That was even more difficult to accept. The thing was, I admired Damian Levay. Which hardly made me unique; everyone admired Damian. He was passionate about the Tau community and its welfare—not just our tranche, but the sodality, the entire Affinity. He was smart, wealthy, generous, and ten years my senior. I could hardly blame Amanda for falling in love with him. I was half in love with him myself.

“It is Amanda’s misfortune,” Lisa said, “that she’s attracted to hopelessly heterosexual men. More than once I have seen conflicts like this resolved by a jovial three-way fuck. But I think in this case that’s not an option.”

Trevor had made the same suggestion more bluntly. (“So get over yourself and go to bed with him. Are you completely blind to his hotness?”) But Lisa was right; it wouldn’t have worked. I wasn’t especially proud of my heterosexuality—in our tranche it sometimes seemed like a kind of selective sexual impotence, for which I deserved sympathy and compassion—but I was stuck with it. Born that way, as the old song has it.

“If you continue to cultivate your own unhappiness,” Lisa said, “you and Amanda will end up as—what? Not enemies. We aren’t that sort of people. But just friends. Do you want that?”

“No,” I said.

“Then you have to start living up to your own expectations. And—oh, do you feel that?”

“What?”

“The wind from the window!” The gingham curtains lofted as she spoke. “Rain on the way. You can smell it.” She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. “I do love that smell. Smells like thunder!” As if on cue, there was a distant rumble. “I’m nearly seventy-five years old, Adam, and I still love a summer storm. Is that wrong?”

“Of course not.”

“I sense a kindred soul. You love a storm, too, don’t you?”

I admitted I did.

“But we’re not rivals, are we? Because there’s storm enough for both of us.”

“Ah. The parable of the storm.”

“I’m sorry, was it too obvious?”

“Maybe just obvious enough. You are wise, oh ancient of days. Maybe Amanda’s the one who should be jealous.”

Lisa performed a credible blush. “I love you too, dear. Especially now that you’ve stopped pouting. You’ve finished your tiramisu, so I propose a bottle of wine and chairs in the arboretum. We can watch the lightning together. How does that sound?”

It sounded fine.

That had been four years ago. Since then, Damian and Amanda and I had arrived at a modus vivendi. Amanda would not tolerate us competing for her attention, so we didn’t. And as for my feelings about Damian …

“Lord,” he said, hands on the railing of the cedar deck, staring into the moonlit corridors of the forest, “take this cup from my lips. I’m pretty sure Lisa and Laura would make a better decision than any of us.”

He was a Tau and I loved him as a Tau. But he was as imperfect as the rest of us. Left to his own devices, he would never wear anything but sweat pants and t-shirts. He believed he was a good cook; he was mistaken. He had a laugh that sounded as if someone had stepped on the tail of a small dog. He couldn’t assemble Ikea furniture or operate simple appliances without a friendly intervention. Amanda had once said she loved Damian for his confidence, even when it was misplaced, and she loved me for my doubts, even when they were foolish. In a sense, we were the two sides of Amanda’s own personality. Damian worked on behalf of Tau in a way that echoed the work ethic Amanda had inherited from her family: do what needs doing, and do it selflessly, efficiently, and promptly. I was the other side of that equation, impractical and occasionally impulsive, sometimes usefully creative. Amanda’s personal philosophy veered between Aristotle and Epicurus. No wonder she needed two men in her life.

It was also true that these thoughts were easier to entertain now that she was sleeping in my bed again.

Mist from the drenched forest had begun to condense into a ground fog. The high moon dimmed. I was about to stand up when Damian said, “Did you see that?”

“See what?”

“In the woods. About your nine o’clock.”

I tried to look where he was looking. The trees were still dripping. In the silence I could hear the creak and sway of their branches. I might have glimpsed a moving light in the deep of the woods. But it was gone before I could say a word. “Maybe it’s one of the security guys.”

Damian stepped away from the railing. “We need to ask Gordo,” he said. “And we need to go inside. Right now.”

CHAPTER 10

I went into our bedroom to wake Amanda.

She was asleep on her back, head turned to one side. She wore her hair longer than she used to, but it was still short, a dark halo against the cotton pillowcase. She sighed when I sat on the bed. I called her name.

She opened her eyes and frowned at me. “Adam? What is it?”

“Sorry, but Gordo wants us all in the main room where he can keep an eye on us. Might be some motion outside the house.”

“Oh.” She sat up and fished her blouse off the floor where she had dropped it. “Something moving around, you mean? Like a deer? A bear?”

“Someone carrying a flashlight.”

“Oh. Okay. Yeah. Hand me my jeans.”

In my experience the only thing better than watching Amanda put on her jeans was watching her take them off, but Gordo distracted us by knocking at the door. “Turn off the lights when you come out, okay? I don’t want the whole place lit up like Times Square.”

She finished buttoning up. “I thought we were here to get away from scary strangers.”

“Probably it’s nothing,” I said. “False alarm.”

We found everyone gathered in the main room, looking sleepy and irritable. Gordo had drawn the drapes, and he waited as Amanda and I settled onto the sofa. He had a phone in his hand and a pistol in what looked like a military holster at his hip. Usually it would have been Damian who dominated the gathering, but tonight Damian was just one more endangered Tau. He sat quietly with the rest of us.

Gordo said, “I’ve got three people on the perimeter and they’re watching all the access points. Anybody approaches the house, they’ll see him. That doesn’t mean we’re altogether safe. I’ve got Marcy Britnell on the west side, she says there was what looked like a flashlight in the woods and she’s found fresh footprints tracking past the property on an oblique angle, like somebody was scouting us out. Maybe one set of footprints, maybe more, hard to tell at night on muddy ground. So we’re being careful. I can’t see why anyone would be out there at two in the morning after a rainstorm for innocent purposes, but we can’t rule out a lost hiker or a drunk trying to find his way home. It may seem isolated here but there are plenty of people living closer to the docks, so let’s not draw too many conclusions, okay?”

Good advice—we all nodded sagely—but easier said than done.

Amanda was still sleepy and she snuggled against me. I saw Damian’s eyes linger on us a moment. He didn’t seem jealous but he did look a little frustrated. Or maybe it was just the weight of the responsibilities he had recently shouldered.

It occurred to me to wonder what I might have been doing if Damian hadn’t more or less adopted me a few years ago. Six months after I joined the Rosedale tranche I had been working in Walter Kohler’s ad agency, putting together text and images on an Apple platform and proofreading copy on the side. The job was well paid but was only mildly interesting, and Damian told me I was wasting my time there. “Come work for me. I talked to Walter, and he’s agreeable, if that’s what you want.”

“Work for you doing what?” Back then, Damian’s main business had been his law practice. “I don’t have any legal training.”

He told me he was setting up a Tau-specific pension fund (which would eventually become TauBourse) and devoting some of the profits to pro-bono work on behalf of the Affinities, including petitioning InterAlia for greater transparency in their management of Affinity groups. He had already enlisted all the legal talent he needed, but what he wanted was a cadre of people who understood Tau and who were flexible enough to act in various capacities as needed, from driving cars to conducting research to writing briefs. Gophers, in effect, but we would be described as “consultants.” The drawback was that none of this would exercise my artistic talent.