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time, but Lila had used it just the one time, on her honeymoon in the south of France. It had made her feel conspicuous, not to mention it was highly impractical for anyone who didn’t travel with a valet. Now it seemed a liability as well, those initials stuck to her like something nasty she’d stepped in and couldn’t scrape off.
    She tried not to think about all that as she threw herself into the task at hand, separating everything into piles: one for all the stuff that was to be given away or thrown out, another for those items that were to be placed in storage along with the rest of their things, packed in readiness upstairs for tomorrow’s move. It was mid-September, and the city was experiencing a heat wave that had turned the storage unit, where the ducts that kept the rest of the building temperature-controlled year-round were noticeably absent, into an oven. Before long she was sticky with sweat, her eyes and throat itchy from the dust.
    Lila didn’t mind. The busier she kept, the dirtier and more physically demanding the job, the easier it was to cope with what was going on in the rest of her life. For whole minutes at a time, she didn’t have to think about the reason for all this upheaval. She didn’t have to dwell on the fact that her darling, brilliant, handsome husband was currently upstairs in their thirty-second-floor penthouse with a monitoring device strapped to his ankle and that tomorrow he was being transported to the Fishkill Correctional Facility to begin his ten-year sentence. As she pried open box lids and tossed things into trash bags, the nightmare of the past eighteen months—the grand jury indictment, Gordon’s perp walk on national TV, the endless rounds of meetings with his lawyers, culminating in the lengthy and very public ordeal of the trial—was like the wail of a siren off in the distance, registering only peripherally on her consciousness.
    Of course, the reality of her new existence eventually reasserted itself, as it always did. Coming across the engraved brass plaque Gordon had received at the Vertex Leadership Association banquet in his honor three years ago, she paused to reflect on the precipitous drop in their fortunes since then. He’d been the golden boy of Vertex Communications, the architect of the merger that had sent stock prices soaring. Wall Street loved him, political bigwigs courted him, and he and Lila were much sought after on the social scene. Theirs had been among the famous faces at every blue-chip function, regularly featured on society pages, Lila always in glittering jewels and the latest couture, Gordon the handsome young Turk in his bespoke tuxedo. She recalled watching him move with ease among his fellow titans of the business world, as though he’d been born to it, and how proud she’d been, not so much of his outward achievements as of his greater accomplishment in having risen, Proteus-like, from the murky waters of his humble beginnings. He’d triumphed over adversities that would have hobbled or soured a lesser man, all without sacrificing his essential decency (or so she’d believed at the time). Others in his shoes might have had their heads turned by such early success, but not Gordon. Through it all he’d remained not only a devoted husband and father but a good man, one who seldom passed a homeless person on the street without opening his wallet.
    Then, seemingly overnight, it had all come crashing down.
    Even now, after the fact, Lila could scarcely fathom it. It was like some twisted practical joke. How could her smart, savvy, loving husband be headed for prison? How could they be nearly broke? Almost their entire net worth—bank accounts, stocks, limited partnerships, their Park Avenue apartment and the cabin in Mahopac—had vanished like so much smoke from a burning pyre. Everything that hadn’t been seized had gone to the lawyers. The only thing the government and