Chapter 32

The jet was small and elegant. Eight cream leather seats. The kind of aircraft that existed to move wealthy people between places. Quinn had never been on a private plane. In fact he had only been on two flights, to Spokane for the Canadian summer and back.

The girls boarded ahead of him, making the sounds of people encountering something that exceeded their expectations. Katherine's world was comfortable and well-resourced. She was accustomed to quality; even she had an oh of genuine surprise. Sheila stopped at the top of the stairs. She quickly turned around and looked at Quinn with a raw, unbelieving expression.

How the fuck are we here?

He held her gaze for a moment then grinned a grin of acknowledgment. This day was a long way from the Abernethy house.

The flight attendant offered mimosas, which the girls accepted with giggles. Quinn asked for water, which the attendant instantly produced.

He sat in last of the cabin, a choice made quickly for his usual reasons. orientation.

Canada had done something to his ability to sit in enclosed spaces. Three months of open country had recalibrated him. The wilderness had been vast and indifferent and occasionally hostile, but he had learned to love it. The return to civilization felt different than it had before: noisier, denser.

He was still processing.

He sipped his water and watched the girls settle into the forward seats. Keiko was by a window, bringing her alert, interested attention to new experiences. Katherine was across from her, taking photographs of the interior with her phone. Sheila sat her legs crossed, holding the champagne flute with the pretend ease of a girl who had decided she was born to this.

He watched the pilot and co-pilot board; both of them had the matter-of-fact air of professional aviators. The flight attendant, whose name was Claire, was efficient and friendly.

The engine sound changed, and the plane began to move.

He gripped the armrest. He would not have said he was afraid, exactly. More like uncomfortable. Out of control. He was cargo. This was unfamiliar and entirely uncomfortable.

He breathed in and out. Outside, the tarmac moved past, the plane turned, and the engines committed; then suddenly they were airborne.

He looked at the window until the altitude made the ground abstract, then he glanced over at the girls.

Sheila was watching him. She had turned in her seat and was looking at him with the full, private thing they shared--not the theatrical face, the serious one she used when she was actually trying to read him.

She raised her champagne flute fractionally. A small toast--just between them, just for this.

He raised his water bottle.

He breathed some more and somewhere over Nevada, he relaxed and slept.

When they arrived and disembarked, he had a moment of anxiety looking around for some clue that Keiko's security was there to meet them. A Japanese woman came into view, caught his eye and ever so slightly nodded, then disappeared into the crowd.

Okay then.

The gilded age façade of The Plaza Hotel in the late afternoon light was impressive. Central Park on the other side was doing its thing with the horse carriages at the corner.

Welcome to New York.

The suite was on the ninth floor, with a view of Central Park.

Katherine stood at the window and looked at the park for a moment before she said anything, and when she spoke, it was the quiet of someone genuinely moved. "I've been to New York four times; I've never seen it like this."

Sheila was examining everything--the bathroom, the second bedroom, the sitting room's details, the quality of the furniture, touching things with the intention of someone cataloging a memory. She opened the minibar, looked at it, and closed it. She stood on the small balcony and looked at the park and the city, took a theatrical deep breath, then came back in.

She didn't speak. The message was there without the words.

Keiko stood in the sitting room with her bag over one shoulder and looked at the space with the evaluating eye of someone who had stayed in places like this often. "It's beautiful," she said simply, which from Keiko was the complete review.

Quinn had gone to his room, across the hall, a standard room by the Plaza's standards, which was still remarkable. He came back and knocked on their door.

"Dinner at five, ladies. Keiko's Japanese restaurant. Dress appropriately."

Sheila appeared in the doorway. "Dress appropriately," she said, in that voice. "He says dress appropriately, as if we've never--"

"You have three hours," Quinn said. "I'll be in my room."

"Are you going to sleep?"

"Gonna work," he said.

Quinn went to his room and lay on the bed with Emerson's Self Reliance. The wonder of the no-time experience was still on his mind. This was the fifth time reading it and he still found new things. He made notes to discuss with the Colonel when he got home.

He read until five, took a shower, and then dressed.

The restaurant Keiko's father had named was on West 47th Street. It was small and understated. The interior projected calm, the lighting chosen to make a meal a ceremony. The maître d' recognized the Consul's name, which opened a further door in the restaurant's hospitality.

They were seated at a low table in a private alcove, a configuration that felt both intimate and formal at the same time.

Quinn wore his dark suit. Katherine was in something dark green that was exactly right. Sheila looked theatrical in the best sense, her clothes as character, worn with complete conviction. Keiko was in a dress that was clearly Japanese in its aesthetic. She looked elegant and completely at home.

The kaiseki meal was a once-in-a-lifetime, highly refined five-hour dining experience. Keiko took the role of hostess. She poured each of them green tea. As the first course arrived, small, exquisite servings of different colored vegetables and rice, Keiko explained how the colors of the arrangement told the story of the seasons' change.

Quinn ate it with the focused attention he brought to new things.

Katherine said, after the second course, quietly, "This is unlike anything I've eaten."

"Yes," Quinn said.

"It's like each thing is a complete thought, and the thoughts are in conversation with each other."

Keiko was eating with a different quality than they were. She had the sophistication to appreciate the experience. She did the best she could to explain while giving the meal the attention it deserved.

Sheila, who had approached the meal with the theatrical enthusiasm she brought to everything these days, had gone quiet by the fourth course. She was eating with both hands in her lap between bites, her version of reverence.

"I want to tell you all something," Quinn said between courses.

They looked at him.

"I planned this trip in Canada. In the seventh week. I was on one of my solo sections, paddling across a lake at dawn. The scene was so utterly and absolutely beautiful that I wanted to share it, you know. But I was alone. That's when I missed you three the most. That's when I planned this because I wanted to give you something that tells what your friendship means to me."

The table was quiet.

Katherine looked at him with soft eyes. "Thank you," she said.

Keiko said, in Japanese, something brief and quiet that he caught most of and which was, he understood, the more formal and therefore more sincere register for gratitude in her language, the kind you used when the ordinary word wasn't sufficient.

Sheila looked at the table for a moment. When she looked up, her eyes were glimmering in the way they got when she was holding a feeling that was too large for words.

"We were lonely for you too."

The fifth course arrived. The meal continued.

The next two days were shopping.

Katherine approached this with organized efficiency. She had a list. The list had been developing since the ice cream store.

He carried bags. He performed the service good-naturedly with only mild complaints. Three girls in New York on a spree: one navigating by list, one approaching each store as if it were a theatrical experience, and one making precise, considered selections with the eye of someone who understands quality before price and him carrying the plunder.

He did find time for his own shopping: two bookstores and a military surplus store that he had identified before the trip.

Lunches were at a diner on 57th Street that Katherine had been to with her aunt. Sheila ordered from the breakfast menu despite it being one-thirty in the afternoon.

The three girls chattered away about everything: free associative, following the energy, moving from the stores to the restaurant to the city itself, and back to the shopping experience, then sideways to something Keiko had seen from the window of a cab. Quinn sat in the middle of it with his coffee and basked in the feeling of being exactly where he wanted to be.

Saturday after lunch, Keiko took him aside briefly while Katherine and Sheila consulted over a map of the afternoon's remaining stops.

"My father will ask me about this trip. I'll tell him about the restaurant. He'll appreciate that you remembered."

Quinn said. "He told me it was important to you."

Keiko looked at him with mischief present and something warm underneath.

"Thank you."

Saturday evening was Hamilton.

They walked to the theater. Manhattan at night, with all the lights and noise.

Sheila was quiet. She walked beside Quinn, hooking her arm in his. He could feel the quality of her anticipation.

They found their seats. Quinn had gotten them in the orchestra, central--the position where the stage was fully visible.

The lights went down.

He found himself watching Sheila more than the play.

She was utterly still. Sheila, who processed the world through motion, voice, and theatrics, sat with her hands in her lap and her eyes on the stage.

At intermission, she did not say anything for a long time. Then she said, "I want to do this."

Quinn looked at her.

"This thing," she said. "Not this show. This..." She gestured at the stage, at the theater, at the combination of music, language, and human beings telling a story with everything they had. "I want to do this for a living."

"You already knew that," Katherine said gently.

"I knew I liked theater," Sheila said. "I didn't know I wanted this. The whole thing." She looked at the stage. "I know now."

"Then do it," he said.

She looked at him. "Just like that?"

"Just like that," he said. "You'll be good at it. You take the tiny steps one by one to get here. You just saw what it can be. So do it."

Sheila found herself caught up in his gaze, in the spell of his sureness.

When the lights dimmed for the second act, she turned back to the stage and was completely still again.

Sunday was Central Park.

His idea, offered at breakfast in the Plaza's restaurant. He said, "Central Park. All day. We'll take a carriage ride and then wander. No plan."

Katherine received "no plan" with the expression of someone being asked to navigate without a compass. Then she looked out the window at the park and said, "Okay."

They walked with phones in hand for pictures. The park in September was wonderful. It contained New York: the serious runners, the tourists, the families, and the people simply being in it, all of them together in the green.

They rented a rowboat at the Loeb Boathouse. Quinn rowed while the others sat and took selfies until Sheila decided she could row better, took the oars, and proved that she could not. Thier laughter that echoed off the water.

They ate hot dogs from a cart, which Katherine photographed. They sat on a hill and looked at the skyline. Sheila lay back in the grass and looked at the sky, and Quinn sat beside her with his arms around his knees.

"You know what I keep thinking about," Sheila murmered.

"What?"

"The Abernethy house," she said. "How far it is from here. In miles and time and in everything else."

He looked at the sky. "Yes," he said.

"We made it out," she said. No performance, no theater, just plain fact of it.

"Yeah, we did."

She was quiet for a moment. "I used to think about you," she said. "After they separated us. Wonder where you were. Whether you were okay."

"I thought about you too," he said.

"Were you okay?"

He thought about the question honestly. About the parking structure and the chess games and the river on Mercer Street and the year of managing alone. "Some of the time," he said. "Mostly I managed."

"Yeah. Me too." She paused. "I'm so glad you're okay now."

After dinner that night, they took a carriage ride, the horse clip-clopping along in the night. Central Park with its lights looked like a fairyland.

Sheila was imagining herself in a rom-com and told the others the plot, the happily-ever-after ending.

Monday morning as the plane lifted off from Teterboro and turned west into the clear September air. Quinn sat quietly in the rear, thinking about the trip and matching it with the plan that had come from that morning on a Canadian lake.

The girls were quieter than on the outbound flight. The quiet of people carrying a memory they didn't want to jostle.

Sheila slept in the forward seat, a faint smile on her face.

Katherine looked out her window at the country below, and Quinn could see from the back of the plane that she was thinking carefully about something.

Keiko read.

At one point in the middle hours of the flight, Katherine turned and looked at him. She said quietly, across the cabin, "Thank you, Quinn. For this memory."

He looked at her. "You are welcome. Always."

She turned back to her window.

Below them, the country unscrolled westward.

He was, he thought, going to remember this weekend for a very long time.

Chapter 33

The final bill for the trip was going to be substantial. Quinn had planned for it, but now he had to figure out a way to pay for it. It never occurred to him to leave it up to the Colonel. The New York weekend had cost what it had cost. It was worth it. Now the cost was his responsibility. It needed to be addressed.

You always pay for what you get.

He asked to talk to the Colonel on a Thursday evening, the one night of the week when his attention was available for household matters.

He laid it out: the credit card bill, the need to address it, the request for help finding work that was worth doing.

The Colonel listened with his usual calm attention.

"Money," he said finally. "You haven't had the money education yet."

"No, sir," Quinn said. "It's been on the list."

He looked at Quinn. "Excellent, this is the perfect time. Now you have a reason to understand that money isn't abstract."

He picked up the phone.

Simon Falcutta's office was on the fourteenth floor of a building on California Street. The name on the wall was plain: FALCUTTA & ALLCOT. Quinn guessed they figured the name was sufficient, which was telling information about the people behind the name.

After school, he had dropped the girls off at their respective homes, continued downtown, found parking, and walked down California Street, looking around with the alertness he exercised in new environments. He entered the office exactly at 4:30.

The lobby looked less like a corporate office and more like a quiet living room that had accidentally been dropped into a commercial building.

The receptionist, a woman with silver-streaked hair gathered into a soft bun, sat behind a dark oak desk that was nearly buried under a sprawling collection of framed photographs of children in soccer uniforms and baseball uniforms and babies in sun hats. She looked up as the heavy glass door clicked shut behind him. She was knitting on a big piece of dark green material, her needles clicking a steady, domestic rhythm that competed with the soft hum of the air conditioning.

"Hi, I'm Quinn Norman," he said. "I have an appointment with Mr. Falcutta."

She made a call. A brief exchange in a low voice.

"He'll be right out, honey." She gave him a mischievous wink and stage whispered, "His bark is worse than his bite."

Simon Falcutta was short and broadly built in the way of men who were once substantial and have reduced with age. He had white hair worn short and eyes that were dark and smart behind reading glasses that were perched on his nose.

He looked at Quinn for five seconds.

"You the Colonel's kid?" he said.

"His nephew," Quinn said.

"Huh." He turned and walked back into the office. "Well, come on back."

His partner, Brady Allcot, was sixty-eight, and where Simon was broad, Brady was thin; where Simon was loud, Brady was dry; where Simon expressed his opinions at volume, Brady possessed a sharpened cynicism from four decades of watching human beings make stupid mistakes because they were helplessly greedy.

He was at his desk when Simon brought Quinn in. He looked up from what he was reading with an alert expression.

He said, "what are you, sixteen or seventeen?'"

"Sixteen, sir," Quinn said.

"You need a job and an education as well, I hear."

"Yes, sir."

Brady Allcot looked at him for a moment. "Why?"

"I have a credit card I need to pay off. Plus I need to learn about money."

Brady looked at Simon, then looked back at Quinn.

"Sit down."

The job was what they called a general dogsbody, which was a term Quinn had to look up. He was to do what needs doing.

He cleaned. He filed. He made coffee and learned that Simon had strong opinions about what it should taste like. He ran documents to and from other offices in the financial district, which gave him a pretty good working knowledge of the district by the end of the first month.

He drove Simon and Brady to meetings and lunches in Brady's grey Bentley. Occasionally, they let him sit in then and quizzed him afterward on his impressions of the people involved.

This was the part he had not expected. It told him that they trusted him and were taking his training seriously.

The office had three analysts: Issak, a thin man who had been with them for years; a Greek guy named Nickolas who was twenty-eight and had the satisfaction of a person who was smart and had found a]his place in life. A black man named Reeves, who was thirty-five and had the narrow eyed belief that everybody was out to screw them him.

Quinn cleaned their office. He listened seldom speaking except to ask a question. Gradually they responded and he learned the markets in a patchwork kind of way, the information arriving and posing questions that he carefully wrote down to discuss on Thursday evenings when the two partners would sip whiskey, smoke cigars, and lecture him.

He hadn't expected this. The lectures had started in his third week. Simon had been at his desk and said, without preamble, "Come here."

When Quinn went in, Simon showed him a chart of an investment returns over a twenty-year period. He asked, "What do you see?"

Quinn had looked at it and described the pattern he saw but had not yet fully interpreted it.

Simon had interpreted it for forty-five minutes, without notes, with the authority of a man who has lived inside this material for years and has developed convictions that fit observed facts.

Quinn had listened with disciplined attention he had learned at the Colonel's dinner table, attention that received, filed, and questioned.

At the end, Simon said, "Same time next week. Read this before you come." He handed Quinn a book.

Security Analysis. Graham and Dodd.

Quinn had read it in four days and came back with a notebook full of questions.

Simon had looked at the notebook. He had looked at Quinn. He called out, "Brady," in the direction of the inner office.

Brady had come out with his coffee.

The Thursday evenings became a standing arrangement. The two old men and Quinn in the office after the analysts had gone, the city going dark outside. The two partners took money as a subject of study rather than as an object of desire.

They had a mantra.

Money is a tool. That's all it is.

Simon said it with emphasis. "People confuse the tool for the purpose. A hammer doesn't build a house. A person builds a house with a hammer. Money doesn't make a life. You make a life with money if you understand what it's for." He pointed at Quinn. "What's it for?"

"Whatever you decide it's for," Quinn responded.

Simon looked at Brady.

"Tell me more," Simon said.

"People who don't decide deliberately what money is for, end up serving it. Instead of the other way around. The tool runs the craftsman."

"Where'd you get that?" Brady said.

"You guys two weeks ago," Quinn said.

The corner of Brady's mouth moved.

The accounting class was Simon's idea.

He announced it one Thursay with the flat authority of someone communicating a decision rather than making a proposal. "Next summer at Stanford. Financial Accounting. I signed you up. It's a five-credit course; class meets at 5:00."

Quinn looked at him. "I'm still in high school."

"So what?" he said. "I've arranged it. The Colonel has approved it. You'll take it."

"Why accounting?"

Simon looked at him with dark eyes that assessed continuously. "Because accounting is the language of money. If you want to understand our work, you've got to learn the language first."

Brady looked at him. "The financial statements of a Japanese company will look like to the financial statements of a French company or an American company. The language of accounting is universal."

Quinn thought about this. "Okay".

The Ponzi scheme lectures were Brady's domain. He had an ongoing fascination with the anatomy of greed, like a doctor is interested in disease.

He kept a drawer full of manila folders that he had been maintaining for years that documented the history of financial fraud. Each case was annotated in Brady's small, precise handwriting with an analysis of the operation.

He showed Quinn a file on a Thursday in November.

"Ponzi," he said, "1920. The original. He took advantage of one simple thing: the difference between what people expected and what they understood." He looked at Quinn. "Can you tell me the difference?"

"Expected is emotional," Quinn said. "Understood is structural. You can expect something to be true without understanding why it would be true."

Brady nodded. "Not bad. Ponzi knew that the promised return was what people heard, not the mechanism. They rarely asked about the mechanism because the expected number was just large enough to make the mechanism feel like a detail."

"The detail is the whole thing," Quinn said.

"The detail is always the whole thing," Brady said. "Every fraud in this file runs on the same principle. The return number is carefully designed to prevent questions." He turned to another section. "Madoff. 2008. Sixty-five billion dollars. Running for how long before the collapse?"

Quinn had read about Madoff. "Decades, I think," he said.

"Decades," Brady confirmed. "Because the returns were large enough to be attractive but not so large as to be implausible. He too understood the number that stopped the questions. Too low, and nobody cares. Too high, and the smart money gets nervous, and rumors start. He found the perfect middle."

He closed the file. "What does that tell you?"

Quinn looked at the file. "That fraud is designed around the victim's psychology rather than the financial reality. He was modeling human response, not investment performance."

"Exactly."

"So you're saying that understanding fraud is all about psychology," Quinn said. "Not accounting."

"It's both," Brady said. "The accounting is how you find the gap between what's claimed and what's real. The psychology is how you understand why the gap wasn't found sooner. Accounting is the tool."

Simon's version of education was different from Brady's in the way their minds were different--where Brady analyzed forensically, Simon synthesized historically.

Simon had been in the market since 1965. He had seen that business cycles repeated with variations. The only difference was the costumes they wore. The markets of the sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, and the two thousands were each distinct on the surface and identical in their underlying human content.

He told Quinn about these cycles on Thursday evenings with the vivid recall of someone who had lived through them. He spoke about the oil crisis and the inflation of the seventies and eighties with the slightly complicated feelings of someone who had done well in a period when a whole lot of others suffered.

"Bull markets gradually make people stupid. Their confidence tends to grow beyond what the evidence supports. The market goes up for long time and people stop asking why. They assume the up is the way things are, rather than a cyclical phenomenon."

Quinn looked at him, "Assuming that I'm no smarter than they are. How do I keep from doing that?"

"You must ask why constantly," Simon said. "Even when things are going well. Especially when things are going well."

Brady took a puff of his cigar, "Especially when things are going well. Because when things are going badly, everyone wants to know why. The market is full of analysts asking why in a down cycle. Our edge is asking why in the up cycle when nobody else is." He pointed her cigar at Quinn. "The Colonel knows this. It's why he's still on our client list after thirty years."

Quinn thought about the Colonel's margin note in the Tocqueville book: What has changed since the first reading? Always asking. Even when the text was good, even when the understanding was comfortable, the question kept him moving.

Maria kept his dinner warm. He would work until eight or nine, the office going quiet around him after the analysts left and then going quieter still when Brady collected his coat and said good night. On his way out, Simon, who stayed the latest, was busy in his office until Quinn came to the door and said good night. Simon would look up from whatever he was reading and seem surprised to find it was night.

Sometimes she was there, waiting for him.

"Those old men tell you money is a tool," she said one night in February, watching him eat.

"Yes," he said.

"They're right," she said. "But they're right from the position of people who have had enough of it for long enough that the tool is not survival." She held her tea. "When the tool is survival, when you don't have enough of it and you need it to stay alive, it's harder to think of it as only a tool. It feels like survival because it is survival."

Quinn looked at her.

"I want you to know both things," she said. "What Simon and Brady know and what my mother knew. Because you came from the place where money is survival and you're going to a place where money is a tool. The people in that place will not know what the other version feels like." She paused. "That knowledge is worth something. Don't lose it in your new place."

He thought about that.

He wrote it in the notebook that night at the kitchen table after she'd gone up: Two worlds. The one where money is survival and the one where money is a tool. The first produces a knowledge the second can't teach. Both are real.

Chapter 34

The rhythms of his junior year established themselves by October and held through the year.

School in the morning. The Jeep to Keiko's gate, then Sheila's porch, then Katherine's door. The drive had become its own small daily ceremony. Sheila in the front because she always called it, the other two in the back, the conversation running on yesterday's dramas.

School required the maintenance level of his attention and left the rest for other things.

After school, the Jeep journey in reverse -- Katherine, Sheila, Keiko, each deposited at their door. Then downtown. California Street. The fourteenth floor.

Work until eight or nine. Then his dinner that Maria kept warm for him.

The girls were doing their own thing. Exploring new experiences, which he watched with interest.

Katherine had run for junior class president in October. She did it with the organized efficiency that she applied to all her projects.

Her campaign had been the new version of herself, not merely relying on the social position she already held. That surprised some kids who expected her to go the popular girl's route to a popularity contest. She'd had well-thought-out positions on things that mattered to kids. She won by fourteen points, which was larger than the margin anyone had predicted and way smaller than Quinn had.

He'd told her, the evening after the election: "Fourteen points."

She looked at him across the lunch table. "You thought it would be more?"

"I thought it would be way more," he said.

"Because?"

"Because you're better at this than people know," he said.

She'd been quiet for a moment. "The honor society is less interesting than the presidency," she said. "But my father wanted me to do it. so it's on my list. These days I don't do things halfway."

"I know," Quinn said. "That's one of your better qualities."

She threw a napkin at him. "One of?"

"You have several."

"Name them."

"Nah, you already know them," he said.

She looked at him for a moment and then laughed, "You are so annoying."

Sheila's second play was Antigone. She was the lead, not by accident. She'd spent two weeks researching the production history before auditions and had arrived with an idea about Antigone that she'd developed.

That pleased Ms. Favreau, the drama director, to no end. Encountering unexpected depth in a student she'd already assessed as talented was one of her deepest pleasures.

Sheila talked about it at lunch before her audition.

"Antigone dies for a principle," Sheila said. "She knows she's going to die and she does it anyway. Most people read it as tragedy." She looked at her lunch. "I don't think it's tragedy."

"What is it?" Katherine asked.

"It's clarity," Sheila said. "She's the smartest person in the play. She knows exactly what she values, and she doesn't compromise. The consequence is that she dies, but the clarity is not the tragedy. The tragedy is everyone else."

She looked at Quinn. "Sound right?"

"Yeah, that Creon thinks he's being rational," he said. "He's actually being rigid. There's a confusion between consistency and correctness -- he keeps doing the wrong thing because he's committed to consistency. Antigone makes one decision and holds it. Creon makes a decision and can't let it be wrong." He paused. "You're right that it's not tragedy for Antigone. It's tragedy for Creon."

Sheila pointed at him. "That's what I'm going to make the audience feel," she said. "That when she dies it's not -- it shouldn't produce the feeling of waste. It should produce the feeling of completion."

Keiko had been listening. "In Noh theater," she said, "the moment of death is not the emotional peak. The emotional peak is the moment of decision. After the decision, everything that follows is simply the completion of what was already fully expressed."

Sheila looked at Keiko. "That's exactly it."

The play ran three nights in February. Quinn attended all three nights, the second night with Peter, James, and Will, and watched Sheila be Antigone with the full commitment of a person who has done the interior work and arrives on stage already to show the truth of the thing.

She was very good. She was better than very good. She had the thing that made an audience sit forward.

He told her this afterward, backstage, after giving her a big hug.

"Thanks," she said, watching his face.

"Yeah," he said.

They stood backstage in the smell of stage makeup and old curtains. She looked at him with the full reading for a moment.

"Theater school," she said. "After this."

"Yes," he said.

"My parents are going to want college first."

"Your parents are reasonable people who want good things for you," Quinn said. "Talk to them. Bring them evidence. You have evidence."

She looked at the stage behind him. "What if -- " She stopped.

"What?"

"What if I'm only good here," she said. "In this school, where I know everyone and they know me. What if I go somewhere real and I'm just -- " She didn't finish.

"You know what Taylor told me in Canada," he said.

She looked at him.

"He said, 'The country taught you'." Quinn looked at her steadily. "The stage is going to teach you. Every stage, every city, every production. You're not finished being taught. You're just ready to start your education."

Sheila held his gaze for a long moment.

Then she hugged him again. "Okay," she said into his shoulder.

"Okay," he said.

Keiko's basketball was a revelation to everyone who hadn't been paying attention. When the girls' basketball season started, Keiko, who had been playing since she was eight, was outstanding.

Her coach was a woman named Torres who had played collegiate ball at UCLA. She had watched Keiko for twenty minutes at the first tryout and made a decision that she was going to be a starter.

Keiko was a guard. She was five-foot-four and the fastest player on the floor. She'd had years of good coaching.

Quinn watched the first home game from the bleachers with Sheila and Katherine.

In the second quarter, Keiko came off a screen, received the ball at the wing, pump-faked her defender into the air, took one dribble left, and threw a perfect pass through traffic to the post player for an easy layup. The whole sequence took seconds.

"Holy shit, our girl is really good," Katherine said.

"She never said anything," Sheila said.

"No," Quinn said. "She wouldn't."

Keiko, on the court, was in the zone. She looked different on the court than she looked anywhere else. Not the diplomat's daughter, not the precise, measured girl managing the cultural gap. Just herself, moving at full speed in a game that she loved.

Quin thought: everyone has a place where they're most themselves. That's hers.

After the game, a twelve-point win, Keiko, with sixteen points and nine assists, they waited for her in the hallway outside the locker room. She came out with a huge smile, flushed with happiness.

"Holy shit, you can play b-ball," Sheila said.

"I've been playing since I was eight," Keiko said.

"You could have mentioned it," Katherine said.

Keiko looked at her with mischief present. "You could have asked," she said.

Katherine opened her mouth and closed it. "Fair," she said.

Keiko looked at Quinn. He raised his hand at the height she'd released her last three-pointer from.

She laughed the tinkling laugh.

Quinn's Saturday cooking lessons had become their own thing.

They had started with bread, which Maria had said would teach him everything. The patience it required had established the methodology for everything after.

They had moved through Maria's repertoire with sequential logic: foundation first, then building. The tortilla soup had been the third lesson, after bread and stock, because Maria had said you could not make tortilla soup without understanding stock first.

He'd made it three times before she was satisfied.

By November, Maria's family had started arriving on lesson day. Her sister Carmen had come first, ostensibly to give Quinn another haircut, but she stayed for the cooking. She had opinions about the preparation of the chiles that had produced a furious argument in Spanish between her and Maria.

Carmen came back the following Saturday and brought her daughter, who was twenty-two and worked in a restaurant in the Mission. Connie showed him some professional braising techniques. Then Maria's cousin Esperanza, who made tamales that Quinn had been eating at Maria's table for two years, taught him how to make them.

They treated him as a member of the family. He was expected to contribute, to have opinions, and to fight for them the way the others did.

Maria oversaw this all with obvious pride in her boy.

Carmen's husband, Eduardo, appeared one Saturday in February. He looked at Quinn's pride and joy, a smoker, an offset horizontal that Quinn had bought with his own money in November. He had installed it in the back garden with Sullivan's assistance.

"You season it?" he said.

"Yes, sir," Quinn said. "Three times."

Eduardo crouched and looked at the firebox. He stood and looked at the cooking chamber. He said, "Who told you three times?"

"The manufacturer. And the internet."

Eduardo looked at him with a frown. "The manufacturer sells smokers. The internet has lots of opinions. What does the metal tell you?"

Quinn looked at the smoker.

"It still smells a little like new metal," he said.

"Season it again," Eduardo said. "Then we cook."

This was the beginning of his BBQ education. Eduardo arrived on alternating Saturdays; he patiently showed Quinn grilling and smoking tips and tricks.

"Low and slow," he said. On the first real cooking Saturday, the brisket went in at nine in the morning for a twelve-hour cook. "The collagen breaks down at around one ninety, one ninety-five. Don't try to force it. The fire wants to run hot because that's the nature of fire. Your job is to control the fire like you would a wild horse."

Quinn tended the fire through the morning with the attention Eduardo required. He adjusted the vents based on the temperature and the smoke quality. He added wood at the intervals Eduardo had shown him, using the oak that Eduardo brought. "The wood selection is as important as the meat."

By afternoon, the brisket smelled wonderful.

By evening, when Eduardo probed it and the probe went in with the resistance of perfection -- like butter, not air, not board, butter. When Quinn sliced it, he found it melt-in-your-mouth perfect.

Chapter 35

One night at twelve-thirty on a Saturday night, his phone rang. Quinn was in his room at his desk working through one of the Colonel's assignments. He looked at the screen. Katherine.

He answered.

She was crying. "Quinn, would you come get me?" She was drunk and incoherent. Loud music in the background from a party.

"Where are you?" he said.

She mumbled an address in Pacific Heights.

"Fifteen minutes," he said. "Stay where you are. Outside or inside?"

"Outside," she said. "I'm outside."

"Good. Stay outside. I'll come find you."

He hurriedly got dressed and was in his jeep pulling out of the drive in minutes.

He found her on the front steps of a house whose party was audible from the street. She made a lonely figure sitting on the top step with her knees up and her arms around them. Her eye makeup had run, giving her a raccoon face. She had her phone in one hand and her shoes in the other.

He sat on the step beside her.

He did not say anything. He'd learned, from knowing her for the better part of two years, that the best response to visible distress was presence rather than questions.

She leaned against his shoulder.

"Hi," she mumbled. After a long while, she mumbled again, "He said I was a bitch. That I was fake."

She drifted off. Her eyes closed.

Quinn held still. He thought about what he knew about the boyfriend--a senior named Fredrick, entitled, a typical rich kid.

"Did he harm you? Mess with you?"

"No, he was just an asshole. I think I'm gonna be sick." She staggered to her feet and vomited in the flowerbeds.

"Okay, let's get you home and tucked into your bed."

She could barely walk, so he picked her up and carried her to the Jeep.

They stopped twice on the way so she could be sick. He pulled over and held her hair while she threw up.

By the second stop, she was laughing a little between the misery.

"This is so fuckin' undignified."

"It's fine," Quinn said.

"Thank you for coming for me."

"You're welcome. Done?"

"I think so."

They got back in the Jeep. He drove the rest of the way to her house, parked, and looked at her.

"Think you can walk?" he said.

She looked at him with bleary eyes. "Sleepy."

He got out, came around, and she put her arm over his shoulders. He picked her up and carried her up the steps, knocking rather than ringing, which he judged to be the right call at twelve fifty-five.

Ellen Gallagher answered the door.

She was in a robe, with the look of someone who had been waiting. She looked at her daughter and then at Quinn with questioning eyes.

Quinn met her gaze. "Someone tossed a perfectly good girl to the curb," he said. "I was going to keep her, but the Colonel has a firm no pet rule."

Ellen Gallagher looked at him, then the humor of the situation won, and she snorted a laugh.

"Come in," she said. "Help me get Sleeping Beauty to bed."

He got her up the stairs and into her room and onto the bed. Quinn went back downstairs and waited for Katherine's mom.

When she came back down, she looked at him.

"The boyfriend?"

"Apparently, he's history," Quinn said. "She'll tell you the rest."

"Thank you for doing this," she said.

"She called," Quinn said simply.

He went back home and read for an hour about John Stuart Mill's Harm Principle. Then he went to bed.

He fell asleep instantly.