He was thirty-two years old and he had more than most people would accumulate in several lifetimes, and on the Tuesday morning that would eventually become the axis around which everything else pivoted, he lay in his bed with the silk sheets pooled around him and felt the specific, sourceless heaviness of a man who has obtained everything he aimed for and is beginning to understand that the aiming was the point.
The company — Avery Capital, a private investment firm that he had built from a modest inheritance and an immoderate appetite for work — occupied the thirty-first floor of a glass tower downtown and employed sixty-three people and managed assets that appeared, in the financial press, as numbers with enough zeros to lose their concreteness. He had built it in eight years, through the sustained application of intelligence and will and the particular willingness to work longer and harder than the people competing with him, which had been, in the beginning, the only genuine advantage he had over them. By the time the other advantages accumulated — the reputation, the network, the compound returns of early success — the work habit was so thoroughly his that he could not have identified where it ended and where he began.
He had not taken a vacation in three years. He had not read a novel in two. He had not, in recent memory, spent an afternoon without an agenda, without a call to return or a decision pending or a problem requiring his particular quality of attention.
He had a fiancée, Sofia Marchetti, who was beautiful in a way that photographed well and who moved through the social world that his success had opened with the ease of someone born to it, which she had been. He had met her at a charity dinner two years into the company’s growth, when he was newly significant enough to be invited to such things and still new enough to find them interesting. She had laughed at something he said and the laugh had seemed genuine and she was very beautiful and he had thought: yes, this is what the life is supposed to include.
Three years later he was less certain about what was genuine and less certain about what the life was supposed to include, and the uncertainty had the specific quality of something that has been sitting at the edge of consciousness for a long time and is beginning to demand to be looked at directly.
He looked at the ceiling. The ceiling was very high and very white and offered nothing.
The bedroom door opened.
Part Two: Sofia
She was wearing the red suit — the one she wore to the meetings she considered important, which were the meetings that involved other people’s assessment of her, which was most of them. She wore it the way she wore most things: as a considered statement, nothing accidental, every element in deliberate coordination with every other element. Her perfume preceded her into the room by a fraction of a second — heavy, expensive, the kind of scent that announces arrival.
“Don’t forget,” she said. “Wedding planner. Today.”
No good morning. No inquiry about how he had slept, which had been badly, which she could not have known because the silk sheets showed no evidence of it. He watched her move to the mirror and assess her reflection with the same thoroughness she had applied to the room — her face as another surface to be correctly managed, any deviation from the intended presentation to be addressed before departure.
He had tried to postpone the wedding planner meeting. The business negotiation he was in the middle of — a complicated acquisition that required his daily presence and that had a closing deadline that was not flexible — had made the previous three weeks a sustained exercise in managing multiple urgent things, and the wedding plans, which Sofia treated as the most urgent thing, could not, from her perspective, wait. The venue had to be confirmed. The caterer had to be decided. The flowers — there was apparently a particular flower, sourced from a particular place, that was only available in certain seasons and required booking well in advance — had to be ordered.
He had offered to have his assistant coordinate. Sofia had looked at him with the expression she produced when he said something she found genuinely incomprehensible.
“It’s our wedding, Daniel.”
“I know what it is.”
“Then act like it.”
He had agreed to attend the meeting. He was going to attend the meeting. He was lying in bed on the morning of the meeting and thinking about all of this when the knock came.
