At U-Stuff-It, just about all the outside lockers were padlocked. Two Asian men, maybe a father and son, were hauling bushels of rice and boxes of pots and pans into the back of a van; a white man Rob’s age was wrestling a couch into an SUV; everything about this place reeked of divorce, bankruptcy, and petty crime.

  Rob’s locker was inside on the second floor, near the end of a dim, windowless hallway that smelled like the new interior of a cheap car. Every so often he had thought he might take the items from his past that he hadn’t thrown out and bring them home. But he liked the separation, liked that his current life remained unsullied by his suburban Chicago history. He spun the combination on his locker, pulled down hard, opened the hasp, rolled up the door, and found—nothing.

  He thumbed up the brightness of his phone flashlight, swept the thin beam of light over the locker’s concrete walls and floor. A white envelope was taped to the back wall. He crouched to walk into the locker and snatched the envelope. His name was on it in a handwriting he recognized.

  He left the storage door open and took the envelope into the hall. A girl—about his youngest son Sasha’s age—was holding her mother’s hand as she walked happily past him; maybe Mom had finally paid off the back rent; maybe the woman had kicked her Oxycontin addiction and they could finally take their stuff back home. He didn’t know what their story was, but he was sure it was depressing.

  He unsealed the envelope, breathed in a faint scent of stale, sweet perfume, and fished out a letter: “Don’t worry. I’ve got it. Call me.” The note was signed MIEP GIES.

  *

  Rob asked Eileen to meet him for breakfast at the club. He didn’t want to meet her at the house where she was still living with her mom, didn’t want to take the chance of running into old neighbors who would wonder what he might be planning. He didn’t like the idea of visiting Eileen on her own turf, wanted to believe he had not only transcended his past but that it no longer existed. He couldn’t grasp that people he had grown up with still lived here, that they took care of elderly parents, ran their families’ auto parts stores, sent their kids to North Shore, and thought that made them better than families whose kids attended Evanston, New Trier, Niles, or Glenbrook, as if all those places weren’t full of shit. The thought that he, a fifty-two-year-old man, could drive ten miles north and meet the same woman in the same house where he’d brought her to orgasm while the rest of her family was downstairs watching Trapper John, M.D. revolted him. Ty Densmore was dead; Declan was awaiting trial for setting fire to the man’s house. All that made sense. The confounding part was that some people and buildings were still standing.

  In previous years, when he had spoken on the phone to Eileen, he kept his tone casual but distant—like a star athlete forced to do community service at a home for the aged. During college he had seen her on breaks, occasionally allowed himself to be lured into old, appalling habits, but he had barely seen her since then. After she met Tim Donovan, she didn’t call anymore, just sent cards—one on Rob’s birthday, another around Christmas. No actual content in them, just photos of her and Tim, and sign-offs in red ink: YOUR LOVE FOREVER, EILEEN or SLOPPILY, SWEATILY YOURS, EILEEN accompanied by smiley faces, hearts, and HA!

  Before breakfast, he went to Walgreens and purchased a box of condoms—size extra large. Not because he needed the roominess per se but because he liked the looks on the faces of drugstore workers when they unlocked the case for him and he pointed out what he wanted. “Gonna be gettin’ it ON, my man!” the manager said.

  In the Standard Club dining room, Rob’s table looked out over Plymouth Court. The bright sunshine did little to mitigate the cheerless view of this part of the Loop, which seemed always cast in the shadows of skyscrapers, office buildings, and elevated train tracks. The scene inside was just as drab: tables topped with white cloths and good silverware, populated mostly by posses of men—dark-suited lawyers and finance bros who looked as close as you could get to goyish Washington, D.C., in Chicago’s oldest Jewish professional club. Some men at the other tables offered nods of solidarity; maybe they recognized him and agreed with his politics; maybe they hoped he agreed with theirs; maybe they had no idea who he was, just looked at him and thought they saw their own reflections. The difference was that his job was in the capital and theirs was in Chicago, and things that happened here just didn’t matter as much.

  Eileen pranced into the dining room toting Rob’s old leather briefcase. She wore tight blue jeans, heels, a billowy, low-cut, tangerine-colored top, and a haze of L’Air du Temps perfume.

  “Sorry I’m late.” Eileen hugged him, then flopped down on the seat opposite his. “If I told you what kept me, it’d take at least three hours, and I’m sure you don’t have that kind of time, Robbo.” She put the briefcase on the floor.

  “You look good,” Rob said. It was true: as a teenager, Eileen looked like a young Julia Child. However, when you got to be Rob’s age, a middle-aged Eileen Muldoon forced you to acknowledge that, for a while, Julia Child had actually been pretty damn MILFy.

  Eileen did most of the talking. She dropped names of people Rob didn’t know, didn’t wait for him to ask who they were. “Mary” was a nightmare—so demanding on her bad days but even more so on her good ones. “Danny” was another problem: he kept saying he wanted to leave his wife, but now it was time for him to either shit or get off the pot.

  “Who did you tell him you were seeing this morning?” Rob asked.

  “An old boyfriend. He gets so jealous; it’s hysterical.”

  It amazed and amused him, the behaviors social protocol required. He was bigger than Eileen, worked out three times a week at the gym, played softball on Saturdays at Maury Wills Field. Nothing was keeping him from reaching under the table and just grabbing his briefcase.

  Instead, he drank his coffee, nibbled his English muffin, watched Eileen scarf down her scrambled eggs and bacon, and chuckled as she reminisced about the locations of some of their most sordid teenage hijinks: the top of the tower at Lighthouse Beach; the slot car track at Tom Thumb Hobby & Crafts; the men’s room at the Mill Run Theatre during a Peaches & Herb concert. He briefly worried she was speaking too loud, that some reporter at the next table might be secretly recording them. But hardly any journalist he knew could afford this club’s fees; the few who could came from family money and would have been on his side. So he relaxed and laughed along with her. “You’re right,” he said. “After that night we broke into Fritz That’s It!, I never looked at salad bars in quite the same way, and I still never order ranch dressing.”

  Eileen laughed so hard, she choked on her cranberry juice.

  “So,” Rob said, “there’s one thing we haven’t discussed yet.”

  “Yup”—Eileen cast her eyes down toward the briefcase—“the elephant between my legs.”

  “Well,” Rob said, “maybe we could start discussing it now.”

  “Maybe somewhere a little more private?”

  “My room’s upstairs.”

  “Shall we, Mr. Rubicoff?”

  Rob had not been unfaithful to his wife, at least not since he and Rhonda had had children. And those instances when he had strayed in the early years of their marriage had been one-offs, so trivial they barely constituted infidelity—a hooker one of Silvio Berlusconi’s minions sent to his hotel room as a thank-you gift for helping the Italian prime minister develop an American media strategy; a Steve Forbes staffer who was a fan of his writing and followed him into the john at CPAC. The main reason he hadn’t told Rhonda was because speaking of what had happened would have made it seem more important than it actually was. And he had used a rubber both times. He did somewhat regret that he would have to keep this encounter secret from his wife and children, but what happened between him and Eileen would be over in an hour or two, whereas what he would do after he was confirmed for his job would last for generations.

  “Whoa, plush as hell, Robbie-Rob.” Eileen took a seat on the sofa by the window in Rob’s room and kept the briefcase by her side. Rob’s condom packs were on his pillows like thin mints.

  “Want to use the bathroom? Freshen up?” Rob asked. “It’s a good shower—really strong pressure.”

  “No,” Eileen said with a laugh. “I’m okay.”

  “Then I will.”

  Rob took his time in the shower, used the shampoos and exfoliating soaps, and made sure not to empty all of them, since pilfered hotel bathroom products were his son Sasha’s favorite gifts when he returned home from business trips. He turned the water as hot as it could go and the room steamed up.

  When he walked out, he stepped through the fog like a hot chick in a 1980s music video, then advanced toward the bed in his open white robe, halfway erect dong poking out as if he were some beloved liberal icon for whom this behavior was standard operating procedure.

  Rob pulled down the covers, got in bed, and took a condom pack off his pillow. “Shall I roll my own?” he asked.

  Eileen was still dressed and she hadn’t moved. The briefcase was in her lap; atop it, a typed document. She looked at Rob without enthusiasm, and when she spoke to him she sounded less like a horny Miep Gies and more like the former executive vice president of U-Stuff-It Storage Solutions. “Oh, so tempting,” she said. “But things’ve gotten so complicated. I don’t want to complicate them any more. And I’ve kinda gotten used to younger guys and, no offense, Robby, even in your prime, I’m not sure you could’ve kept up. I’m sorry if I gave the wrong impression.”

  “No, that’s fine. Better, actually.” Rob sat up stupidly in bed, unsure whether to get dressed or stay as he was. “Then why’d you want to come up?”

  Eileen held up her papers. “For this,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “A contract.”

  It looked like something she had copied and pasted from the internet, a purportedly legal document sold to fools who ordered garbage for $19.95 from the Home Shopping Network, hicks who waved flags at rallies supporting the politicians he worked for but were too dumb to remember to show up on Election Day. He skimmed the document. “But what would you do?” he asked.

  “It’s up to you, Rob-Rob,” Eileen said. “I’m not particular.”

  What she wanted was not the pile of cash he was prepared to part with, not the vigorous cunnilingus he would have performed upon request. All she wanted was for him to help her get a job. “I’ve been following your career for so long,” she said. “And I’m not getting any younger. I need someone to give me a shot. I banked everything on Tim and the storage business, and all I’ve got to show for it is debt, an old mom I can’t take care of and who doesn’t even like me, and a house we won’t be able to afford. No one wants to hire me for anything; my references suck. The only call I’ve gotten in the past year was from T.J. Maxx—cosmetics section, part-time.”

  “For once, I’d love to do something I really believe in,” Eileen said, “where I don’t have to say I’m sorry just because I’m white and my grandparents came here legally and spoke English. Single, middle-aged white ladies—our lives matter too.”

  “What happens if I don’t help out?” Rob asked.

  “Do we really have to go there, Rob-Rob? You know how hard I work; you know how organized I am, how loyal. Frankie Lichtenstein keeps calling me and I haven’t told that manipulative little douche a thing.”

  “What about your mom?”

  “What about her?”

  “How would she manage without you?”

  “Oh, Ms. Mary does just fine for herself when I’m not around. And maybe my brothers could pick up some slack for once.”

  “And your boyfriend?”

  “I deserve a lot better than some third-string, two-timing real estate guy, don’t you think?”

  Rob could have said many things. He could have said he wouldn’t be in charge of hiring his staff, but that would be, at best, half true. He could have said Eileen wasn’t qualified, but Washington was full of unqualified nepotistic hires. Eileen had been a B– student taking “regular” classes in high school and had barely been able to hack SIU; sure, he could find her a job in Washington. He took a pen from the night table, signed both copies of the contract, and handed one to Eileen. “Thanks so much,” she said. “This’ll be so fun. Like being back in high school, the old cast together again.”

  Rob nodded, though he knew Eileen was wrong about that. He was a man of his word, and he would help her find a job in D.C., but that didn’t mean he’d see her every day, or even any day. He didn’t need her meeting Rhonda and the kids, insinuating herself into their lives, coming around on weekends, bringing Betty Crocker meat loaf, asking if there was anything good on TV. He could install her in some office as far away from him as possible, find her a gig with the sleaziest horndog on Capitol Hill or some rabid right-wing closet case in need of a beard, let her become that guy’s problem.

  Eileen handed Rob the briefcase, kissed him on the cheek, then reached under the covers, laughed, and gave his dong a friendly yank.

  “Good to see you again, old pal,” she said, then made for the door.

  Rob waited to hear the elevator doors open and close. He turned the combination—6969—and flipped open the briefcase. Yes, all these years later, they were still here.

  *

  Decades of character diaries written by the drama students of North Shore Magnet had been destroyed in the fire at Ty Densmore’s house. All that remained were the pages that a few posterity-obsessed or forward-thinking students like Rob and Eileen had xeroxed and kept for themselves.

  Rob’s entries were just as he remembered them: a largely truthful yet slightly altered history of the time he spent as Anne and Margo’s father. Every day was chronicled: how he struggled to get Otto Frank’s accent right; the way Judith harangued him about needing to find the “emotional core” of his character; Trey’s unfortunate departure; Declan’s unfortunate return.

  And then, his final night in Anne Frank: he had driven with Eileen and Amanda to the party at Fiona’s house. Amanda had kept bugging him to get drugs, but he refused. She started drinking as soon as they got to Fiona’s. He’d had enough of her act, then went off to play poker. He’d been playing for maybe a half hour when he heard a commotion, then Judith and Fiona talking about some wasted girl upstairs. He’d stepped away from the game and saw Amanda stumbling down the staircase, looking pretty out of it. He figured she was just in one of her crap moods. Sometime later he saw Declan leaving the party, clutching a big wad of bloody Kleenexes to his face. Maybe he should have put two and two together, but it was better he hadn’t. If he had known that Declan had tried to assault Amanda, he might have lost control, kicked the guy’s ass, and had his admission to Carleton rescinded. He’d thought Declan was a good dude, but sometimes it was hard to tell what people were like when they didn’t think they were being watched. “I still don’t entirely believe it. I just wish I’d stayed with Amanda so she didn’t have to fight that creep off on her own,” he wrote.

  Miep Gies’s character diary corroborated Rob’s narrative: “I feel bad for Declan. He’s a great actor and he’s always been nice to me,” Eileen wrote. “But he deserved a lot worse than what Amanda did to him.”

  Rob read through the diary entries one final time. Taken separately, they might not have meant all that much. Together, they dismantled whatever Amanda might have said about him and anything Franklin might have been preparing to write. He put the papers back in the briefcase, then he got dressed to meet Franklin.

  *

  At the bar of the New Apartment Lounge on East Seventy-Fifth Street on Chicago’s South Side, Rob sat on a stool next to Franklin. People might have thought Rob had chosen the venue because it wasn’t the sort of joint where anyone would care about their conversation, and there was some truth to that. Others might have thought he had picked the New Apartment because he liked meeting white liberals in places that made them feel uncomfortable; there was some truth to that too. But the main reason was that he just liked the place: the drinks were cheap, the vibe was low-key, and even on jam session nights when anyone could get up and play, the jazz was top-notch.

  Rob and Franklin showed each other pictures of their wives and kids—the middle-aged man’s version of measuring dicks. Franklin somehow managed to drop the name “Carrie” five times into their conversation, almost like he wanted Rob to ask about the status of their relationship. How small would your life have to be to still care about high school girlfriends? Rob wondered. Maybe that was all you could think about if you found yourself living in the same town where you’d grown up. He briefly imagined Peter Van Daan having actually survived the war, then many years later meeting up with an old friend who asks what he’s been up to. You know how it is, Peter tells him. Texting a lot with Anne, going out with her for coffee and whatnot.

  Rob put his briefcase on the bar and raised his eyebrows in a self-consciously conspiratorial fashion.

  “I guess we’re getting to the part of the conversation where you ask if we can talk off the record,” Franklin said.

  Rob laughed. “Is that how it usually works?”

  “Pretty much,” Franklin said. “We shoot the shit for a while, then right when we’re about to get to the important part, it’s like, ‘Let’s go off the record.’ ”

  “And people honor that?”

  “That’s kind of how the game’s played.”

  “We play it differently in Washington,” said Rob. “When you say something’s off the record there, that means you’re getting to the stuff you actually want people to know. If you really want something ‘off the record,’ you just don’t say it.”

  “So, this whole conversation,” Franklin said, “you’re on the record for all of it.”

  Rob took out his phone, placed it on the bar, and swiped the voice recorder app. “I am if you are,” he said. “We can work it like this: you ask me questions, I ask you questions. You ask me about Amanda, I ask you about Carrie. It sounds like you’re seeing quite a bit of her. What do your wife and kids think about that? Have you talked to them about it?” Rob’s finger hovered over the RECORD button.