TERMS AND CONDITIONS

The apartment on Fifth Avenue had eleven rooms and a view of the park, and the first thing Win did on moving in was to count the light switches.

There were sixty-three. She wrote the number in the ledger, under Provisions, beside the car (a black Mercedes with a driver named Anselmo who spoke only to say good morning), the card (unlimited, platinum, and heavy as a coin), and the housekeeper (Mrs. Dray, no relation, who appeared at nine each morning, folded things, and was gone by ten). Win had never lived anywhere that required staff. She found it unnerving. It was like being the subject of a very polite surveillance operation.

"You're allowed to ring for things," said Mrs. Dray, on the second morning, regarding the untouched breakfast tray.

"I don't need anything."

"No one needs anything, Miss Callaghan. That's rather the point of the room."

By the end of the first week, Win had stopped apologizing to the furniture.

By the end of the second, she had developed a routine, which she recognized, with some amusement, as an adjuster's: a schedule drawn up in advance, defended against interruption, and reviewed each night for variance. She woke at nine. She took the white pill with a dry piece of toast and the blue pill at noon, and she did not look at the third bottle, the brown one, which Dr. Voigt had called for breakthrough and which Win thought of, privately, as the Emergency Exit. She walked in the park until her legs began to feel like water. She read in the library. She spent, on average, eleven thousand dollars a day of someone else's money, and wrote down every cent.

Oct 28. Lunch, the Carlyle: $412. Gloves (kidskin, lilac): $380. Orchids: $210. Tip to Anselmo (declined; left in glove box anyway): $100. Provision.

Oct 29. Opera tickets, Met, Box 4: $0 (comped by Provision). Dress, Oscar de la Renta: $6,800. Provision.

Oct 30. Nothing. Slept until four. Provision.

She reread that entry twice. Then she added, in smaller letters, underneath: Cost to the body: noted.

…

Callum did not call.

She had expected it. She had expected a man who seized things to seize this, too: the daily summons, the car at the curb, the text at two in the morning. Instead there were nine days of silence, and then a black card on a silver tray with a time and a room number, and then another silence. He was building something; she could tell from the rhythm. He arrived at the end of a week with a game in his hand like a cat bringing in a bird, and between games he seemed content to let her disappear into the city, buy a pair of gloves, fall asleep in a chair.

It should have felt like freedom. What it felt like, increasingly, was a sentence left unfinished.

On the ninth night, at a quarter to midnight, a tall woman in black let herself into the apartment with a key Win had not given her.

"Don't get up," said Odessa Pell.

Win, who had not been planning to, set aside her book.

"I'm not in the habit of paying calls after hours," Odessa went on, stripping off her gloves, "but I don't generally have clients this interesting. Is there anything to drink in this mausoleum?"

"There's champagne in the kitchen."

"There's always champagne. Is there anything else?"

"Bourbon, in the library."

"Ah." Odessa's eyes warmed. "A woman of character."

She poured two fingers into a tumbler and sat down opposite Win on the pale silk sofa with the unhurried grace of a cat that has been in a hundred rooms and found most of them overrated. The gold-rimmed glasses caught the lamplight. Her gown was the exact color of a bruise.

"You signed," said Odessa.

"You sound disappointed."

"I'm never disappointed. I'm a professional." She took a sip. "I'm curious. Most people who come to me want to be told what they're doing. You read the contract, struck eleven of the twelve clauses, and walked out of the tower like a woman who'd just closed a deal on a mortgage. Callum's attorney is still talking about it. He says he's never seen red ink so enthusiastically deployed."

"I was trained in a hard school."

"What school?"

"Insurance."

"Ah," said Odessa again, with great meaning. "That school."

Win said nothing. Odessa regarded her for a while over the rim of the glass, with that long, assessing, faintly maternal stare, and then set the tumbler down on the glass table with a small precise click.

"I'm going to say something," she said, "that I say to all of them. Most don't hear it. I would like you to."

"Go on."

"Callum Draycott has never kept a woman longer than three months."

"I know."

"You know the rule. Do you know the reason?"

"He gets bored."

"He gets near." Odessa leaned forward. "Everyone assumes the man is cold. He isn't. He's a furnace with the door welded shut. For about eight weeks, a woman holds his attention, and he gets closer, and closer, and then something happens. A look, a word. A sound she makes in her sleep. And he feels it. And he ends it. Quickly, and without a scene, and with a settlement so generous that the lawyers weep." She lifted one shoulder. "Seven women, in eleven years. Not one of them has ever been able to tell me why."

"You think I'm going to be the eighth."

"I think you're going to be the first to see it coming." Odessa's mouth twisted. "Which is not the same as avoiding it."

Win lifted her glass. She turned it once in the light.

"Miss Pell, I appreciate the concern. But you seem to think I have a stake in the outcome."

"Don't you?"

"I have ninety days in a contract."

"And after ninety days?"

After ninety days, thought Win, I shall be so thin that the Mercedes will have to carry me to the opera. She smiled, her old smile, the one that had closed a thousand claim files.

"After ninety days," she said, "I'll be gone."

Odessa Pell looked at her for a very long moment.

"Yes," she said slowly. "I rather think you will."

She finished her drink, collected her gloves, and rose. At the door she turned, with the light behind her, and for an instant she did not look like a broker at all. She looked like a woman who had stood in a great many corridors and been sorry.

"Be careful of the ones who aren't afraid," said Odessa. "They have the least to protect themselves with."

…

Josie called on Sunday.

Win let it ring four times. She was lying on her back on the living-room floor in her silk robe with her legs up the wall, a thing she had read, somewhere, was good for nausea, and the sunlight through the tall windows was making a lattice across the ceiling. She had begun to lie on floors. It seemed to help.

"Hello, you."

"Win." Josie's voice came down the line in a rush of relief so loud that Win held the phone away from her ear. "You answered. You actually answered. Oh my God. Where are you? I've called nine times. I went to the apartment, and the super said you gave notice, and the landlady said you'd paid the whole lease in advance, and the lobby guy said a man with a truck took your sofa—"

"I sold the sofa."

"You sold the sofa?"

"It was a nice sofa. It went for four hundred."

"Win!" A pause. A long indrawn breath. "Are you in a hospital? Are you somewhere you can't tell me? Because I swear to God, if you're doing the thing where you decide to die quietly in a motel to spare everyone, I will find you."

"Josie, I'm in New York."

"New York."

"I'm having a vacation."

"A vacation."

"I'm staying in a very nice apartment. I've seen Tosca. I had lunch at the Carlyle. A man brought me a bellini with a gold leaf on top, and I ate the gold leaf, and I felt nothing."

The line was silent for a moment.

"You're lying," said Josie, in a smaller voice.

"About the bellini?"

"About all of it. I don't know which parts. But you're lying, and I can hear it, because you're doing the voice."

"What voice?"

"The one you used on your mother's insurance company. The very calm one." Her voice cracked. "Win, are you eating? Are you taking the pills? Are you—"

"I'm eating oysters."

"Oysters."

"Belons. Atlantic."

"Is there a man?"

Win closed her eyes.

It was only a second. It was only a flicker, a split-second pause, quick as the click of a lid. But Josie had been her friend since they were nineteen, and Josie had spent six years being lied to by the best liar in the Great Lakes region, and Josie heard it.

"Oh my God," said Josie, in a tone of dawning outrage. "There's a man."

"There is no man."

"There's a man. There's a rich man. You're in New York in a nice apartment having a romance, and you didn't tell me."

"It isn't a romance."

"What is it?"

A contract, thought Win. Nineteen pages, with a clause on the eleventh. "It's a distraction," she said. "I'm spending money, Josie. I'm distracting myself. It's what I wanted."

"Is he nice?"

"No."

"Is he kind?"

Win looked at the lattice of sun on the ceiling. She thought of a bathroom door and a corridor and a man leaning against a wall with his arms crossed, looking at a point past her shoulder. The water in the second bathroom is warmer.

"He doesn't ask me anything," she said at last.

"That's—"

"I know it doesn't sound like much. But Josie, you have no idea." Her voice caught; she cleared it, hard. "Everybody asks. How are you, are you eating, did you call the doctor. I love you, you know I love you. But I've been looked at as a question for six weeks, and he looks at me as if I were a—"

She stopped.

"A what?" said Josie, very gently.

"As if I were a woman," said Win. "That's all. Just that."

Neither of them spoke for a while. Somewhere on the other end of the line a kettle began to whistle, and Josie said, "Hold on," and Win heard the click of the burner and a breath, and then her friend's voice, thick and low and absolutely without humor:

"I'm going to hang up now and cry for ten minutes. Then I'm going to call you back, and you're going to tell me about the gloves."

"They're lilac."

"Of course they are," said Josie, and wept.

…

She went to the opera on Wednesday in the Oscar de la Renta. It was green silk, cut close to the body, with a low back that showed every vertebra, and Anselmo opened the car door for her as if she were a visiting head of state.

Tosca was a mistake. She knew it at the end of the second act, when the heroine killed the policeman with a table knife and sang to his corpse, and the whole house hung in a hush of ecstasy; and Win, in her box, with a glass of champagne untouched in her hand, felt a long slow cold thread of exhaustion unspool down her spine and settle in her knees.

She stayed through the third act by an effort of will. She applauded. She went down the grand staircase on the arm of a man in a white tie whose name she never learned, and he said, "You look radiant," and she said, "Thank you," and went home in the car, and took off the dress, and got into bed, and could not lift her arms.

At two in the morning she woke in a pool of her own sweat, unable to remember where she was.

It was a very short moment. A breath, perhaps. The room was dark and wrong: too large, the windows in the wrong place, a smell of lilies that wasn't hers. She lay rigid in the sheets. Her heart was going like a fist on a door.

Ten, she thought. Nine. Eight.

It came back all at once. The suite, the tower, the contract, the dress on its hanger like a ghost. She lay for a long time looking at the ceiling. When her breathing had slowed, she turned her head and saw the ledger on the nightstand, closed, with the Montblanc lying across it.

She'd lost four pounds in nine days. She knew because she weighed herself every morning on the marble scale in the bathroom, a habit that had begun as research and become something nearer to prayer. Her face in the mirror was getting a little too clean in the cheekbones. Her wrists, in the lilac gloves, had looked like a child's. Soon there would be makeup to cover the yellowing at the whites of her eyes, and a different kind of dress.

She reached for the ledger.

The page under her hand was last night's, half full: Tickets, dress, gloves, Anselmo's tip. Her handwriting got worse toward the bottom. She turned to a fresh sheet, and sat looking at it in the light of the one lamp.

The pen was in her hand. She was tired. She was so tired that for a moment the old structure of her mind, the great grid of columns and sums on which she had balanced her whole life, simply went quiet, the way a building does when the power fails.

In that quiet, she wrote a line.

She hadn't planned it. It was in the same sharp black ink as everything else, in the same upright hand. It sat on the page for exactly as long as it took her to read it.

I want to live.

She looked at the words.

They were not dramatic. They were small and neat and entirely reasonable, the sort of entry an auditor might find in a ledger and pass over, because it did not balance anything. And yet the sight of them on the cream paper did something to her that the biopsy had not, and the car park had not, and the bathroom floor at Halcyon had not. It opened a door in her chest, and through the door came a cold bright tide that she had spent six weeks not allowing in.

I want to live. I want to see how this ends. I want to be somewhere when the sun comes up and have it matter.

She shut her eyes.

When she opened them she drew a firm, straight, savage line through the sentence. The nib tore the paper. The ink bled through to the next page and a little way beyond, and she sat looking at the black bar, and breathing.

Don't, she told herself. You decided. You did the math. You have a calculation, and it's correct, and a woman who changes her mind in the second month is not a woman who did her homework.

The lamp hummed. Outside the window the park lay black and still, and beyond it the lights of the Upper East Side wavered in the heat. A single taxi went down Fifth Avenue with its lamp lit. She watched it until it was gone.

Then she capped the pen, laid the ledger on the nightstand, and turned out the light. She lay in the dark with her eyes open. And on the far side of her mind, so faint she could only hear it by not trying to, a small and stubborn voice said, once, quite clearly:

It's still there, you know. Under the line.