Now that he’s talking, I think about going back for the bottle and just leaving it on the table, not wanting to slow his roll.

  “But,” he continues, “one of my rich customers did suggest there might be someone who could throw me a life preserver, at least in the short run. He described him as a broker for people in situations like mine.”

  “You care to tell me the customer’s name?”

  “Edmund McKenzie.”

  And I think: If my world gets any smaller, I’ll be able to fit it inside Martin’s empty shot glass.

  “Even though I got my money,” Martin Elian says, “I have been paying ever since.”

  “With interest.”

  He nods. “He never called himself a silent partner. Referred to himself instead as a member of my board. With what he said were full voting privileges.”

  “Do you think Licata was the one calling the shots?”

  He shakes his head. “I never thought so. It had to be someone doing the actual bankrolling. But the one time I asked, he grinned and said that if he told me, he might have to kill me.”

  He holds up his empty glass. I go get the bottle and leave it in front of him.

  “Everything was fine until the last couple of months, because the new restaurant, after an excellent beginning, began to underproduce. So I reached out to Anthony for more money. Which he gave me.”

  “Have you paid him back?”

  “That’s the thing,” he says. “I paid him back everything I owed him the night you saw me with him. With all the interest. In cash. So, while I was surprised that he wanted to see me tonight, I never considered saying no.”

  “Neither borrow nor a lender be, at least not with the First National Bank of Anthony Licata,” I say. “Polonius said that, by the way, in Hamlet.”

  He closes his eyes. “Of course he did.”

  “Sorry, sometimes I can’t help myself,” I say. “Please continue.”

  “Thank you so much,” Jimmy says. But he grins. “We were just passing through East Hampton when the man sitting next to me in the back seat reached around and I felt the jab. The next thing I know, I’m here.”

  “They never told you why he wanted to see you?”

  “They did not.”

  It’s past two in the morning and I’m tired, more than somewhat. Maybe exhausted suddenly that my ex-husband’s problems have become my problems. Or that mine have become his. Either way. And that one of the connecting lines on my grease board now runs right through Martin Elian.

  Maybe this is Licata’s last warning for me to stay out of his business.

  Martin leans forward now. “How much trouble do you think I’m in?”

  “How did he leave it with you the other night, when you thought your business with him had concluded?”

  “He just told me that I’d hear from him if he was the one who ever needed a favor.”

  Now I nod.

  “He’s not after you, Martin. He’s after me, for reasons I don’t fully understand. At least not yet.”

  “So what do I do now?”

  “Do you still need his money?”

  “I no longer want his money.”

  “Then maybe you’re done with him.”

  “And if I’m not?”

  “I’m not sure what to tell you. Other than this is what happens when you lie down with dogs.”

  I turn toward mine. “Sorry, Rip.”

  Martin says, “You mean dogs like your current client.”

  I smile quite genuinely now. “Touché,” I say. “That’s French, by the way.”

  “What are you going to do about Licata? You obviously know that he’s dangerous.”

  “So am I, Martin. You should know that as well as anyone.”

  I stand.

  “Mind if I take the couch for the night?” Martin asks.

  I get out of my chair and walk over to him and lean down, gently kissing his cheek. His scent, even now, is one I remember, vividly.

  “I used to love you so much, Martin,” I whisper.

  He looks up at me, the affection in his eyes quite real.

  “I love you, mon ange,” he says.

  My angel. Blast from the past.

  He starts to reach up to pull me closer to him.

  I back away.

  “Call an Uber,” I tell him.

  SEVENTY-NINE

  WHEN HE’S GONE AND I am finally and blessedly asleep, I dream again about my mother.

  She is happy, surrounded by a whole flock of her hummingbirds. And I awaken smiling, a rare occurrence these days, the image of her and the birds still vivid as I make myself a cup of coffee and go down into my basement, which I keep almost pathetically neat, and find the box containing the hummingbird feeder my father once made for her.

  The birds keep showing up in my dreams.

  When I was little, before she got sick, she taught me all about her birds, the best way to feed them, the perfect placement for the feeder in the quietest place on the property. How to make the perfect mixture of water and sugar that kept bringing the birds back.

  “Think about it,” she told me. “Refined white sugar and water. Four parts water, one part sugar. And that’s all it takes to make a miracle.”

  “You think that birds coming back is a real miracle?” I’d asked her.

  “Is there any other kind?”

  Then she drummed into me how cleaning the feeder often was essential, to prevent mold growth.

  “Too much information?” she said one time.

  “Never when it comes from you.”

  Now I felt as if I knew as much about the birds as she once did, remembering without trying, whether I wanted to or not. The miracle wasn’t just that they came back, they migrated to Mexico and then returned. How they could chirp and whistle and squeak and buzz, even though I could never get close enough to hear. I just took it on trust, the way I took it on trust that they would keep coming back.

  After buying my house, I hung the feeder on a pole in view of my kitchen window, greasing the bottom of the pole with vegetable oil to keep ants from getting at the sugary water I mixed myself. I never bought it premade at the hardware store.

  Eventually, my birds found the feeder and then stayed with me for a long time.

  I came to love them just as much as my mother had loved her birds.

  But then the cancer that had come for my mother came for me. The once happy memories of the birds became associated with death and dying.

  Representing Rob Jacobson in court, I kept forgetting to mix the water, letting the feeder go dry for days at a time. I was too sick and too busy to give the process the care it demanded. The birds who once depended on me gave up, probably because they thought I had given up on them.

  Finally, reluctantly, I took the feeder down and packed it away, leaving the empty pole in the backyard.

  Now I brought the feeder upstairs to my sink, used a small brush to clean the sucker within an inch of its life. A few minutes of honest work made me feel good, cleared my mind of worries about Licata and what he did to Martin, about Eric Jacobson and all those lines pointing to his father, about the pretrial motions I need to file before I start chemo next week.

  Mixing fresh sugar water makes me feel just as good. Once I’ve perfected the proportions, I rehang the feeder in the same quiet place. Through my kitchen window, I stare at it for a long time, still smiling, hoping the birds will find me again.

  In a world that keeps getting meaner and more complicated and more dangerous, the feeder looks beautiful to me.

  The way the feeder always looks, gleaming and freshly painted, in my dreams about my mother.

  I tell myself that if the birds find their way back, it will be a sign.

  I could use one.

  EIGHTY

  WORKING TOO HARD ON Rob Jacobson’s case makes the days start to feel longer and longer. I’m exercising too little, not eating as healthy as Dr. Sam Wylie wants me to.

  Sam invites me to dinner, just the two of us, midweek, at the Bell & Anchor, on Noyac Road in Sag Harbor.

  Good food, good pours, good vibe. On top of that, I’m here tonight with my good friend.

  When we’ve been served our white wines, Sam says, “You look tired.”

  “What every girl wants to hear,” I say. “But I promise: It’s a good tired.”

  Then I raise my glass and she does the same.

  “You sound like those people from Arizona who say, well, yeah, but it’s a dry heat,” Sam says.

  “I promise I’m doing all the right things you’ve told me to do,” I tell her. “You’d be proud of me.”

  We’re both wearing blue summer dresses. Sam’s navy one fits her much better than mine, in a lighter shade, fits me.

  “I’m proud of you,” she says softly.

  I proceed to catch her up on crazy-town recent events. What most interests her is how Martin showed up like a lump on my doorstep.

  “Promise you didn’t give him a good kick?” she asks.

  “Like I told you. I thought really, really hard about it.”

  She has never liked him, never trusted him. She told me after Martin and I broke up that he was a phony who had probably been cheating on me all along, unless he was incredibly unlucky to have gotten caught the one time that he did.

  “I’d like to kick that French bastard,” Sam Wylie says. “Right in the bon bons.”

  I redirect the conversation, asking about her husband, her kids, her annoying dogs.

  “They’re not annoying. They’re adorable.”

  “You know what they are? They’re the dog version of avocados.”

  “Wait… what?”

  “Hear me out,” I say. “All of a sudden, without anybody noticing, avocados got way too popular.”

  She grins but knows enough to let me go.

  “Labradoodles didn’t even used to be a thing,” I continue. “Are you aware that they didn’t even become an official breed until 1989?”

  “You actually researched my dogs?”

  “You think I’d come out to dinner with you unprepared?” I ask.

  I laugh. She laughs. She really does look fabulous tonight. But then she always has, even back in junior high, when every girl we knew seemed to go through an awkward phase except her. Put it another way: nobody has ever accused Samantha Callaghan Wylie of being more boy than girl.

  If they had, I would have punched out their lights, too.

  I get around to telling her about trying and failing repeatedly, almost spectacularly, to break up with Dr. Ben.

  “Well,” she says, raising her glass, “I’ll drink to that.”

  “Because I’m still with him?”

  “Hell, no,” she says. “Because you finally lost a case.”

  We stretch dinner over a couple of hours. We try to keep the conversation as light as possible, as we’ve both decided in advance that this evening will be a no-cry zone.

  I tell Sam that I’m too full for dessert. She tells me that in her considered medical opinion, I need more food. So she orders us the Bell & Anchor’s Dreamy Brownie Sundae.

  Two spoons.

  “You’re too thin,” she says.

  “Look who’s talking.”

  We laugh again. The waiter brings the dreamy dessert. We both order decaf coffee. It’s clear that neither of us wants this night to end. Both of us feeling young. Martin talked about furloughing some of his employees during COVID. Tonight I feel as if I’m on furlough from real life.

  Sam finally gets up and heads for the ladies’ room. While she’s away, I scan a room whose lights have dimmed by now, spot a corner table in the darkest corner of the place, getting a good view of it when the waiter steps away.

  And despite my distance from the table, I am quite certain and quite aware that I am looking at Edmund McKenzie and Eric Jacobson, deep in conversation.

  When Sam sits back down and sees my face she says, “What?”

  “I think I just saw somebody I know. Two somebodies, actually. Or nobodies, depending on your point of view.”

  I tell her who they are and why it matters to me that they are here together.

  “Be right back,” I say, and get up from the table.

  I’ve only taken a couple of steps toward them when the main dining room at the Bell & Anchor begins to spin.

  I take one more step, and then stop, unable to do anything now except wait for the world to stop spinning.

  Something it refuses to do.

  I take a small step to the side, all weight on my right foot, as a way of trying to steady myself, remembering times in the gym when the trainer would make me balance on one foot for thirty seconds.

  I bump into a waiter then.

  Someone grabs for my arm.

  Too late.

  I’m falling.

  I hear a woman scream.

  Last thing I remember.

  EIGHTY-ONE

  “AT LEAST I DIDN’T consider kicking you to wake you up,” Dr. Sam Wylie says.

  It’s an hour later and I’m hooked up to an IV in a bed in a private room at Southampton Hospital that Sam Wylie has scored for me, mostly because she’s not someone to be screwed with, especially not here.

  She drove me herself, not wanting to wait for an ambulance. I admitted to her over a couple of bottles of water that for all my chatter about doing the right things, over the past couple of days I’ve allowed myself to get dehydrated. She tells me it’s probably not the only reason I fainted. But likely the biggest one.

  I accuse her of being overly dramatic.

  “Ending up in the hospital at the end of our girls’ night out is what’s kind of dramatic,” Sam says.

  She’s in a chair next to my bed.

  “You’ve got to sleep more, you’ve got to exercise more, you have to hydrate every day and not just when you remember,” she says. “All those good things you say you’ve been doing? You don’t get to take a day off, whether you’re doing chemo or not.”

  “I’m trying.”

  “Try harder. Or you not only won’t make it through your trial, you won’t make it to your trial.”

  I lift my head slightly and start to speak.

  Sam doesn’t give me the chance.

  “Hush and listen,” she says, putting a little snap in her voice. “I’m telling you for the last time that no trial and no client is worth dying for.”

  “Would you say that if I were defending one of your patients?” I ask.

  “We’re talking here about the most important patient I’ve ever had,” she says. “You.”

  “I tried to quit the case. I just couldn’t make myself do it.”

  Sam smiles. “Would that have killed you?”

  She reaches over and takes my free hand. I think about all the talks we’ve had in our lives, about everything, in what feels like another life a thousand years before we were doctor and patient.

  “For the last time, please answer one question. I promise not to ask you ever again.”

  “Liar.”

  She leans forward, squeezes my hand harder. “Is it worth it?”

  Ever since I resumed my defense of Rob Jacobson, I’ve been asking myself the same question.

  I squeeze her hand back and remind myself that tonight is a no-cry zone.

  In a whisper, I say, “It might not make any sense to you. But it’s worth it to me.”

  She keeps me on the IV for another hour. The nurse comes in and unhooks me, but Sam shakes her head. “Obviously I can’t release you. You’re still acting lightheaded.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “The hell you are,” she says. “You can pick up the car in the morning. Besides, your ride is already here.”

  Dr. Ben Kalinsky pokes his head into the room now.

  “We need to stop meeting like this,” he says.

  He drives me home and gets me into bed, walks Rip. No further conversation, he tells me. He’s going to sleep on the couch.

  In the morning, Jimmy calls. From the hospital, Sam caught him up on the festivities at the Bell & Anchor.

  “I took a ride over to the restaurant after you two girls left,” Jimmy tells me. “I found out some very interesting shit about McKenzie and Eric Jacobson.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as they go in there a lot,” Jimmy says.

  There’s a brief silence then, from both of us, while I process the information.

  “Turns out it’s kind of their place,” Jimmy adds.

  EIGHTY-TWO

  Jimmy

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON, JIMMY and Jane are drinking iced tea on her back patio. If she’s run-down enough to fall down, Jimmy tells her, she needs to wake the hell up.

  “I’d like you to please cut the shit,” Jimmy says.

  “Yes, doctor. I slept until nearly noon today.”

  “I mean it.”

  “I know.”

  While Ben was driving Jane home from the hospital, Jimmy made the short drive to the Bell & Anchor, taking a shot that McKenzie and Jacobson were still at the restaurant after watching Jane take a header. They weren’t.

  But the guy at the host stand was a local who as a college student had bartended for Jimmy. He was an up-and-comer now, the kind restaurants in the Hamptons relied upon to know who wanted to be seen and who didn’t.

  “According to my guy Jake, McKenzie and Eric Jacobson started showing up together about six months ago. McKenzie shot my guy some money at the time. Rent money, enough to guarantee a table no matter how crowded the place was.”

  “Makes you proud to be an American.”

  “They’re not at the Bell every week,” Jimmy continues. “But Jake says they are there fairly regularly.”

  “So maybe our friend Eric wasn’t riding the wild surf nearly as much as we and his parents thought he was.”

  “So what we’ve got here is a guy who hates the father, hanging out with the son,” Jimmy says.

  “Who hates the father even more.”

  Jimmy grins at her. “Maybe daddy issues brought them together, like it was destiny.”

  Jane has finished her iced tea and is now working on the bottle of water next to her cup.

  “We’re talking here about two guys who basically grew up being called losers by our client,” she says.