do so at the worst possible prices, creating even larger losses and driving the prices even further against them.

So it seemed queer to Timothy that, given the fact that his fund had lost almost a third of its value, and that nearly thirty million dollars of investor wealth had been destroyed, he was more concerned about the relatively small one hundred and fifty thousand dollars that had vanished from his bank account days before Katherine died. There was something strange about it. He started thinking about it the morning after reading her journal, after remembering what the journal did not contain: any mention of sickness, or of doctors, or – for that matter – of interior decorators. Katherine had asked him for two hundred thousand dollars in order to begin remodeling the house. But the money had vanished. No decorator called Timothy sheepishly to return it; no contractor wrote him a letter asking when to start work. One hundred and fifty thousand dollars had disappeared. And
Katherine, who scrupulously recorded each grapefruit she ate for breakfast, had not written a single sentence about it.

That morning at work, Timothy called his attorney at Perkins Coie, Frank Arnheim.

‘Timothy,' Frank said. ‘How are you holding up?'

‘I've been better, Frank,' Timothy said. Over the past week he had refined his answer to that question, since he had been asked it, in one form or another, hundreds of times. He appreciated that people bothered to ask, but he knew that, secretly, they did not want to be burdened by the truth, which was that he blamed himself for his wife's death, that he was sad and lonely, and that he drunk himself into a stupor each night and often cried. On the other hand, Timothy knew he could not simply ignore his grief or make light of it. So he had settled on the ‘I've been better' line – a laconic, honest admission that he hurt like hell, but business was business – and so let's not waste too much time on facts that we can't change. Like the fact that my wife killed herself.

‘I understand,' Frank said. ‘I can't even imagine what you are going through.'

‘Thanks, Frank.' With that out of the way, he got down to business. ‘Frank, the reason I'm calling is that I need a little help tracking down some money.'

‘Tell me.'

‘About two weeks ago, I wired a hundred fifty K into a Citibank account, for the benefit of a company called Armistice LLC. I want you to find out who owns the account – who exactly is Armistice LLC? – and how to contact them.' Timothy rattled off the account number at Citibank that Mike Kelly at Union Bank had given him. ‘Can you do that?'

‘Give me a couple hours.' And then: ‘Got any lunch plans?'

He had somehow managed to avoid Tricia his first days back at work – just a terse hello as he walked to and from the elevator, a brief exchange of pleasantries when she brought him coffee in the morning – and she too at first tried to keep her distance, as if standing too close or talking too much might somehow shatter his fragile recovery, might remind him of the Monday night
before Katherine died, and start the pain rushing back.

But that afternoon Tricia came to his office and brought him coffee, and turned to leave. She stopped at the doorway and turned to him. ‘I'm worried about you.'

He sipped his coffee and looked up at her. She wore a snug black-and-white striped pullover and a cotton skirt, and her hair was pulled back in a prim tight bun. Her librarian glasses were perched on her nose, and she looked very different from the woman who had climbed on top of him a week earlier and said, ‘I want your cock inside me,' and stuck her tongue in his ear.

‘Worried?'

She shut his office door. ‘You seem so sad and lonely.'

‘I am sad, Tricia. I am lonely.'

‘I feel partly responsible.'

Timothy wanted to tell her that she was incorrect, that she was not partly responsible – she was, rather, completely responsible. Her flirtation, her infatuation, her come-ons, had caused his wife's suicide. She had tempted him even though she knew he was married. ‘You're not responsible,' he said.

‘If you're lonely, maybe you'd like some company. I can come over, cook you dinner.'

He tried to picture her in his kitchen, rattling pans over his stove, sautéing vegetables and braising meat. ‘I don't think that's such a great idea.'

‘I know,' she said, ‘it's too soon, right?'

She was looking, Timothy realized, for some kind of confirmation that he was still interested in her. Maybe his wife's death was too recent, she seemed to think, to begin an affair, but perhaps soon?

How could he tell her that this was not the case, that it would never be the case, that he considered her dull-witted and vulgar and foul-mouthed – and perhaps sexy, yes – but nothing more than a little girl, a trashy, slutty, little girl who said ‘awesome' too frequently and who probably was great in bed, but who – when that was done – had nothing much to offer a man like himself.

‘It's too soon,' he agreed.

She nodded. ‘Awesome,' she said. The word probably meant she was glad he would be open to the idea in the future, but it sounded ridiculous to Timothy, and confirmed his worst suspicions about her: that she was just a dumb girl from LA.

There was a knock on the door, and Frank Arnheim, Timothy's lawyer, stuck his bald bullet head into the office. ‘Hello?'

‘Hi, Frank,' Timothy said.

Frank said apologetically, ‘There was no one at reception so I just thought …' His voice trailed off as he looked at Tricia.

She smiled pleasantly at him. ‘I should probably get back to the front desk.'

‘Okay,' Timothy said.

She nodded and squeezed past Frank Arnheim in the doorway. ‘Excuse me,' she said.

Frank glanced down at her breasts as she walked past, and then his eyes followed her ass as she departed down the hall. He closed the door behind her.

‘God,' he said, ‘killer ass. That is the hottest receptionist I've ever seen. And I'm a bit of a connoisseur.' He put a hand to his mouth. ‘Sorry. I guess that's kind of inappropriate, especially right now, isn't it?'

‘It's okay,' Timothy said. ‘I agree with you. She's not my type, though.'

‘Oh, yeah?' Frank said, suddenly interested, as if this freed him to try to get Tricia for himself. He thought about it a moment, then snapped back. ‘I have that information you wanted. Pretty interesting stuff. I'll tell you over lunch.'

They ate at Il Fornaio, just across University Avenue. The restaurant was filled with tables of two, and all were nearly identical – a bug-eyed young man dining with an older, better-dressed, more distinguished-looking gentleman. The young men laughed eagerly at every remark of their dining companions, and tried to stare into their eyes, and to please them. In any other city in the world it would have seemed like a room full of gigolos entertaining their sugar daddies, but here in Palo Alto, at the height of the Internet boom, everyone understood that it was something very
different: the tables were filled with young entrepreneurs trying to charm a venture capitalist, or a board member, out of money, or into a job.

Timothy and Frank sat in the corner, overlooking the courtyard. Frank opened his briefcase and took out a yellow legal pad scrawled with notes. ‘I had two associates look into Armistice LLC, as you requested. I thought it would be a simple thing, you know, one hour of billable time, tops.'

‘And?'

‘Not so simple,' Frank said. He bit into a piece of bread and tore it with his teeth. ‘So don't be surprised when you get the bill.'

‘Your bills never surprise me, Frank.'

Frank wasn't sure what to make of that. He looked up at Timothy, then shrugged. ‘So here's where it comes out. Armistice LLC owns the Citibank account that you gave me. Armistice LLC is a Delaware corporation – but really, it's a nothing: no assets, no income, no taxes, no place of business. Not really uncommon. But –' He started reading from his notes now. ‘Armistice LLC is in turn owned by a company called Chelsea Partners. Chelsea Partners is not a partnership, incidentally, just another corporation, this one registered in Nevada. Okay, so Chelsea Partners is in turn owned by a company registered in the Bahamas, called Keystone Group. You following this?' Without waiting for an answer, he continued. ‘Keystone Group is just a shell – all the contact information points to an offshore corporate services company in Nassau, and they have no idea who Keystone Group is, and – even if they did – they probably wouldn't tell me. By the way, that's where most lawyers would stop. They'd tell you, that's all I can find out; the search ended at Keystone Group in Nassau. And then they'd hand you a bill right then and there.'

‘But you didn't stop there, Frank, did you?'

‘Of course not.' He turned the page on his legal pad. ‘So we did a legal search on Keystone. It turns out that you can find references to Keystone Group in the registration of a Panamanian shell company called Stillwater Group. Stillwater and Keystone are joint partners in a third company, Amber Corp. Still with me?
Amber Corp is registered in the State of Florida. They're totally legit, by the way, in good standing with Florida Secretary of State, all taxes and fees up-to-date and current.'

‘That's it?'

‘Well, yes, “That's it”' – he made quotation marks in the air – ‘as you put it so dismissively, but I think you might be interested in one more thing.'

‘What's that?'

‘Amber Corp. is a Florida corporation, right? Why Florida, you ask? I have no idea. But they have another business office listed in their annual filing. Want to know where it is?'

‘Sure.'

‘Their office is on Sand Hill Road, right down the street from here, in Menlo Park. 3625 Sand Hill Road. What are the chances of that?'

19

At three o'clock in the afternoon, Timothy pulled his BMW out of the underground parking garage and drove toward the Stanford University campus.

Stanford began at Palm Drive, which was both an avenue and a triumph of stage management. Broad, lined by majestic Canary Island Palms, it ushered people onto the campus, rising at a gentle grade – perfect for rollerblades and ten-speeds – and ending, to the west, at the Oval, a green space filled with taut Stanford men and women playing frisbee. Behind them was Memorial Church, a terracotta cathedral, with a giant exterior mural of Jesus ministering to his disciples among what clearly looked like Northern California foothills. Every time he drove toward the mural, Timothy half-expected to see Jesus, robe flying, catching a frisbee between his legs.