“We didn’t do enough to celebrate,” she said, “but that’s okay, it’s not too late, it’s technically still the Jubilee Year. I want us to go somewhere. Somewhere amazing, somewhere we’ve never been. I thought about surprising you, but I decided that what I really want is for you to surprise me. Where would you go if you could just go anywhere?”

She was so excited. She looked older than she used to, that was true, and the unfairness of that made him a little sad. He opened his mouth to speak but he felt the catch in his throat and had to close it again. He smiled apologetically. He hoped she’d figure he was too choked up by her thoughtfulness to speak. He hoped she’d figure he was taking a moment to think about it, about where he would go if he could go anywhere. Or that he was sitting there thinking about how much he loved her.

But he watched her get up and shut his office door. “What’s going on?” she said.

He told her everything. Even as he was talking he couldn’t make himself stop trying to think of some way out of saying it, some way to keep her in the dark. Her eyes got very big. When he’d said everything he could think of to say, she started to cry.

“Are they going to find out?” she said. “Are they going to arrest you or something?”

He said that a lot of people liked him on Wall Street and so if someone were looking into him, someone from the SEC or the U.S. Attorney’s office or even just some investigator hired by Sanford, he had to believe he would have heard something about it by now. But it was a possibility, and maybe it would always be. And she should know that if he was ever even charged with anything, their powers were very broad. They might arrest him or they might just seize the money, which in some ways was worse, because they could seize everything they figured the money might have been spent on, including the apartment in which all four of them were sitting right now. She shook her head.

“I don’t give a shit about the money,” she said.

“You don’t?”

“I don’t. I want to ask you something else. It might seem off topic. Have you ever been unfaithful to me?”

And the amazing part was that he understood right away how she had gotten there, how it was part of what they were discussing. He stood up from his chair but kept the desk between them. “No,” he said as gravely as he could. His heart was beating dangerously hard; he put his hand on it. “I never have, and I never would. If I lose you, it’s all over for me. I don’t care if they take everything else away. I honestly don’t.”

She walked around his desk and fit herself against him with her arms around his neck. He was shaking.

“Thank you for not telling me,” she said. “All this time, I mean. What a burden that must have been for you. I know why you did it. I know you did it for us. I’m fucking proud of you, if you want to know the truth. You are a man, Adam. You are a man among men. Let them come after us. They can’t touch us.”

They stood like that until they were in the dark. He felt invincible, like a martyr, like a holy warrior. Why hadn’t he understood it before now? No wrong for him but whatever was wrong in her eyes.

THERE WAS THIS CAFETERIA-STYLE restaurant on South Woodlawn called Mandel’s; in the window underneath the awning hung a small square neon sign that read, SEE YOUR FOOD! Jonas couldn’t get over it. Like only a sucker would agree to pay for food without seeing it first. He added it to a sort of honor roll he kept in his head of ill-advised, unappetizing restaurant names: Hot and Crusty, Something Fishy, A Taste of Greece, a Chinese restaurant he’d once seen from a moving car called Lung Fat, though he wasn’t sure that counted because it was obviously more a translation issue than a case of simple cluelessness. It was a list kept for his own amusement, though whenever he found a new one he couldn’t help mentioning it to Nikki, who understood why Lung Fat was funny but not why it was still just as funny the twentieth time you said it. He just had this strange, campy affection for people and places that tried hard to sell themselves but couldn’t get it right. He even ate at Mandel’s a few times during his first exam week, and thereafter as a kind of exam-week tradition, wanting to do his part to keep them going despite their entrepreneurial tin ear. The food wasn’t terrible. Filling, for damn sure. And you did, in fact, get to see it there on the steam table before you ordered it.

Mandel’s was dirt cheap and near campus and so it wasn’t like other UChicago students didn’t eat there too, but Jonas never told any of his friends about it or invited anyone along with him because he thought it would probably come off as slumming, even though it wasn’t. As if he should have been eating at Morton’s every night, as an undergraduate, just because he could afford to. People had weird ideas about money. Like not spending it was condescending somehow. Like being rich meant acting rich, whatever that entailed, and if you didn’t live the way you could live every moment of the day, you were displaying a kind of reverse pretension. Or trying to pass as normal when you weren’t. He wasn’t trying to pass as anything. It was probably true that he’d been naïve about the degree to which he could reinvent himself by leaving home and going away to school. It wasn’t like he’d changed his name or anything. People started to figure out who he was within about the first week; after that, it wasn’t so much that they treated him differently, it was that they made a great point of not treating him differently. Occasionally someone would want to pick some sort of Marxist fight with him, but it didn’t interest him because he wasn’t even involved enough to feel guilty about it. He and his father had never in their lives had one single conversation about, say, derivatives. It was unthinkable. No one could help what they were born into. You just had to start from zero and not let it determine who you were.

He lived off campus, but not in any great splendor or anything. A lot of undergrads lived off campus, just because the on-campus options were so dismal. When Nikki’s parents came to see the place for the first time, you could tell they were a little puzzled that it wasn’t nicer. Kind of mercenary of them, he mused later-out loud, unfortunately; he and Nikki had a fight over that remark that nearly undid the whole arrangement. She was four years older than Jonas-already in grad school-and he supposed that in the absence of any obvious gold-digging motive, her folks couldn’t figure out what she saw in him. It was pretty disgusting, actually. Not least because they were so pleased to refer to themselves as a couple of old hippies.

He and Nikki met at the Art Institute, though it wasn’t quite as cute as it sounded, since Jonas was there on a field trip. Actually, it was more like an anti-field trip, for a course on Art Brut taught by Lawrence Agnew, a famously charismatic lunatic at UChicago whose intensity Jonas at that point still considered mostly laughable, but with whom he’d since taken three other courses, every undergraduate course Agnew offered. Nikki was a TA in that Art Brut course; he’d seen her before, in the darkened lecture hall where Agnew worked himself into a frenzy over slide projections (the informal record between slide changes was thirty-two minutes), but he’d never spoken to her until that day. She was the subject of a lot of male speculation in that class, with a face made up of perfectly harmonized eccentricities: freckles, an overbite, a mannish brow, long black hair that was never held back in any way, so that whenever she leaned forward to take a note, her face disappeared from view. That day at the Institute was freezing, and her strategy in response was to wear two sweaters and three shirts and a gigantic scarf and no coat. Jonas knew it was fashion at work rather than modesty but still liked to imagine the magnificence of the body that had to be buried under so many layers in order for her to be taken seriously and not incite a museum or lecture hall full of undergraduate boys. Agnew, who was only about five feet six, was lecturing invisibly from the center of a circle of about forty students, in front of a roomful of Monets.