Part One: The Weight of Everything Money Could Buy
The villa had fourteen rooms, which Daniel Avery had never counted himself but knew from the architectural plans his assistant had filed somewhere in the organized labyrinth of his office. He lived in perhaps four of them with any regularity — the bedroom, the study, the kitchen in the mornings, the terrace in the evenings when the city below arranged itself into something that looked, from sufficient distance, like order. The rest of the rooms existed in the particular way that expensive things exist when they are owned rather than used: perfectly maintained, impeccably furnished, waiting.
He was thirty-two years old and he had more than most people would accumulate in several lifetimes, and on the Tuesday morning that would eventually become the axis around which everything else pivoted, he lay in his bed with the silk sheets pooled around him and felt the specific, sourceless heaviness of a man who has obtained everything he aimed for and is beginning to understand that the aiming was the point.
The company — Avery Capital, a private investment firm that he had built from a modest inheritance and an immoderate appetite for work — occupied the thirty-first floor of a glass tower downtown and employed sixty-three people and managed assets that appeared, in the financial press, as numbers with enough zeros to lose their concreteness. He had built it in eight years, through the sustained application of intelligence and will and the particular willingness to work longer and harder than the people competing with him, which had been, in the beginning, the only genuine advantage he had over them. By the time the other advantages accumulated — the reputation, the network, the compound returns of early success — the work habit was so thoroughly his that he could not have identified where it ended and where he began.
He had not taken a vacation in three years. He had not read a novel in two. He had not, in recent memory, spent an afternoon without an agenda, without a call to return or a decision pending or a problem requiring his particular quality of attention.
He had a fiancée, Sofia Marchetti, who was beautiful in a way that photographed well and who moved through the social world that his success had opened with the ease of someone born to it, which she had been. He had met her at a charity dinner two years into the company’s growth, when he was newly significant enough to be invited to such things and still new enough to find them interesting. She had laughed at something he said and the laugh had seemed genuine and she was very beautiful and he had thought: yes, this is what the life is supposed to include.
Three years later he was less certain about what was genuine and less certain about what the life was supposed to include, and the uncertainty had the specific quality of something that has been sitting at the edge of consciousness for a long time and is beginning to demand to be looked at directly.
He looked at the ceiling. The ceiling was very high and very white and offered nothing.
The bedroom door opened.
