By the time they returned to New York he’d come down a little bit. He went back in to work on Monday morning, and before he had his coat off Sanford called him into his office and fired him. It was not a cordial scene. “You haven’t looked this young in years,” Adam told him. Sanford gave him until 9:15 to clean out his desk. “I don’t know what you’re planning,” Sanford said, trembling, “but I will find out. You will learn the hard way that you cannot fuck with me. I made you.” Which was funny not just in the sense that Adam had been fucking with him for years with great success but also because the elaborate plan Sanford believed was behind this decision-a plan to start his own fund, a plan to force him out of this one, whatever-didn’t exist, not in any form. Adam had no clue what came next.

When he got back home it was still only about eleven o’clock in the morning and no one else was in the apartment. He sat in the media room and watched TV, scrolling through the channels without stopping. He’d been careful for so long that he felt like doing something especially stupid, something that would finish him off once and for all. But he didn’t. He reminded himself that there were other people involved, people he was bound to protect. Sanford was angry enough to do anything, to look anywhere. He went to the bedroom closet and got the disposable cell phone out of its hiding place inside one of his sneakers.

“I thought we said never during business hours,” Devon said.

“It’s over,” Adam said. “We have to shut it down.”

“What?”

“It’s over starting now. Okay? Nothing for you to worry about.”

“Nothing for me to worry about?” he said, in a kind of strangled whisper. “What the fuck are you talking about? Has somebody found out?”

There was something in his voice. It should have been simple, Adam thought-yesterday is done, it never happened, tomorrow you start over-but he could hear the give in Devon’s voice and knew that his thoughts were turning in a bad direction.

“Listen to me,” Adam said. “It’s just time. Nothing has happened. No one knows anything. We will be fine. And I will take care of you. I will not forget what you and I have put on the line for each other. Understand? Now, you will not hear from me for a while, maybe a long while, but that’s just about being cautious. You have my word that I will not leave you hanging. Our future is still together. We could take each other down, but it’s way preferable for neither of us to go down at all. Preferable and honorable. We’ve done something amazing together. I would never, ever give you up for any reason. And I know that I can count on your loyalty too. Right?”

Even in the silence that wasn’t silence-there was too much noise in the background, phones beeping and keyboards clicking and salesmen screaming and purring-Adam could hear him coming around.

“Right,” Devon said, to himself as much as to Adam. “No snitching. If you say we’ll be fine, we’ll be fine.”

“We will be better than fine. The future is brilliant and I promise you you have a place in it. I won’t leave you hanging. In the meantime get rid of the phone, get rid of everything. Just to be safe. Just don’t look back and when the time is right you will hear from me again. Okay? Eyes forward. Trust me.”

So that was taken care of, he thought. Still, though he had always known how to act boldly in the moment, as the day passed in idleness the idea of his own past opened up in front of him as something threatening and, amazingly, ineradicable. You couldn’t undo it, it didn’t belong to you anymore, and yet it was still there. This was a new one on him. It was just as real-more real, in fact, as each day of unaccustomed inaction went by-as the present, but in another sense it was inviolate, behind glass, where even if you wanted to get rid of it you could not.

He had three different job offers in the first week, as word spread of his firing, but he declined all three and the offers stopped coming, no doubt because people assumed, as Sanford did, that Adam had some plan that had yet to be revealed. He didn’t want to go to work for anyone else. Yet the solitude of sitting at home-even in his bright, high-ceilinged home office, the sky over Central Park like a frame around his computer monitor-wasn’t good for him either. Eventually he figured out that there was one thing that did return him at least temporarily to himself, and that was risk. He took flyers in the market on companies that might turn out to be way undervalued and then watched with a gambler’s intensity to see whether his instincts were correct. There was one memorable afternoon when Cyn went off to a Children’s Aid Society board meeting and by the time she returned and said “How was your day?” he had lost two hundred and thirty thousand dollars of their own money. It was all their own money now. He told her he’d been to the gym, and that was answer enough for her. He felt, as he hadn’t in years, what it was to be loved. He had a strong intuition that he would die without her, that just as any slacking off in his workout routine would surely lead to a rapid and shocking physical decline, so would time spent outside the field of her total belief in him eventually unmoor him from his status as a civilized man.

He saw that Barron’s had a strong sell recommendation on a pharmaceutical stock called Amity. He’d long thought Barron’s fatally unimaginative and decided it would be fun to prove them wrong. He bought ten thousand shares, and a week later sold them again at a net loss of four hundred and eight thousand dollars.

Cynthia had no idea about any of this, and if she had, her concern would have been disproportionate because she had no idea how much money Adam had managed to put away in accounts she knew nothing about. He couldn’t think of a way to justify a solo trip to Anguilla when spring break was less than a month away and so he just had to bite the bullet and wait. He did float the idea that maybe this would be their last trip. He said he was bored with it and had heard about other places he wanted to try, maybe the South Pacific. She believed him. The whole scheme, he reminded himself, had been for her benefit, and in fact it had worked out just the way he hoped it would: he had seen her stuck and unhappy and the thought of it had been too much for him; he had an image of the life he was going to make for all of them and it wasn’t coming fast enough and so he had done what he’d had to do to speed things up, to get them all intact to that place of limitlessness that she so deserved and that he had always had faith they would occupy. It wasn’t about being rich per se. It was about living a big life, a life that was larger than life. Money was just the instrument. He thought about calling someone at Perini just to ask what was new, like say a visit from the SEC, but he decided that was a bad idea.

It was hard, some days, to keep himself stimulated. He shorted Wisconsin Cryogenics International, his old stomping ground, thinking that maybe irony would protect him now. Guy Farbar was long gone: the deal Adam had put together for him had made him a millionaire many times over but then he was fired by his own board for impregnating his secretary. The stock started soaring as soon as Adam picked it up, almost as if it had been waiting for him. He told himself that taking the loss was a smart move in this case because if anyone was looking into his past then this kind of miscalculation was bound to throw them off the trail.

Cynthia said she had something important to talk to him about. After the kids were home and fed and had disappeared downstairs for the evening, she came into his office and sat across the desk from him. Incredibly, what she wanted to discuss was his fortieth birthday-something that was completely off his radar, not because he was in any sort of denial about it but because he had turned forty ten months ago.