Jenn wrinkled her lips like she’d bitten something foul. Mitch only nodded. “Fine.” He turned to Ian. “But it’s not the three of us.”

“Huh?” Stick-thin and hunched, the man looked like a bird as his glance darted around the table. “What do you mean?”

“You’re a fuck-up, Ian.” Mitch spoke calmly. “I know it’s not your fault. But you are. We can’t trust you.”

“Look at the boss man,” Alex said. He didn’t know why he bothered, what it mattered whether Ian was included or not. It was more the change in Mitch that he was reacting to. “Telling everybody how it is.”

“He’s right,” Jenn said, her voice emotionless. “I’m sorry, Ian.”

“But-” The trader looked around the table, his expression so pathetic Alex had an urge to hug him. “This is stupid. The four of us are best friends. We need each other.”

Mitch shook his head. “Not anymore.”

IN THE CAB ON THE WAY HOME, shaky and alternately scalding and freezing, Ian played a game with himself. Even now, he liked games. The thought made him sick.

This one was called Have You Ever Felt Worse in Your Life.

Round One, eighth grade. All summer he’d bugged his father for a trip to Six Flags, and finally the old man piled him and his best friend, Billy Martin, in the F-150. Dad paid the entrance fee, shaking his head at the price, and Ian had led them straight to the biggest ride in the park, a monster of plunging hills and loops. They’d waited for an hour, listening to the screams, watching people stagger off. At first he’d been giddy. But as they inched forward, a dark, flapping fear had grown in him. It was in the irrevocability, the way the car got higher and higher with no last chance. The terrible pause before it went over, and the screams started.

Then the bored teenager manning the gate had opened it, and they’d walked onto the platform, where the empty car was waiting. People were laughing and jostling, the air sweet with cotton candy and hamburgers, gulls shrieking above.

Just as they reached their seats, he said, “I don’t want to.”

His father had looked at him then with an expression he’d never forgotten, one he saw sometimes late at night. A twisted-lip sort of contempt, and behind it, a thought Ian could read clear as day.

What kind of a pussy am I raising?

“Fine,” his dad had said. “Wait here.” Then he’d turned to Billy, and said, “What about you? You want to?”

And the two of them had climbed into the front seat of the front car like father and son, leaving Ian to stand and watch.

That had been bad. But not as bad as now.

OK, Round Two. Junior year at the University of Tennessee. Madly in love with Gina Scoppetti, a fierce Italian girl with sharp brown eyes and a body that reminded him of his favorite picture in the stolen Penthouse that had held him through his teenage years, the shot of a girl stretched and spread and glistening beside a perfect California pool, a world a million miles from pork rinds and Friday night football. Gina said she loved him too, and they made silly plans and drew on each other with marker and dry-humped till he bled.

Then someone told him that she’d gotten drunk at a fraternity party and ended up blowing three brothers in a back room. He’d confronted her, and she’d cried, said that she didn’t remember, she didn’t think it was true, that she loved him, that she’d been drunk. And he’d wanted to believe her, but thought about the frat boys with their expensive clothes and bright white baseball caps trading high fives as they used her, and he’d started to cry, and called her a whore, and said they were through. It was a month before he found out it hadn’t been Gina, it had been a friend of hers, that Gina had just passed out on a downstairs couch, and he’d begged her to forgive him, said she was the best thing that had ever happened to a kid from Shitsville, Tennessee, and that he would never doubt her again, and she hadn’t even let him in, just shook her head through the crack in the chained door and called him a coward.

That one came close, all the more because then, like now, he was to blame. But as terrible as he’d felt-the racking crying that left him hollowed out, the sense that the world was empty-it didn’t add up to the combination of cocaine shakes and paralyzing horror that he had let down and endangered everyone he loved.

How about the time he’d slipped on the icy steps of the Michigan Avenue staircase down to the Billy Goat Tavern, tumbling half a flight to hit the cement with a sickening crack, the pain vicious as broken glass, his leg broken in two places, cars sliding by, exhaust and the queasy yellow light of the underpass and the sense that he was all alone in a city that wanted to break him?

Nope.

Katz holding a cigar to his nuts?

Nope.

He felt an urge to giggle and retch at the same time. It had been almost four days since he’d had so much as a bump of coke, and he was shocked at the desperate way his every cell seemed to be screaming for it. The sky was a spotlight, white and hot and hard.

Hell with them, he thought. Jenn and Alex and Mitch, Katz and Johnny Love and Victor, his father, his coworkers. Hell with them all.

The cab pulled up to his building, and he paid without counting, just handing over bills and climbing out as the driver said, “Hey, man, you OK?” Slammed the door and went in the lobby and hit the elevator button again and again.

His hands were shaking as he fumbled with the keys, and he dropped them and cursed and kicked the front door hard enough to hurt his toe, then bent and snagged them and jammed them in the lock and twisted and walked into his home.

The air smelled sour, and he remembered vomiting that morning, on his knees in front of the toilet, desperate for a line, not doing one. Lying on his side on the couch, the TV on mute, until the phone had rung, Katz on the end of the line, saying he needed to see him right now. Telling him to come to the Continental.

That Katz had betrayed him didn’t surprise or sting. But his friends? The people he had tried to protect? That they couldn’t even try to understand why he had done what he had, that there had been reasons-

Fuck it.

He strode to the bookshelves, snatched the Montecristo box, opened the lid, and shook out the contents to clatter on the glass table. Habit taking over as he unrolled the baggie of white powder, unzipping it to pour a too-large pile. The razor had bounced to the Oriental carpet, and he stooped for it, then dropped to his knees and began to chop the pile furiously. It was good stuff, already fine, and in half a minute he had broken the few clumps and then divided the pile into four thick rails, each long as the span between thumb and forefinger. Ian transferred the razor to his left hand and took the pre-rolled twenty and leaned forward, one end in his nostril, his body calmer already, the shakes easing as they sensed what was coming, the bitter winter snort of relief. The air-conditioning was on, and he could smell his own sweat as he bent over. The motion reflected off the polished surface, the sunlight glaring oblique through the windows, turning the table into a mirror so that he could see his features ghosted over the powder. Pale and hard-angled, with dark pits instead of eyes. A cadaver with a rolled-up bill jammed up his nose.

It was the most haunting thing he had ever seen. Ian froze, staring down at his own face eight inches away. His fingers palsied on the twenty, and his breath scattered the edges of the cocaine like dust. Every part of him wanting to just take a quick blast, just one, something to ease this feeling, to let him think clearly, to banish the memory of the friends who had betrayed him and the job he had blown and the father who never knew what to do with a son who liked games and the man in the suit saying he would visit that same father and do terrible things to him. If he just did a little his mind would clear, and he wanted it, God, he wanted it, more than he’d ever wanted anything, more than Gina or his father’s love or the thrilling uncertainty of the unturned card, and he hated it, more than he hated even himself, and the two feelings yanked at him, tore into him, made him clench and shake and want to scream, and then he felt a slick burning in his left hand.