That Saturday morning, Walker found Jane sitting at the table on the back patio, her hands wrapped around a cup of coffee, her eyes down on a newspaper spread out before her. It was late winter but it was sunny, and the stiff wind coming up the hill from Green Lake was kept off the patio by the high wooden fence they’d had built the previous summer.

“Good morning,” he said, setting his own coffee cup down and taking the seat across from her. He lit a cigarette.

She looked up at him and smiled weakly. Her eyes were glassy and ringed with dark circles; her skin was pale and waxy. She had drunk herself to sleep last night, perched in front of the television long after he’d gone to bed.

“What’s the good news?” he asked, nodding at the paper.

“There is no good news,” Jane informed him. “We’re still at war, the economy’s still screwed. They still haven’t found that Laurelhurst girl. And if she’s like the others, I guess they never will. Plus, I’m hungover.”

“Of course you’re hungover,” Walker said, smiling. He spoke to her as if she were a child. As if she’d eaten too much candy and now had a stomach ache. Of course she had a stomach ache. “What time did you come to bed?”

“I don’t know,” she shrugged. “It was dark, I remember that.”

He nodded, took a drag on his cigarette. The sections of the paper that Jane wasn’t reading were on the chair between them. He reached over and grabbed a piece at random, then opened it on the table. When, after a moment, he looked up, he found her watching him.

“Walker, I–” she began.

“What?” he asked, inadvertently cutting her off.

She went silent and lowered her eyes.

“I have something to tell you,” she said after a moment, “but it’s not going to be easy.”

Walker sat back and flicked his cigarette, sending a tiny ball of ash to the floor, and smiled knowingly. It was going to be one of those conversations. Jane, who struggled with self-control on her best days, had betrayed even her own loose standards of behavior. And she needed Walker to hear her out, to listen and forgive.

“Okay,” he said, closing the newspaper he’d only barely begun reading.

“Can I have one of those?” she asked, eyes on his cigarette.

Walker paused, suddenly taking her more seriously. Then he pulled the pack out of his breast pocket and handed it to her. He followed with the lighter.

“Is it that bad?” he asked. In the fifteen years he’d known Jane, he’d only seen her smoke half a dozen times, and what had come after had never been good.

She lit her cigarette, inhaled deeply, and blew out a thick cloud of smoke.

“I have a problem at work,” she said simply.

“Okay,” Walker said again, “but that’s nothing new.”

“No,” Jane said. She took a second drag on her cigarette and then punched it out in the ashtray. “But this problem… Well, it’s more like trouble. I’m in trouble at work. I mean, I’m in trouble generally.”

“Because of work?” Walker asked.

“Yes. But I’m in trouble everywhere.”

Walker let a moment of silence pass, hoping that Jane would jump in and fill it. When she didn’t, his lips turned up into a cold grin. And when he spoke again, there was impatience in his voice. This was no way to spend a Saturday morning.

“Jane,” he began. “I’m not planning to sit here for the rest of the day. Eventually I’ll need to get up and go somewhere else. So if you’ve got something to tell me — which, according to you, you do — then please get on with it.”

“Do you remember Matt Pullman?” she asked quickly.

“No,” Walker said after a moment. “Should I?”

“You’ve never met him,” Jane said. “But I told you about him. We used to date in college, and a year and a half ago he came to me looking for a job.”

Now Walker remembered. Jane had spoken to him about Matt over dinner one evening, wearing her usual weary frown and with a glass of wine in front of her. Matt had appeared in her office that morning, looking smart in an expensive suit, résumé in hand. He’d been in New York, he told her, where he’d had a successful run on Wall Street. But now he wanted to come home.

It would be awkward, she’d told Walker that evening, putting an old boyfriend forward for a job, but she felt she owed him. In college Matt had been handsome and charming, a resounding success in his personal life. But as a student he’d been undisciplined and scatterbrained, and the more demanding their work had become, the more quickly he’d begun to fall behind. Initially Jane had done what she could to help, but when her own work had begun to suffer, she’d realized that she was tethered to a hopeless case. Finally, after a year together, she cut him loose. A month later, he left college, and she didn’t see or speak with him again until he appeared in her office that afternoon.

“Yes,” Walker said. “I remember Matt.”

“Well,” Jane said, her eyes down. “We had lunch together today. We have lunch together every so often. It’s not unusual. But today he had something to tell me.”

She was sitting forward, leaning with her forearms on the table’s edge, holding her coffee cup in both hands. There was absolutely no strength in her; she was all weakness and submission.

“Matt was hired as a trader,” Jane went on, “and as far as I knew, everything was going well. No complaints from his department head or his coworkers, and when I spoke to Matt, he seemed to be doing great. I’d even been feeling good about it, thinking that not only had I helped out an old friend, but I’d brought a real contributor to the company.”

Walker looked at the discarded cigarette and braced himself. Jane was in trouble. Was he too?

“And then what?” he prompted.

Jane looked up and met her husband’s eyes for the first time in several minutes. She retrieved her cigarette from the ashtray and relit it.

“To begin with,” she said, smoke spilling out of her mouth and nose, “Matt’s résumé was a lie. It said that after he left the University of Washington, he moved to New York and enrolled at NYU, eventually graduating from the Stern School of Business. In fact, after leaving the UW, he went back to Bellevue, moved in with his parents, and then entered the two-year business program at BCC. He did alright there, and after graduating with an associates degree, he left for New York to try and get a job on Wall Street.

“The big New York firms didn’t want him, of course. Even here in Seattle, I won’t look twice at a candidate with only an associates degree. So this is when he decided to put his real assets to work for him. He fabricated a new résumé and used his charm and good looks to sell it. He was smart enough not to claim too much, nothing that’d raise any eyebrows, nothing they’d want to look into too deeply. Just a four-year degree and an MBA from the University of Washington, the school he’d walked away from. And once he got in the door, he made it all about him, what a great guy he was, so handsome and personable. He may have been clueless about financial services, but he knew the type, knew how to play the part. And eventually someone hired him.

“Then something interesting happened. They started him in a back office job, grunt work but it’s where all the trades are processed, and suddenly he got it. All the stuff that hadn’t made sense to him at all at the UW, that had barely made sense to him at community college — suddenly, in practice, it became perfectly clear. Seeing it action, working the computers and processing the trades with his own hands, he got it. But unfortunately, just when he was feeling comfortable and imaging himself as a trader, his bullshit résumé caught up with him. He’d been on the job just six months when they kicked him out the door.”

Walker thought he could see where this was heading, felt his patience bottoming out.

“So you hired an old friend with a padded résumé,” he said, grinding out his cigarette. “And today you learned the truth. But you didn’t know any of this when you hired him.” Then, “You didn’t know any of this, right?”

“No, I didn’t know any of this when I hired him” Jane said, shaking her head as much as she could, given her hangover. “Please, Walker, I need you to listen. Trust me, I’d rather not tell you the whole story, but I have to.”

Walker lit another cigarette, nodded.

“Next job he applied for,” Jane went on, “he left off the back office job, and the rest of it he fabricated upward, making himself an experienced trader. Again, nothing too good to be true, but he was sure his time would be limited, and he wanted to be where the action was for as long as he could get away with it. It went like it had before. His résumé got him through the door, then his personality got him a job. Next thing he knew, he was a Wall Street trader.”

Jane took a final pull on her cigarette, the ball of glowing tobacco singeing the filter, then she crushed it out.

“Do you know what naked short selling is?” she asked her husband.

Walker laughed, a sickened chuckle.

“Of course not,” he said.

“Well, Matt didn’t either,” she said, “not until he worked in that back office. And he brought this knowledge to his new job as a trader. This time, he wanted to get as much in his bank account as he could before HR found him out. So, what he’d do is, he’d pick out a small company and launch what’s called a bear raid. He’d buy a bunch of options to sell ‘x’ number of shares of the company’s stock at a certain low price by a certain date. A crazy price, maybe half the current trading price. Then he’d turn around and sell huge quantities of the company’s shares — shares he couldn’t deliver, that he hadn’t even borrowed — while at the same time spreading negative rumors about the company, all of which would cause the share price to drop dramatically. The shares were counterfeit, but it didn’t matter. It’s possible to trade more shares of a company than actually exist.

“So let’s say the stock starts at $60 dollars a share. He buys the right to sell a million shares at $30 on a certain date. Then the bear raid begins. If he plays the game right, once that date rolls around, the stock might be worth just $10. He’s just made $20 million for his company and earned himself a hell of a bonus.”

“That’s madness,” Walker observed as he took a sip from his coffee cup. He made a face as he swallowed, the coffee now cold and bitter.

“That’s Wall Street,” Jane said with a shrug. “Which is why Matt got away with it for so long. He was making his company so much money that they never bothered to look at his résumé again.”

Something occurred to Jane, a flicker across her features. Walker sensed that her confession was about to turn into a lecture.

“Okay,” she began, “this was after Matt’s time in New York, but do you remember Bear Stearns?”

Walker shook his head disdainfully.

“In March 2008,” she continued, “someone bet almost $2 million on options that the company’s share price would collapse — from $60 a share to less than $30 — in nine days or less. A crazy bet, right?”

Walker barely understood what she was talking about.

“Then suddenly the stock started trading like crazy,” Jane went on, “first a few hundred thousand shares, then a few million, then several million, mostly phantom shares that were never delivered. Then the negative rumors started, complete bullshit, but it got on TV, and by that Saturday, the Fed was offering the company to JPMorgan for $2 a share. Now the $30 bet on a $60 share seemed like genius. In a week, the guys who’d gambled on $30 had become $250 million richer.”

Walker suppressed a groan. For him, his indulgences notwithstanding, the beauty of life was received through the artistry of writing, the books he bought and sold, the people who came to him, who loved books too. Yet he had tethered his existence to a woman who hadn’t read a proper novel in years, who daily navigated the hollow, intangible world of high finance. What on earth did this woman — his wife, the mother of his child — actually do?

But he couldn’t question her living without feeling hypocritical. When he’d been forced to leave teaching, her world of financial make-believe had been his safety net. He owed to her generous salary his bookstore and the freedom it provided him to pursue his interests. The house he lived in, the clothes he wore, the food he ate, it was all thanks to her lucrative yet impenetrable profession.

And this was the only reason he cared about this ‘trouble’ that Jane was in. Trouble for her meant trouble for him.

“I’d like you to get to the point,” Walker said calmly, yet with the unmistakable hint of a threat.

“Okay,” Jane said, swallowing hard. “So Matt gets away with it for much longer than he thought he would. He gets away with it because he’s making his company money, not to mention earning a tidy bonus. It’s only in 2005, when the SEC starts taking action against naked short selling, that HR comes to him, waves his phony résumé in his face, and suggests that he make a quiet exit. Matt’s not too worried because he’s been making money too fast to spend it: his last year there his bonus was $600 thousand. So he leaves and spends the next few years traveling around, Europe, the Caribbean, all the obvious places.

“Then, when the money starts running out and he’s trying to figure out how he’ll ever find a job again, a gift lands in his lap. A friend of a friend of a friend tells him that his ex is head of human resources at Klein Faliszek in Seattle. And a couple weeks later he’s standing in my office with another fake résumé. He says he was ready to tell me the truth if I checked up on him, or at least some version of the truth, but I didn’t so he didn’t. Not until today.

“Today he comes to me and tells me everything that I’ve just told you. Then he reveals that for the last year and a half, he’s been naked short selling at Klein Faliszek, killing small companies by selling shares he doesn’t have, spreading negative rumors, then selling options for shares he does have for ten times what they’re worth, making big money for Klein Faliszek and raking in big bonuses.

“Problem is, at some point his skills started failing him. A couple of his assaults didn’t pay off, he ended up losing a bunch of Klein Faliszek’s money, and he got properly chastened. But did he let up? No. He tried it again, only this time he went all in, picked three companies and let the trades fly. He was determined to get back on the company’s good side. Instead Klein Faliszek ended up on the hook for about $4 billion.”

At this, Walker’s eyes went wide.

“Exactly,” Jane said, seeing his expression. “It’s more than Klein Faliszek is worth.”

Walker didn’t know that, of course, just that $4 billion was an unimaginable amount of money. He couldn’t imagine four billion anything, much less dollars.

“So today he tells me that I need to help him,” Jane continued. “I need to help him, or I’m going down with him. He’ll tell the company — and the police, of course, because it’s inevitable that they’ll get involved. He’ll tell them all that I knew his résumé was phony but I hired him anyway. He’ll tell them that I knew what he was up to the whole time, and that I profited from it.”

Now Jane lowered her eyes, and Walker understood that she had arrived at the hardest part.

“And he’ll tell them that we were sleeping together.”

Walker’s fingers found the edge of the table, as if he were bracing himself. He watched Jane’s body slump, her shoulders edge forward, her eyes focus on the rim of her coffee cup. She wasn’t done speaking; there was one thing left to say.

“Because we were,” Jane said. “We are. We are sleeping together. It’s the only thing that’s true.”

Walker stood. This could really be it, and he had no idea what to do about it. His safety net had become the noose around his neck, the needle in his vein. Jane couldn’t help Matt — she was human resources, and they were talking about $4 billion — so he would drag her down with him. Then the police would come and take everything away.

He turned and stepped through the sliding-glass door into the house. He was standing in the dining room, trying to steady himself, when at the other end of the house the front door opened. He caught his breath: they were already here. But it was only Ryan and Michelle, his son leading the girl in by the hand.

Ryan squinted at his father’s obvious agitation, but Michelle just smiled. It was a dim, innocent smile — had Ryan still not noticed that there was something wrong with her? — but seeing it, Walker felt something inside him shift.

“Hi guys,” he said, suddenly regaining his composure. He shook his head and laughed. “You startled me.”

Ryan was looking beyond Walker.

“What’s wrong with Mom?” he asked.

Walker looked over his shoulder. Jane was holding her face in her hands, sobbing, trembling.

“She had a hard week,” Walker said, watching Michelle as her grey-blue gaze drifted around the room, enthralled, as if she’d never been there before, but of course she had. “Best just to let her work it out. What are you two up to?”

“Nothing,” Ryan shrugged. “You know.”

“Sure,” Walker said, nodding. Kids were always up to nothing. “I’m headed for the bookstore. Anyone want to join me?”

Ryan looked at Michelle, a question. She nodded.

“Great,” Walker said.

He stepped past them into the foyer and grabbed his jacket, Ryan and Michelle following. He was still on edge and desperate not to let it show. This would help, getting away from Jane, spending time at the store.

Outside on the curb, as Walker fished in his pocket for his keys, Ryan tugged at his father’s sleeve.

“Are you sure Mom’s alright?” the boy asked. “Is it okay just to leave her here?”

Walker put a hand on his son’s shoulder.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m sure it’s okay to leave her here.”

Ryan nodded and stepped away.

Walker reached out for the driver’s-side door, the key clenched between his thumb and forefinger. Suddenly he stopped, watching his hand. It was shaking.

This was it. This was the test he had been anticipating for years. It had arrived from a wholly unexpected direction, but this was it. Either his strength would prevail and he would act to save himself and his family, or everything he’d spent so much time and energy and heart building up would crumble.

He stared at his hand, glared at it, willing it to steady. The late winter wind wrapped itself around him, and the entire city seemed to go silent. Then the tremors in his hand ceased, and he unlocked the door.

This was it.