Robin paused before she sat down and gave a modest little comic twirl. “It’s really beautiful, Cynthia,” she said. “Thank you again. So, what’s on the agenda today?”

“Hmm,” April said. “Tanning by the pool for a few hours and then eating again?”

“That’s what I love about you,” Robin said. “Always willing to think inside the box.”

“Adam,” Cynthia said as he sat down again, “you’re golfing this morning, right? What time?”

“Nine forty-two,” he said.

“So precise,” Cynthia said. “That’s what I admire about golfing.” Turning toward her son, she caught him artlessly checking out Robin’s breasts again; Jesus, it must suck to be a boy, she thought. Completely pathetic and condemned to know it. “When are you going to initiate young Jonas into the golfing mysteries, anyway?”

Jonas dropped his fork and waved his hands in front of him. “Please, God, no,” he said.

“Maybe someday when he’s done something really horrible,” Adam said. They fell silent as their plates arrived. The shadow of the villa receded over them as the sun rode a little farther up the sky. Adam drained his coffee and held his hand over the cup as Simon moved to fill it again; he excused himself and went to the bedroom to change into shorts and a collared shirt and a baseball cap. He threw his clubs in the back seat of their rental car and drove north on the island’s one highway, past the overgrown lots and the discreet high-end resort entrances and the bright pastel exteriors of houses no one was living in anymore. At one point he waited patiently for some goats to develop the urge to get out of the road. He drove past the golf course and all the way to the little business district in Shoal Bay East, at the island’s northern end. There was a bar there that was open even at ten in the morning; he parked in the shade behind it and walked across the street to the Royal National Bank of Anguilla.

It wasn’t really much of a bank; it looked more like a doctor’s office, with a heavy-lidded fat woman in a tight pink dress sitting at a receptionist’s desk and a closed door behind her with a security camera above it. The woman was not someone Adam had seen before.

“Mr. Bryant?” he asked her. Regally she looked him over and then stood and passed through the door behind her without a word. Adam looked up at the camera. In a few seconds she reappeared and beckoned him through, smiling now as she closed the door behind him.

Mr. Bryant rose from behind an old metal desk and shook Adam’s hand; behind him were two low metal filing cabinets, the paneled wall, and, through a narrow window, the blue marina. “Merry Christmas to you, Mr. Adam,” he said. “You have everything you need?” He meant at the villa. He had absolutely nothing to do with the villa or its operation, but he liked to ask. “You are enjoying yourself?”

“As always,” Adam said.

“Your family is well?”

“Very well. And yours?”

Mr. Bryant nodded in answer, or maybe he was just nodding approvingly at the question. They would never meet each other’s families, but the civilities could not be bypassed, as Adam had learned, when you dealt with Mr. Bryant. Now he unfolded his long-fingered hands, opened his desk drawer, and took out a collection of five checks, all for different amounts, all payable to cash, held together by a paper clip. He removed the paper clip and handed the checks to Adam. Adam looked them over, though not carefully; he folded them in half, put them in the pocket of his shorts, and rose to shake hands a second time.

“My friend says to expect him next around Easter,” Adam said.

“At your service. When do you fly home?”

“Tomorrow.”

Mr. Bryant clucked regretfully. “You’ll miss the regatta,” he said. “Oh well. Duty calls, I am sure.” They shook hands yet again, warmly. Adam never understood why it was so important to Mr. Bryant to treat this like a friendship, but would not have dreamt of offending him either.

He drove back along a different route, taking his time, less for clandestinity’s sake than to catch one last view of the hills of Saint Martin across the water before it got too hazy. It was still only about quarter to eleven, though, and a plausible round of golf had to last three hours at least. So he drove back to the course, went into the pro shop, and bought two large buckets of balls for the driving range. He took the checks out of his pocket and zippered them into one of the compartments of the golf bag before he got started. It was so hot by now that he was the only one out on the range, but he didn’t care. The heat rarely got to him, and the scolding a slight sunburn would earn him would only help cement the question of his whereabouts.

Half an hour later, sweat was pouring off him, but he was absolutely striping the ball, better than he’d hit it in months. He had the driver going a good 280 yards. He was so locked in, he wound up sorry there wasn’t enough time to get out on the course after all.

There was a lunchtime board meeting of the Coalition for Public Schools at some restaurant down in Soho, which by any reasonable standard should have been over by three; but it wasn’t, and when Cynthia couldn’t stand it anymore she rose to excuse herself early, telling everyone she had a doctor’s appointment uptown. She couldn’t make it out the door without ten women stopping her to express the bogus hope that it was nothing serious. On days like this she just had to take a deep breath and remind herself that it was all for a good cause, namely the separation of these aimless gossips from some of their millions, so that those millions could start to do some good in the world. It took up a lot of time. You could just stay at home and write checks, of course, and when Adam had started making serious money that’s all she initially thought she would do; but a big check was wasted on these halfwit dowagers with no idea how to do anything more substantial than send out invitations to a benefit, and before you knew it you were involved. Not just the CPS either; she’d become involved to various degrees with the Riverside Park Fund, the Coalition for the Homeless, and Big Brothers Big Sisters. She did have a rule about staying away from disease charities: there was something about them that just struck her as especially haughty, a blithe tossing of money at the ineffable, like Won’t You Please Join Us in the Fight Against Death. She knew on some level she was wrong about this but obeyed the feeling anyway. She preferred causes that dealt with what might actually be improved, not the hard-to-fathom world of genes and viruses but just the generally fucked-up way in which human institutions worked-homelessness, public schools, Habitat for Humanity, things like that. Anything that improved the lot of children got her money in a heartbeat. “You’re sweet,” Cynthia said, smiling and backing away, “but no, it’s nothing major, just something I scheduled months ago, and you know how hard it is to get in to see these guys.” Which probably left them all thinking that she was going in to get her ass lifted or something, but so what. In truth all she had to do was make a phone call, but it was a private one that had to be made before close of business and she had lost faith that they could wrap up this meeting in time. It was a kind of universal truth in the nonprofit world that everything took at least twice as long as it needed to. She used to have to schedule her shrink appointments for five in the afternoon, because her commitments had grown to the point where that was the only window; but if she had an evening event, as she often did, there were days when seeing the shrink meant not seeing the kids at all, and so she’d finally just quit therapy altogether. No room in her day for it anymore, which was probably the best circumstance for terminating, she thought, and probably why doing so had turned out easier than she’d expected.