Geddy stayed in touch with Aaron and Jenny more consistently than I did, and it was Geddy who had flagged the first signs of Aaron’s abuse. He had hinted at it back when I was in Vancouver, but it wasn’t until months later that he raised the subject in another phone call.

“He slaps her,” Geddy had said. “Punches her sometimes. Maybe worse things.”

“Really? You’ve seen this?”

“When I was staying with them. I mean, I didn’t see it happen. But some nights I could hear the yelling. And in the morning she might have a bruise. Or she might be walking a little carefully, like something hurt. So I knew. And she knew I knew. She tried to talk about it sometimes.”

Jenny had never been a complainer, but neither had she suffered fools gladly. I asked Geddy why she didn’t go to the police.

“She’s worried Aaron could pull strings and get a complaint shut down. And then it would be even worse for her. But she’s thinking about it.”

One thing I had learned from watching my tranchemates disentangle themselves from their tethers was that these things don’t get better all by themselves. “There are shelters,” I said. “There are people who can help her with legal problems. Geddy, if she wants to talk to me, I’m sure I can set up a secure line. Aaron wouldn’t have to know about it.”

“Okay,” Geddy said. “I’ll tell her that.”

But I didn’t hear from her. And a year later, Geddy said the trouble had been resolved.

“Resolved how? They’re still married, aren’t they?”

“That was part of the deal. Jenny decided she needed evidence, right? So she set up her tablet in the bedroom with the camera recording video. Night after night, until she had all the evidence she needed. Yelling, slapping, grabbing, hair-pulling—Aaron’s a hair-puller, did you know that? Including threats. What he’d do to her if she tried to tell anyone and how he’d bankrupt her if she left him. Because he’s afraid of a public scandal.”

And here was another aspect of Jenny’s personality I had failed to discern: this calculated stoicism, the ability to endure something terrible until she had devised a tool to end it. Twenty-five minutes of video recording, Geddy said, which she had wisely copied and stored in multiple locations. I pictured a thumb drive in a safety-deposit box in some DC bank, an insurance policy by any other name.

But still, she hadn’t divorced him.

“That’s part of the deal. She keeps the video to herself and goes on pretending they’re happily married. In return they lead totally separate lives, separate bedrooms, separate vacations, he pays her a monthly stipend and guarantees payments on her car, things like that. She hardly has to see him, except at public events.”

“Not as good as a clean separation.”

“It’s what she wants, Adam. She feels like it gives her some power over him. She’s saving all the money he gives her, in case he tries something. But he sees other women. What he calls discreet short-term relationships. Which Jenny says means high-priced hookers and bar pickups, basically.”

And that was how things had stood until a couple of months ago, when Jenny herself had called me. She used Geddy’s phone (he was in DC with his band), which meant she distrusted her own phone, which meant the situation with Aaron must have heated up again.

At first I didn’t recognize her voice. Jenny had been a social smoker almost as long as I had known her, but her years with Aaron had ramped it up into a full-blown pack-a-day habit, and her voice was a charcoal drawing of the voice I remembered. It had lost its tentativeness, too. “A while back you told Geddy you’d be willing to help me. Is that right?”

I felt blindsided. “Of course. But I’m not sure—I mean—”

“I know Geddy told you about Aaron and me. So I don’t have to rehash all that business, do I?”

I told her what I knew. “So you had an arrangement with Aaron—I guess something changed?”

“I want to go public,” she said. “I want the video to go viral. But I can’t just post it online. I need legal advice. And I need protection. I thought of you because I know Aaron has been cozy with the Het sodality, and I know Tau isn’t okay with that.”

This was when the Griggs-Haskell bill was being vetted in committee. Damian and other sodality leaders had been looking at how various congressmen were likely to cast votes. Aaron was one of the congressional reps who were firmly in the pocket of the Het lobby. He had benefited considerably from PAC funds we had traced to wealthy Het contributors. So yeah, Tau had an interest in seeing Aaron discredited, if it would affect his vote on Griggs-Haskell. Though I had a fleeting wish Jenny hadn’t pitched it quite so bluntly. Clearly, she wasn’t pinning her hopes on my own refined sense of moral duty.

“I can have a word with some people if you like. Can I ask what changed your mind?”

She paused, then said flatly, “Aaron’s in what I guess you would call a long-term extramarital relationship.”

“And you’re not okay with that?”

“I don’t give a rat’s asshole about Aaron’s affairs. Except … I’ve met this woman. She’s someone perfectly trivial, but she shows up now and then on the cocktail circuit. She’s reasonably good-looking but mousy and timid, which is how Aaron likes ’em. And lately I’ve noticed how she dresses. Long sleeves in summer. How she walks sometimes. I ran into her in a bathroom at the Blue Duck Tavern, putting makeup over what looked like a serious bruise. Doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to add it up.”

“That’s what changed your mind?”

“Well, yeah. Because I thought I had solved a problem. But I had only solved my problem. The real problem is Aaron. He’s still out there, doing what he does. The only difference is that some other woman is feeling the pain.”

“And you want to stop him.”

“I want to paint the word abuser on his fucking forehead. Or as close as I can get.”

Okay: I promised to speak to someone, see whether Tau could help. Then I said, “How are things otherwise? Jesus, Jenny. I haven’t talked to you in a dozen years.”

“Thanks, Adam.” The intensity drained from her voice. “I’m pretty busy, actually. No time to chat. But you can reach me through Geddy when you need to.”

CHAPTER 17

The lights went out all over North America and across much of the rest of the world that evening, but from Schuyler it looked, at least at first, like any other power blackout.

So we did what everyone else does when the lights wink off. Geddy peeked outside and reported that the whole neighborhood was dark, so we knew it was more than a blown fuse. Mama Laura handed me a flashlight from a drawer in the kitchen and sent me to the basement to fetch the emergency candles she kept there. (A years-old box of yahrzeit candles, no doubt from the tiny kosher aisle in the local supermarket. I was sure Mama Laura didn’t know the use for which they were intended, though Rebecca winced when she started lighting them.) Jenny tried to call her mother but reported that her phone was also dead. Mama Laura went upstairs to see if my father was still awake (he was not) and to fetch the battery-operated radio they kept by the bedside.

We gathered in the living room. Geddy put the radio on the coffee table and cranked up the volume. The radio was an old analog model, and the only station we could tune in was a local one. The evening news-and-sports guy was struggling to keep up with the situation: he said the blackout appeared to be continent-wide and that wireless and internet service was disrupted and intermittent. There had been no official statement from the federal government, “that I know of.” He said people should shelter in their homes. He repeated something Aaron had suggested, and which the wire services must have announced shortly before the blackout became complete: telecom and utility problems were probably due to viral malware that had been released in India but had spread uncontrollably. There was still no reliable news from that part of the world, but the last social-media posts from the city of Surat showed “a bright cloud and column of smoke” from the direction of Mumbai more than a hundred miles distant. “But of course that doesn’t prove anything,” the newscaster added.