Purity

Moonglow Dairy

But smell had also been heaven. Not outside the airport of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, where the waftings of cow shit from adjacent pastures mingled with the smellable inefficiencies of engines banned from California long before Pip was born; not in the Land Cruiser sure-handedly piloted by a taciturn Bolivian, Pedro, through diesel particulates on the city’s ring boulevards; not along the Cochabamba highway, where every half kilometer another brutally effective speed bump gave Pip a chance to smell fruit rotting and things frying and be approached by the sellers of oranges and fried things who’d installed the speed bumps in the first place; not in the swelter of the dusty road that Pedro veered onto after Pip had counted forty-six bumps (rompemuelles Pedro called them, her first new word in Spanish); not when they reached a ridge and headed down a narrow road as steep as anything in San Francisco, the noontime sun boiling plastic volatiles out of the Land Cruiser’s upholstery and vaporizing gasoline from the spare can in the cargo area; but when the road, after plunging through dry forest and through cooler woods half cleared for coffee plantings, finally bottomed out along a stream leading into a little valley more beautiful than any place Pip could have imagined: then the heaven had commenced. Two scents at once, distinct like layers of cooler and warmer water in a lake — some intensely flowering tropical tree’s perfume, a complex lawn-smell from a pasture that goats were grazing — flooded through her open window. From a cluster of low buildings on the far side of the valley, by a small river, came a trace of sweet fruitwood smoke. The very air had a pleasing fundamental climate smell, something wholly not North American.

The place was called Los Volcanes. There were no volcanoes, but the valley was enclosed by red sandstone pinnacles five hundred meters high or more. The sandstone absorbed water during the rainy season and released it year-round into a river that meandered through a pocket of wet forest, an oasis of jungle in otherwise dry country. Well-maintained trails branched through the forest, and during Pip’s first two weeks at Los Volcanes, while the other Sunlight Project interns and employees did their shadowy work and she had only small menial jobs to do (because Andreas Wolf was away, in Buenos Aires, and she hadn’t yet had the entry interview at which he told new interns what to do), she hiked the trails every morning and again late in the afternoon. To keep herself from dwelling on what she’d left behind in California, the piteous maternal cries of “Purity! Be safe! Pussycat!” that had followed her down the lane when she left for the airport, she immersed herself in smells.

The tropics were an olfactory revelation. She realized that, coming from a temperate place like the other Santa Cruz, her own Santa Cruz, she’d been like a person developing her vision in poor light. There was such a relative paucity of smells in California that the interconnectedness of all possible smells was not apparent. She remembered a college professor explaining why all the colors the human eye could see could be represented by a two-dimensional color wheel: it was because the retina had receptors for three colors. If the retina had evolved with four receptors, it would have taken a three-dimensional color sphere to represent all the ways in which one color could bleed into another. She hadn’t wanted to believe this, but the smells at Los Volcanes were convincing her. How many smells the earth alone had! One kind of soil was distinctly like cloves, another like catfish; one sandy loam was like citrus and chalk, others had elements of patchouli or fresh horseradish. And was there anything a fungus couldn’t smell like in the tropics? She searched in the woods, off the trail, until she found the mushroom with a roasted-coffee smell so powerful it reminded her of skunk, which reminded her of chocolate, which reminded her of tuna; smells in the woods rang each of these notes and made her aware, for the first time, of the distinguishing receptors for them in her nose. The receptor that had fired at Californian cannabis also fired at Bolivian wild onions. Within half a mile of the compound were five different flower smells in the neighborhood of daisy, which itself was close to sun-dried goat urine. Walking the trails, Pip could imagine how it felt to be a dog, to find no smell repellent, to experience the world as a seamless many-dimensional landscape of interesting and interrelated scents. Wasn’t this a kind of heaven? Like being on Ecstasy without taking Ecstasy? She had the feeling that if she stayed at Los Volcanes long enough she would end up smelling every smell there was, the way her eyes had already seen every color on the color wheel.

For a week, because nobody was paying much attention to her, she let herself go a little nuts. In the evening, after the sudden fall of tropical night, she tried to interest the other young women at dinner (which was breakfast for the hacker boys) in her olfactory discoveries, her pursuit by nose of previously unsmelled smells, and her theory that there was actually no such thing as a bad smell: that even the supposedly worst smells, like human shit or bacterial decay or death, were bad only out of context; that in a place like Los Volcanes, where the smellscape was so richly complete, it might be possible to find the good in them. But the other girls — every one of whom was, perhaps not incidentally, beautiful — seemed not to have noses like hers. They agreed that the flowers and the rain smelled nice here, but she could see them exchanging glances with one another, forming judgments. It was like her first week in college dining hall all over again.

She was only slightly below the median age of the Project staff. She was surprised by how many of the others mentioned making the world a better place when she asked why they were working for Andreas. She thought that, however laudable the sentiment was, this particular phrase ought to have been ridiculed off the face of the earth by now; apparently a sense of irony was low on the list of employment qualifications here. If Pip had been Andreas, she might have started to make the world a better place by hiring some females to do tech work. With the exception of a beautiful gay male Swede, Anders, who had some journalism chops and wrote the digests of the Project’s leaks, the division of labor by gender was perfect. The boys went to a windowless and heavily secured building beyond the goat pasture and wrote code there, while the girls hung out in the refurbished barn and did community development and PR and search-engine optimization, source verification and liaising, website and bookkeeping chores, research and social media and copywriting. To a person, they had backgrounds more fascinating than Pip’s. They were Danish and British and Ethiopian, Italian and Chilean and Manhattanite, and they appeared to have spent their college years not going to class (they’d already read and reread Ulysses at twelve while attending private academies for the supergifted) but taking semesters off from Brown or Stanford to fabulously work for Sean Combs or Elizabeth Warren, combat AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, or sleep with college-dropout founders of billion-dollar Silicon Valley start-ups. Pip saw that TSP couldn’t possibly be creepy or cultish, because the other young women weren’t the kind who made mistakes.

Her own history and expectations were achingly unfabulous. She asked people if Annagret had recruited them, but nobody had heard of Annagret. They’d all come to Bolivia by personal referral or direct application. Pip attempted to amuse them by telling the story of Annagret’s questionnaire and ended up feeling like a complainer. The others weren’t complainers. If you were incredibly attractive and privileged and wanted only to make the world a better place, complaint was unbecoming.

At least the animals were poor like her. She befriended Pedro’s dogs and tried to get the goats to like her. There were blue iridescent butterflies the size of saucers, smaller ones in every color, and tiny stingless bees whose hive on the back veranda of the main building, Pedro said, produced a kilo of honey every year. Prowling the riverbank and pursuing agoutis was an adorable dark-furred mini-wolverine sort of mammal that Pedro’s dogs, though twice its size, were very afraid of. The forest was populated with Dr. Seuss birds, huge guans that clambered in fruit trees, tinamous that tiptoed in the shadows. Screeching acid-green parakeets executed group dives from cliff faces, their wings hissing loudly as they swooped past. Circling at the zenith were condors, wild condors, not captive-bred like the ones in California. Taken together, the animals reminded Pip that she was an animal herself; the multitude of shames she’d left behind in Oakland seemed of smaller consequence at Los Volcanes.

And the place was amazingly clean. What looked from a distance like litter would turn out to be a fallen paper-white blossom, or fluorescent orange fungi shaped like industrial earplugs, or a dew-covered spiderweb imitating a scrap of cellophane. The river, which flowed out of a vast uninhabited park to the north, was clear and swimmably warm. Pip bathed in it before dinner and then got even cleaner in the well-water shower in the four-person room she’d been assigned. The room had white walls, red tile floors, and exposed beams cut from timber that had fallen on the property. Her roommates were a little messy but not dirty.

The word around the compound was that Andreas was in Buenos Aires for the shooting of the East Berlin scenes for a movie that was being made about him. The word was that he was having an affair with the American actress Toni Field, who was playing his mother in the movie, and that the affair, which had been rumored in the press, was good PR for the Project. “It’s his first movie star,” Pip’s roommate Flor explained to her one night. “All the women he has affairs with stay loyal to him, even after he ends them, so this should open doors for us in Hollywood.”

“Which presumably is a good thing?” Pip said.

Flor was a tiny American-educated Peruvian; if Disney ever made an animated feature for the South American market, its heroine would look like her. “‘Every hand is raised against the leaker,’” she said. “That’s the first thing you learn from him. We take our friends wherever we can find them.”

“Nice for him that he does the dumping and women do the staying loyal.”

“His own loyalty is to the Project.”

“You know, my mother was convinced he only brought me down here to have sex with him.”

“That won’t happen,” Flor said. “You’ll see when you meet him. He’s all about the work we do. He would never do anything to compromise it.”

“So it’s about avoiding bad press?”

“I’m sorry if you’re disappointed.”

“I’m not disappointed. But he did come on pretty strong in his emails.”

Flor frowned. “He sent you emails?”

“Yeah, a whole bunch of them.”

“That would be unusual for him.”

“Well, I emailed him first. Annagret gave me his address.”

“Do you have a lot of experience in work like this?”

“No, none. I’m more like somebody who wandered in off the street.”

“Who is this Annagret?”

“Somebody he apparently used to sleep with. I just assumed everyone here had taken her questionnaire.”

“She must be somebody from before he set up in Bolivia.”

Pip was seeing Annagret in a new and sadder light, as a middle-aged person inflating her importance to the Project, playing up her past importance to Andreas, remaining loyal after being discarded.

“Before Toni Field,” Flor said, “it was Arlaina Riveira. And Flavia Corritore, who writes for La Repubblica. Philippa Gregg, who wanted to be his biographer — I don’t know what the status of that book is. And before that it was Sheila Taber — she’s got the most followers on Twitter of any professor in America. All these people are helping us now.”

It seemed to Pip that Flor was enumerating Andreas’s successful women to punish her for getting emails from him.

The first person after Pedro to be nice to her was an older girl, Colleen, who smoked cigarettes and had her own private bedroom in the main building. Colleen had grown up on an organic farm in Vermont and was, it went without saying, very pretty. She was TSP’s business manager, overseeing the kitchen and Pedro and the other local staff. Because she reported directly to Andreas, and because social status at TSP appeared to be a function of proximity to him, whatever table she sat down at for dinner was the first to fill up. She was different from the rest, and Pip wondered what the secret was of being different in a way that attracted people, as opposed to her own way.

Colleen always had two cigarettes after dinner, on the back veranda, where Pip had taken to sitting and listening to the frogs and owls and stridulators, the nocturnal orchestra. Colleen neither said much to her nor seemed to mind her being there. After her second cigarette, she went back inside and spoke to the staff in a Spanish whose fluency made Pip feel envious and discouraged. She didn’t wish she were any of the other women, because it would have meant forsaking irony, but she could see wanting to be Colleen.

One night, between cigarettes, Colleen broke her silence and said, “It’s a crap world, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” Pip said. “I was just sitting here thinking it’s amazingly beautiful.”

“Give it time. You’re still in sensory overload.”

“I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of it.”

“It’s all crap.”

“What’s crap about it?”

In the dark, Pip heard the scrape of a lighter, the smoker’s gasp. “Everything,” Colleen said. “We’re a clearinghouse for crap. Nobody leaks good news. All we get is crap news, day after day, crap pouring in. It wears you down.”

“I thought the idea was that sunlight disinfected it.”

“I’m not saying it shouldn’t be done. I’m saying it wears you down. The infinite variety of human badness.”

“Is it possible you’ve been here too long? How long have you been here?”

“Three years. Almost since the beginning. I’ve become the resident depressed person, it’s practically my whole function. Everyone else can look at me and think, Thank God I’m not like her, and feel good about themselves.”

“You could leave.”

“Yeah. I could leave.”

“What’s he like?” Pip said. “Andreas?”

“He’s an asshole.”

“Really.”

“I’m saying that purely descriptively. How could he not be? To do a thing like TSP, you have to be an asshole.”

“But you still can’t leave.”

“I’m being strung along. I’m aware of it every minute of the day, that he’s stringing me along. It’s approaching Guinness Book of World Records proportions, my willingness to be strung along. I get to be first among nobodies to him. I have my own room. I even know where the money comes from.”

“Where does the money come from?”

“I get to be the most special of the never-to-be-special. He really knows how to play a person.”

A silence fell. Frogs in the night were calling, calling, calling.

“So what brings you here?” Colleen said. “You seem a little challenged in the entitlement department. I mean, compared to the others.”

Pip, grateful to be asked, poured out her story, omitting nothing, not even her recent hideous actions in Stephen’s bedroom in the squatter house.

“So basically,” Colleen summarized, “you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing here.”

“I’m looking for my other parent.”

“That should stand you in good stead. Having something besides a hunger for Dear Leader’s love and approval. My advice? Keep your eyes on what you came for.”

Pip laughed.

“What?”

“I was just thinking about Toni Field,” Pip said. “It’s like if they were making a movie about me and I was sleeping with the actor who played my father. Isn’t that a little weird? Sleeping with the person who’s playing his mother?”

“He’s a weird dude. Ours is not to wonder why.”

“I think it would be very weird. But Flor seems to think it’s some outstanding coup.”

“Flor’s like some single-minded carnivore whose meat is fame. She doesn’t need money — her family owns half of Peru. They’re big in minerals. She’s like, ‘Fame? Do I smell fame? Is there fame here? Will you share it with me?’ To her, Andreas hooking up with Toni Field is almost as good as hooking up with Toni Field herself.”

Pip was thrilled to be dishing, even though the mechanism was dismal, her feeling specially confided in by Colleen, who herself was treated specially by Andreas, who was off in Buenos Aires having sex with his virtual mother. To impress Colleen, she said she was going down to the river and swim.

“Now?” Colleen said.

“You want to come with me?”

“Not sure I’m up for being attacked by the hurón.”

“He always runs away when I see him.”

“He’s just trying to lull you into the water at night.”

“I’m going to do it.” Pip stood up. “You sure you don’t want to?”

“I hate dares.”

“I’m not daring you. Just asking.”

Pip waited in suspense for Colleen’s answer. For all her disadvantages in life, she did have the advantage of having swum in the dark a lot, at the swimming hole in the San Lorenzo, in Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park, on summer nights when the temperature lingered in the eighties and the river hadn’t yet dried out and scummed over. Oddly enough, her mother had often swum with her, perhaps because her body was less visible at night. Pip remembered the surprise of realizing, while her mother floated on her back in her black one-piece bathing suit, that her mother had once been a girl like her.

“OK, fuck it,” Colleen said, standing up. “I’m not going to let you win this.”

The moon had risen above the eastern pinnacle, whitening the lawn and making the darkness under the trees by the river even inkier. To get to the bathing spot, Pip and Colleen crossed the water on a chainsaw-hewn plank that was tethered by a rope to a tree in case of flooding. While she undressed, Pip sneaked glances at Colleen. Her hunched shoulders, her almost cowering posture, suggested a body image more like Pip’s own and less like those of her roommates, who stepped out of the shower with their shoulders thrown back and their heads held high.

Colleen put a toe in the river. “Where did I get the idea this water is warm?”

Pip did what had to be done, which was to run and dive and fully submerge herself. She remembered the feeling of expecting to be bitten by any number of things, at any moment, and the pleasure, then, of not being bitten; the emergence of trust in the dark water. Colleen, still cowering, her moonlit arms folded across her chest, stepped forward and sank slowly to her knees, like an Aztec virgin submitting not very happily to sacrificial death.

“Isn’t it great?” Pip said, paddling about.

“Horrible. Horrible.”

“Put your head all the way under.”

“No fucking way.”

“This has got to be the most beautiful place on earth. I can’t believe I get to be here.”

“That’s because you haven’t met the snake yet.”

“Just dive. Get your head under.”

“I’m not like you, nature girl.”

Pip reared up, feeling all fleshy appendage, and grabbed Colleen by the arm.

“Don’t,” Colleen said. “I mean it.”

“OK,” Pip said, letting go.

“This is what I do, this is who I am. I go in up to my knees and no farther. I get the worst of both worlds.”

Pip clothed herself in water again. “I know the feeling,” she said. “But I’m not having it right now.”

“I don’t see how you’re not afraid of being mauled by the hurón.”

“It’s the upside of having poor impulse control.”

“I’m going to go have another cigarette,” Colleen said, leaving the water. “Just scream with blood-curdling terror if you need me.”

Pip thought Colleen would change her mind, but she didn’t. Left by herself, enveloped by the chirping of frogs and the murmur of flowing water and the smells, the smells, Pip experienced a moment of happiness purer than any she’d ever felt. It had to do with being naked in clean water and far away from everything, in a remote valley in the poorest country in South America, but also with her courage to be alone in the river, as contrasted with Colleen’s neurotic fear. It made her feel grateful to her mother, made her miss her and wish that she could be here, floating near her. The love that was a granite impediment at the center of her life was also an unshakable foundation; she felt blessed.

She continued to feel blessed on subsequent evenings, on the back veranda, as she learned more about Colleen’s crap childhood. The farm in Vermont was something between collective and cult, the land owned by her father, who fashioned himself as a cross between Henry David Thoreau, a many-wived biblical patriarch, and the psychologist Wilhelm Reich. His ongoing self-actualization took the form of leaving the farm in Colleen’s mother’s hands for months at a time, returning with younger women who helped him channel his orgone energy into the farm’s rocky soil, to make it more fecund, and randomly knocking up Colleen’s mother. Colleen was homeschooled until she turned sixteen and ran away, first to Boston and then to Hamburg, in Germany, where she worked as an au pair. Then she attended Wellesley on a full scholarship and graduated when she was still just twenty-two. The irony of her position now, performing a role similar to her mother’s at a patriarchal place, wasn’t lost on her. She seemed almost to revel in the crappiness of it.

Pip, for her part, felt she was finally finding a friend who could understand her own strange childhood. She was attracted to Colleen’s cigarette-smelling darkness, and now she didn’t have to worry about where she sat at dinner, because Colleen saved the place next to hers. She could tell that Colleen liked her sarcasm, and she played it up for her. Colleen invited her to her room, which was sweet and low-ceilinged, to dish and drink beer and watch TV shows streamed over the private fiber-optic line that Andreas had obtained in a deal to upgrade Bolivian army comms. If Colleen had been a boy, Pip would have slept with him. As it was, she was going to bed long after midnight, waking up late and somewhat hungover, and blowing off her morning hikes.

Then one night, after returning from a hike so long that she’d done the last part of it by feel in the dark, she went to the dining room and saw that her usual place beside Colleen had been taken by Andreas Wolf. Her heart jumped at the sight of him. He was listening seriously to another woman at the table, listening and nodding, and Pip immediately got what Annagret’s boyfriend had meant about his charisma. It was partly a matter of his still-boyish German good looks, but there was an ineffable something else, a glow of charged fame particles, or a self-confidence so calm and mighty it altered the geometry of the dining room, drawing every sight line to itself. No wonder Colleen didn’t care whether he was an asshole. Pip wanted to keep looking at him herself.

Colleen was slouched low in her chair, her face averted from Andreas, and was tapping a finger on the table, her food untouched. Pip was hurt that she hadn’t saved the place to her other side for her. She took the only available seat, beside her roommate Flor. A bowl of beef stew was being handed around the table, along with the usual yuca and potatoes and onion and tomatoes. Pip had basically thrown in the towel on vegetarianism. At least the beef in Bolivia was grass-fed.

“So Dear Leader is back,” she said.

“Why do you call him that?” Flor said sharply. “This isn’t North Korea.”

“She does it because Colleen does it,” a person named Willow said.

Pip felt slapped in the face. “It’s good to see we’re evolved past eighth grade.”

“You can bet Colleen would never say ‘Dear Leader’ to his face,” Willow said.

“I bet you’d be wrong,” Pip said. “I bet he’d just laugh. I was insulting in my emails, and it wasn’t like my invitation was retracted.”

Flor did some private, not-nice eye-widening, and Pip saw that she wasn’t doing herself any favors by continuing to mention her email correspondence with Andreas.

“Why even stay here if you’re just going to be negative?” Willow said.

“What does it say about this place that a little bit of humor is so threatening?”

“It’s not threatening. It’s boring. 30 Rock already did North Korea. The laughs have been had.”

Never having seen 30 Rock, Pip was rejoinderless and squished. All through dinner, fame and charisma rays from the direction of Andreas warmed the back of her neck. She knew she ought to hurry and go back to her room, to return Colleen’s snub and not appear needy, but she also wanted to meet Andreas, and so she lingered at the table, eating two lime-flavored custards, after the others had left. Behind her, Andreas and Colleen were speaking German. This finally made her feel so excluded and irrelevant that she pushed away from her table and headed for the door.

“Pip Tyler,” Andreas said.

She turned back. Colleen was looking aside again, tapping her finger, but Andreas’s blue eyes were on her. “Come sit down with us,” he said. “We haven’t met.”

“I’ll be on the veranda,” Colleen said, standing up.

“No, stay with us,” Andreas said.

“Need to smoke.”

Colleen left the room without a glance at Pip. Andreas beckoned to her. “Will you have an espresso with me?”

“I didn’t even know there was espresso here.”

“All you have to do is ask. Teresa!”

Pedro’s wife, Teresa, stuck her head out of the kitchen, and Andreas raised two fingers. Pip sat down in the chair farthest from him at his table. The nerve she’d had in writing emails to him was so far gone that she didn’t even want to shake his hand. She just hunched her shoulders and waited to be spoken to.

“Colleen tells me you’ve been enjoying yourself here.”

She nodded.

“Did I not tell you it’s the most beautiful place?”

“No, you definitely told me.”

“I’m sorry I wasn’t here when you arrived. Making the Argentinean capital look like nineteen-seventies East Berlin — they needed a lot of advice.”

“It’s cool that they’re making a movie about you.”

“Very strange but, yes, very cool. Also very dull. You stand around for ten hours waiting for twenty minutes of action, and even then you don’t see it directly. You’re at the back of a crowd in a trailer, trying to see a monitor.”

“Still and all,” Pip said.

“Still and all, intensely gratifying to the ego.”

“I’m guessing it’s in pretty good shape, your ego.”

“No complaints.”

Pedro’s wife came out with two espressos, and Andreas told her in Spanish that she was looking very well. Teresa, normally the picture of long-suffering, appeared inordinately grateful for the compliment, and Pip caught a glimpse of how the world must seem to Andreas: like one of those stadium crowds where every person had a colored board that they could flip in concert with everyone else and form messages. The message he was forever getting was that he was special and great. He walked into the stadium, and suddenly the sea of random bodies became the words WE LOVE YOU, MAN. Pip felt a prickle of resentment.

“So what’s Toni Field like?” she said.

“Lovely. Talented.”

“She’s playing your mom, right?”

“Yes.”

“Was your mom as hot as Toni Field?”

Andreas smiled. “I knew I was going to like you.”

Pip was trying to stay mindful of asshole, of stringing along. “What’s that mean?”

“You ask good questions. You’re more angry than careful.”

She didn’t know what to say to this.

“I’m tired,” he said. “We’ll do your entry interview in the morning.” He drained his espresso cup. “Unless you feel you’ve had your vacation and just want to go home.”

“Not yet.”

“Good. Come to the barn in the morning.”

When he was gone, Pip went out to the veranda and sat down by Colleen, who was staring at the dark river. The night was warm, and so many frogs were chirping that the wall of their sound was seamless.

“So the cat’s back,” Pip said. “Does this mean the mice don’t get to play anymore?”

Colleen lit her second cigarette and didn’t answer.

“Is it just me,” Pip said, “or are you giving me a weird vibe?”

“I’m sorry,” Colleen said. “Have you ever seen a man ballroom-dancing with a woman who’s passed out? I feel like that woman. He moves my arms, he leads me around the floor. My head’s flopping like a rag doll’s, but I’m doing the usual dance moves. Like everything’s OK. Good old Colleen, still running the show.”

“I thought you might be mad at me for something.”

“No. Pure self-absorption.”

This was some consolation to Pip, but not much. She’d alienated all the undark girls by getting closer to Colleen, but Colleen was too dark to get very close to. In little more than two weeks, she’d managed to replicate her social situation in Oakland.

“I thought we could be friends,” she said.

“I’m not worth it.”

“You’re the only person here I like.”

“That feeling is fairly mutual,” Colleen said. “But you know what I’m going to do, one of these days, when they least expect it? I’m going to go back to the States and work for a big law firm and marry some dull guy and have kids with him. That’s the future I’m postponing.”

“Don’t you have to go to law school first?”

“I have a law degree from Yale.”

“Criminy.”

“I keep hanging on here, hoping there’s some more interesting existence for me. But there isn’t. It’s only a matter of time before I go and do the gutless thing. The boring thing.”

“A great job and a family doesn’t sound so bad to me.”

“You should do something better with the guts you’ve got.”

“I don’t usually think of myself as having guts.”

“People with guts seldom do.”

They listened to the frogs for a while.

“Can I keep sitting here with you?” Pip said.

“Criminy. You’re the first person I’ve ever heard say criminy.” Colleen lifted a hand, hesitated, and then patted Pip’s hand. “You can keep sitting here.”

In the morning, after an early hike, Pip went looking for Andreas. The tech building, where the boys worked, was powered by a special generator situated in a soundproofing bunker and fueled by a natural gas line, courtesy of the Bolivian government, that branched off a ten-inch pipeline that ran along the ridge. The barn and the other buildings were powered by micro hydroelectric and a field of solar panels halfway up the access road. Andreas was much admired for declining to have a private office. He underscored that the Project was a collective, not a top-down organization, by working on a laptop in the barn’s loft, where there were sofas and a kitchenette that anyone could use. Pip picked her way through the panoply of female beauty on the main floor, all the girls mousing and clicking, many of them in pajama bottoms that they would wear all day, and climbed the stairs to the loft.

Andreas was in conference with further girls in pajama bottoms. “Ten minutes,” he said to Pip. “Feel free to join us.”

“No, I’ll wait outside.”

Scraps of morning cloud and mist were shredding themselves on the sandstone pinnacles, the sun gaining the upper hand; the world here seemed created afresh every day. Pip sat on the grass and watched a bird with a long forked tail follow the goats, eating flies. It would do this all day; its job and its place in the world were secure. Pedro, crossing the lawn with a chainsaw and one of his sons, gave Pip a friendly wave. He seemed similarly secure.

Andreas came outside and sat down by her. He was wearing good narrow jeans and a close-fitting polo shirt that emphasized the flatness of his belly. “Nice morning,” he said.

“Yah,” Pip said. “The sunlight feels especially disinfectant today.”

“Ha.”

“You know, I’ve always hated the word paradise. I thought it was just stupid born-again-speak for dead. But now I’m having to rethink that, a little bit. Like that bird there—”

“Our fork-tailed flycatcher.”

“It seems perfectly contented. I’m starting to think paradise isn’t eternal contentment. It’s more like there’s something eternal about feeling contented. There’s no such thing as eternal life, because you’re never going to outrun time, but you can still escape time if you’re contented, because then time doesn’t matter. Does that make any sense?”

“A lot of sense.”

“So I envy animals. Dogs especially, because nothing smells bad to them.”

“I’m glad you like it here,” Andreas said. “Did Colleen get your automatic wire transfers sorted out?”

“Yes, thank you for that. Bankruptcy is being staved off as we speak.”

“So let’s talk about what you might do for us.”

“Besides being the resident dogperson? I already told you what I really want. I want to find out who my father is, or at least what my mother’s real name is.”

Andreas smiled. “I see how that helps you. But how does it help the Project?”

“No, I know,” Pip said. “I know I have to work.”

“Do you want to be a researcher? There’s a lot you could learn from Willow. She’s fantastic at finding things.”

“Willow doesn’t like me. Actually, nobody here much likes me, except Colleen.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“Apparently I’m too sarcastic. I wrinkle my nose at the Kool-Aid. I also talk about smell too much.”

“Nobody here has ill intentions. Every person here is extraordinary in some way.”

“You know, that’s the first actually creepy thing you’ve said to me.”

“How so?”

“If I were in charge of your image management? I’d hire some fat people, some ugly people. I wouldn’t set up camp in the most beautiful valley on earth. It gives me the creeps, all this beauty. It makes me not like you.”

Andreas stiffened. “Well, we can’t have that, can we.”

“Well, or maybe we can. Maybe not liking you is the way I can be helpful. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only person who’d be creeped out by the scene here. Didn’t you tell me you wanted me to help you understand how the world sees you? I can be your personal disliker. I have some real skills in that line.”

“It’s funny,” he said. “The more you dislike me, the more I like you.”

“I got that from my last boss, too.”

“There are no bosses here.”

“Oh, please.”

He laughed. “You’re right — I’m the boss.”

“Well, and as long as we’re being honest, I never paid much attention to your Project. What the world thinks of it is your problem, not mine. I mean, it’s nice you wanted me here. But the main reason I came is because Annagret said you could help me answer my questions.”

“You don’t admire the Project even a little bit?”

“Maybe I don’t understand it yet. I’m sure it’s very admirable. But some of your leaks are so small, it’s almost like those revenge-on-the-cheating-boyfriend websites.”

“That’s a bit harsh, don’t you think? We were just discussing a new upload — Australian government emails on the subject of endangered species. Wallabies, parrots. How to pretend to care about protecting them while they sell them out to the ranchers and hunters and mining interests. This is not a trivial leak. But the only way we get it, the only way we remain relevant, is by delivering the goods every day. We have to do the small things to get the big things.”

“I agree that it’s too bad about the endangered animals of Australia,” Pip said. “But I’m still smelling something else.”

“Ah, this nose of yours. What exactly is it telling you?”

She thought before she answered. She didn’t really want to be his personal disliker — she could see what a tiring and alienating job it would be. She’d come to Bolivia willing to admire the Project; it was mainly the chokingly high admiration levels of the other interns that made her hostile. And yet her hostility did help her stand out from the crowd. It could be a way to gratify her own miserable little ego and be liked by him.

“There was this place,” she said. “This dairy called Moonglow Dairy, near where I lived when I was growing up. I guess it was a real dairy, because they had a lot of cows, but their real money didn’t come from selling milk. It came from selling high-quality manure to organic farmers. It was a shit factory pretending to be a milk factory.”

Andreas smiled. “I don’t like where you’re going with this.”

“Well, you say you’re about citizen journalism. You’re supposedly in the business of leaks. But isn’t your real business—”

“Cow manure?”

“I was going to say fame and adulation. The product is you.”

In the tropics, there was a specific minute in the morning when the sun’s warmth stopped being pleasant and turned fierce. But this minute hadn’t arrived yet. The perspiration popping out on Andreas’s face had come from something else.

“Annagret was right,” he said. “You really are the person I wanted here. You have courage and integrity.”

“I bet you say that to all the girls.”

“Not true.”

“Not to Colleen?”

“Yes, all right.” He nodded slowly, his eyes on the ground. “Maybe to Colleen. Does that make it easier for you to believe me?”

“No. It makes me want to go pack my suitcase. Colleen is totally unhappy.”

“She’s been here too long. It’s time for her to move on.”

“And now you need a new Colleen? To exploit and string along? Is that the idea?”

“I feel bad for her. But I didn’t do anything to her. She wants something I’ve always been very clear about not being able to give her.”

“That’s not how she tells it.”

He raised his eyes and looked at her. “Pip,” he said. “Why don’t you like me?”

“It’s a fair question.”

“Is it because of Colleen?”

“No.” She could feel her self-control slipping away. “I think I’m just generally hostile these days, especially with men. It’s a problem I’m having. Couldn’t you tell from my emails?”

“Tone is hard to judge in emails.”

“I was fairly happy here until last night. And now suddenly it’s like I’m back in all the shit I tried to run away from. I’m still an angry person with poor impulse control. I’m sure it’s great what you’re doing for the wallabies and parrots — right on, Sunlight Project. But I’m thinking I should go and pack my suitcase.”

She stood up to leave before she had a full-on outburst.

“I can’t stop you,” Andreas said. “All I can do is offer you the truth. Will you sit down again and let me tell you the truth?”

“Unless the truth is very long, I might stay standing up.”

“Sit down,” he said in a much different voice.

She sat down. She was unused to being commanded. She had to admit that it was kind of a relief.

“Here are two true things about fame,” he said. “One is that it’s very lonely. The other is that the people around you constantly project themselves onto you. This is part of why it’s so lonely. It’s as if you’re not even there as a person. You’re merely an object that people project their idealism onto, or their anger, or what have you. And of course you can’t complain, can’t even talk about it, because you’re the one who wanted to be famous. If you try to talk about it anyway, some angry young woman in Oakland, California, will accuse you of self-pity.”

“I was just calling it like I saw it.”

“Everything conspires to make the famous person ever more alone.”

She was disappointed that his truth had to do with him, not her. “What about Toni Field?” she said. “Do you feel lonely with her? Isn’t that why famous people marry each other? To have someone to talk to about the terrible pain of being famous?”

“Toni’s an actress. Sleeping with her is a mutually flattering transaction.”

“Wow. Does she know that’s how you think about it?”

“We both know the terms of the transaction. Those have been the terms for me with everyone since Annagret. Things were different with Annagret because I was nobody when I met her. It’s the reason I trust her. It’s the reason I trusted her when she told me we should invite you here.”

“I didn’t trust her at all.”

“I know. But she saw something special in you. Not just talent but something else.”

“What does that even mean? The more you try to tell me the truth, the weirder this gets.”

“I’m simply asking you to give me a chance. I want you to keep being yourself. Don’t project. Try to see me as a person trying to run a business, not some famous older man you’re angry with. Take advantage of the opportunity. Give Willow a chance to teach you some research skills.”

“I’m really questioning this Willow idea.”

Andreas took her hands in his and looked into her eyes. She didn’t dare do anything with her hands except leave them completely limp. His eyes were beautifully blue. Even subtracting the vision-distorting effects of his charisma, he was a good-looking man.

“Do you want some more truth?” he said.

She looked aside. “I don’t know.”

“The truth is that Willow will be extremely nice to you if I tell her to be. Not fake nice. Genuinely nice. All I have to do is press a button.”

“Whoa, whoa,” Pip said, pulling her hands away.

“What am I supposed to do? Pretend it’s not true? Deny my own power? She projects like crazy onto me. There’s nothing I can do about it.”

“Whoa.”

“You came here for truth, didn’t you? I think you’re strong enough to hear it undiluted.”

“Whoa.”

“Anyway,” he said, standing up. “I’ll see you at lunch.”

The sun had turned fierce. Pip fell over onto her side as if pushed by the force of its heat, her head swimming. She felt as if, for a moment, she’d had her skull opened up and her brains given a vigorous stir with a wooden spoon. She was still a long way from submitting to him, a long way from being his for the taking, but for a moment he’d been deep enough inside her head that she could feel how it could happen — how Willow might change her feelings like an octopus changing color, just because he told her to, and how Colleen could be trapped in a scene she hated by a wish for a thing she knew she’d never get from a person she thought was an asshole. For a moment, an appalling divide had opened up in Pip. On one side was her good sense and skepticism. On the other was a whole-body susceptibility different in category from any she’d experienced. Even at the height of her preoccupation with Stephen, she hadn’t wanted to be his object; hadn’t fantasized about submitting and obeying. But these were the terms of the susceptibility that Andreas, his fame and confidence, had revealed in her. She understood better why Annagret had been so contemptuous of Stephen’s weakness.

She forced herself to sit up and open her eyes. Every color around her was both itself and blazing white. In the forest beyond the river, the chainsaw was moaning. How could she have imagined that she had any idea where she was? She had no idea. The place was a cult the more diabolical for pretending not to be one.

She stood up and returned to the barn, appropriated the nearest free tablet, and took it down into the riverside shade. Every second day since her arrival, she’d sent a cheerful email to her mother at her neighbor Linda’s address. Linda had written back a few times, reporting that her mother was “kinda low” but “hangin’ in there.” Pip had concocted the fiction that it was impossible to make phone calls from Los Volcanes — what was the point of being here if she had to call her mother every day? — and she hesitated now before activating TSP’s equivalent of Skype. To break down and call her mother was almost to admit that she couldn’t survive here, that she was already on her way out. But the situation seemed to qualify as urgent. She didn’t like having her brains stirred with a wooden spoon.

“Pussycat? Is everything all right?”

“Everything’s fine,” Pip said. “Pedro had to go into town for supplies. I’m calling from a pay phone there. Here, I mean. Here in town.”

“Oh, I can’t believe I’m hearing your dear voice. I thought it could be months and months before I did.”

“No, well, here it is.”

“Dearheart, how are you? Are you really all right?”

“I’m great. You can’t imagine how beautiful everything is, I made a friend, Colleen, I told you about her, she’s really smart and funny — she has a law degree from Yale. Everyone here is well educated. Everyone has parents they’re in touch with.”

“Do you know when you’re coming home yet?”

“Mom, I just got here.”

There ensued a silence in which she imagined her mother remembering her purpose in coming to Bolivia, the angry things she’d said before leaving with her suitcase.

“So anyway,” Pip said, “Andreas came back last night. Andreas Wolf. I finally got to meet him. He’s actually really nice.”

Her mother said nothing, and so Pip chattered on about the movie in Buenos Aires, about Toni Field and other Wolf women, hoping to imply that he wasn’t preying on the interns. That she wanted to imply this, when the whole reason she’d called her mother was that she was afraid of being preyed on, was a good illustration of their relationship.

“So anyway,” she said.

“Purity,” her mother said. “He’s a lawbreaker. Linda printed out an article for me to read. He’s in very serious trouble with the law. His fans don’t seem to care about that — they think he’s a hero. But if you break the law, just by helping him, you might never be able to come home. You need to think about this.”

“I haven’t seen any reports of interns returning in handcuffs.”

“Violating federal law is not a joke.”

“Mom, everyone here is seriously rich and well educated. I really don’t think—”

“Maybe their families can afford expensive lawyers. I’m not going to have a good night’s sleep until you’re safely back home.”

“Well, at least now you’ve got some reason for not sleeping.”

This was a moderately cruel thing to say, but Pip could now see, as she should have seen before she made the mistake of calling, that her mother had nothing helpful to offer.

“Whoops,” she said. “Pedro’s waving to me — gotta go.”

She was heading up to the barn when Willow came out of it. She was wearing a polka-dot jumper in which she looked oppressively fantastic.

“Hey Willow how’s it going.”

“Pip, I need to talk to you.”

“Oh, Christ, let me guess. You want to apologize.”

Willow frowned. “For what?”

“I don’t know — for being mean to me last night?”

“I wasn’t being mean. I was being honest.”

“Jesus. Fuck me.”

“Seriously,” Willow said. “What did I say to you that wasn’t honest?”

Pip sighed. “I don’t even remember. I’m sure you’re right.”

“Andreas just told me that he wants us to work together. I think it’s a great idea.”

“Yeah, I bet you do.”

“What do you mean?”

“He told you to like me, and now you like me. How am I not supposed to find that creepy?”

“I already wanted to like you,” Willow said. “We all did. It’s just that your hostility is kind of hard to take.”

“It’s who I am. It’s what I live and breathe.”

“Well, then, explain it to me. If I understand better where it’s coming from, it won’t bother me anymore. Do you want to go for a walk now and tell me about it?”

“Willow.” Pip waved a hand in front of her eyes. “Hello? You’re totally creeping me out. You’re fucking with my head. You were mean to me last night — my senses did not deceive me. And now you want to be my friend? Because Andreas told you to?”

Willow laughed. “He told me to remember that you’re funny — that that’s the way your mind works. And he’s right. You’re really funny.”

Pip broke away and marched up toward the barn. Willow ran after her and grabbed her by the arm.

“Let go of me,” Pip said. “You’re worse than Annagret.”

“No,” Willow said. “We’re going to be spending a lot of time together. We have to find a way to like each other.”

“I’m never going to like you.”

“Why not?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“I do want to know. I want you to be honest. That’s the only way this works. Come sit with me and tell me everything you hate about me. I already told you I don’t like your hostility.”

To Pip there seemed to be only two choices, either pack her bag or do what Willow asked. If she hadn’t called her mother, she might have imagined there was something to go home to. But she’d come here hoping to get information, she hadn’t got it yet, and according to both Colleen and Andreas she had courage. So she sat down with Willow in the shade of a flowering tree.

“I hate that you’re way prettier than I am,” she said. “I hate that there were always these alpha girls and you’re one of them and I’m not. I hate that you went to Stanford. I hate that you don’t have to worry about money. I hate that you’ll never really get how privileged you are. I hate that you love the Project and aren’t bothered by how weird this place is. I hate that you don’t have to be snarky. I hate that you can’t imagine what it’s like to be poor and owe money, and have a depressive single parent, and be so angry and weird that you can’t even have a boyfriend — oh, never mind.” Pip shook her head with disgust. “This is obviously all just my own self-pity.”

But Willow’s face had become a purplish-red prune of hurt. “No,” she said. “No. You’re only saying what I’ve always known people think about me.”

She squeezed her eyes shut and began to cry. Pip was horrified.

“I didn’t ask to be pretty,” Willow snuffled. “I didn’t ask to be privileged.”

“No, I know,” Pip said consolingly. “Of course not.”

“What can I do to make up for it? What can I possibly ever do?”

“Well. Actually. Do you happen to have a hundred and thirty thousand dollars you can spare?”

Willow smiled while continuing to cry. “That’s funny. You really are funny.”

“I take it that’s a no.”

“I suffer, too, you know. Believe me, I suffer.” Willow took Pip’s hands and rubbed her palms with her thumbs. It seemed to be a Sunlight Project thing, this invasive grabbing of hands. “But can I be really honest with you?”

“Seems only fair.”

“There’s another reason I sort of hate you. It’s because he likes you.”

“He seems to like you, too.”

Willow shook her head. “The way he talked to me about you — I could tell. Even before that, I could tell. You obviously didn’t care about the Project. And then, when we heard he writes you emails … It’s going to be a little hard to work with you, knowing how much he likes you.”

A complex fear was stealing over Pip, the fear that Andreas really did specially like her, along with the fear of being disliked for it; of having to apologize for it, especially to Colleen. “OK,” she said. “Now I’m starting to feel guilty.”

“It’s no fun, is it?”

Willow smiled and leaned forward and gave her a sisterly hug. Pip had the corrupt sensation of being bought off with the prospect of the friendship of an alpha girl, the promise of social acceptance. But she was no longer distrusting Willow. This seemed like a step forward.

In the evening, on the veranda, Pip told Colleen almost everything the day had brought.

“Willow’s by no means the worst,” Colleen said. “Did she tell you one of her brothers was killed three years ago?”

“God, no.”

“Snowboarding accident. She’s still on major meds. And of course this is known to the Wolf. The Wolf can always spot the weak lamb in the flock.”

Pip was impressed, almost confounded, that Willow hadn’t played the dead-brother card with her. Had simply sat there under the tree and taken her punishment. It spoke to the intensity of whatever Andreas had said to her.

“I’m understanding a little better how you’re stuck here,” she said.

“Yeah, well. From what you’re telling me, I suspect my days have been numbered since you got here.”

“Colleen. You know I’d rather be your friend than his.”

“You say that now. But he’s only been back for one day.”

“I don’t want to be here if you’re not here.”

“Really? If what you need is time away from your mother, you should try to hold out longer than two weeks.”

“I don’t have to go back to California. Maybe we could both go somewhere else.”

“I thought you had a missing parent to find.”

“Maybe Flor can give me a hundred and thirty thousand dollars, and then I won’t have to.”

“You’ve got a lot to learn about rich people,” Colleen said. “Flor won’t even share her dental floss.”

When Pip went to the barn the next morning, after her early hike, Willow was outwardly unchanged and yet seemed like a different person, a fragile person on antidepressants, a guilty survivor of her little brother’s death. This time it was Pip who initiated the hug. She couldn’t tell whether it was good that she’d overcome some of her hostility or sordid that she was now on hugging terms with a member of the in crowd; whether she was evolving or being corrupted. But Willow’s research chops were awesome. She typed and moused and clicked so rapidly, bouncing among so many windows at once — Australian property transfers, rosters of Australian corporate directorships, Australian business-news archives, dark-Web Australian government databases — that Pip could see it would be weeks before she could follow what Willow was doing in real time.

Andreas didn’t speak to her privately that day, nor the next day, nor for ten days after that. He was constantly conducting hushed powwows with the other girls, coming and going between the barn and the tech building, and having long informational conversations with Willow while Pip sat beginnerishly in a chair beside her. That he ignored only her, as if to emphasize that she was the only intern not contributing materially to the Project, was obviously deliberate. He was obviously trying to sharpen her appetite for further personal contact, further moments of intoxicating honesty. But she couldn’t bring herself either to confront him or to resent him. He’d got inside her head with a wooden spoon. She wanted more of what he was withholding. Not a whole lot more, she told herself. Just another taste, to be reminded of how it felt — to see if he could have that effect on her a second time.

And then one night he was gone again.

“Toni Field came to town,” Colleen explained after dinner.

“Really? To Santa Cruz? Why didn’t she just come here?”

“It’s part of his firewall between business and recreation. And apparently Toni needs special handling. She’s a little too into him. Doesn’t seem to understand who gets to set the rules. She way overstepped them by following him to Bolivia. He’s probably terminating their relationship as we speak. In the nicest way imaginable, of course.”

“He told you that?”

“He tells me a lot, sister. I’m still first among nobodies. Don’t you be forgetting that.”

“I hate you.”

“You’re kind of breaking my heart here, Pip. I gave you fair warning about him. And now you say a thing like that.”

Two mornings later, returning from her hike, Pip found Pedro waiting for her with the Land Cruiser on the grass in front of the main building. She still couldn’t understand every word Pedro said, but she gathered that El Ingeniero (as he called Andreas) wanted her to join him in Santa Cruz right away.

“¿Yo? ¿Está seguro?”

“Sí, claro. Pip Tyler. Va a necesitar su pasaporte.”

Pedro was impatient to leave, but she begged permission to take a shower and put on fresh clothes. She was so out of her head that she found herself shampooing her hair a second time without intending to. She couldn’t even frame the question of why she’d been summoned. Her thoughts were jostling fragments. Too late to ask Colleen if interns ever traveled with Andreas. Too late to ask Pedro if she was supposed to bring anything but her passport, or what she should wear. She looked down at her left palm and saw that she’d filled it with shampoo a third time.

The inbound drive felt less epically long than the outbound had. Civilization reassembled itself in the form of dusty roadwork, cheap loudspeakers blasting música valluna, billboard ads for mobile devices, posses of kids in school uniforms, a deepening particulate pall. Not until they were into Santa Cruz’s ringed boulevards, passing stores that were simply small warehouses with the front wall removed, did Pip hazard to ask Pedro why he supposed El Ingeniero wanted her in town.

Pedro shrugged. “Negocios. Él siempre tiene algún ‘negocito’ que atender.”

In a less raw and more shaded neighborhood was a low-rise hotel called the Cortez. Pedro helped her register and instructed her to wait in her room for a call from El Ingeniero. She searched Pedro’s face for evidence of custodial worry, but he just smiled and told her to enjoy the city.

She’d never stayed in a hotel. Wandering through the lobby and bar, her knapsack on her shoulder, she heard conversations in English and possibly Russian. Out in the courtyard were jacaranda trees and a large fiberglass stork whose belly was a pay phone. She thought she saw Andreas at a table by the swimming pool, but it wasn’t him.

Having her own hotel room, cleaned expressly for her, was possibly the happiest-making gift she’d ever been given. There was a desinfectado-certifying strip of paper across the toilet seat, crisp paper wrappings on the drinking glasses, a TV, a built-in air conditioner, a minibar, total luxury. She remembered her high-school friends’ descriptions of Hawaiian resorts, her college friends’ raptures about room service, and how deprived she’d felt listening to them. Even poor people sometimes stayed at Motel 6. But her mother wouldn’t travel, and while her friends were taking spring-break road trips she’d always dutifully gone home to Felton.

She kicked off her shoes and rolled around on the bed, luxuriating in the cleanness of the pillowcases. She closed her eyes and saw a tropical highway with rompemuelles. She expected the phone to ring soon, but it didn’t, and so she lay for a while and listened to Aretha. She tried to watch soap operas that her Spanish wasn’t quite up to. She drank a beer from the minibar and finally cracked the Barbara Kingsolver novel that Willow had pressed on her. The sunlight in her window was mellowing to apricot by the time Andreas called.

“Good, you’re there.”

“Yah,” Pip said. Her voice sounded sultry from hours in a hotel-room bed. There was a bit of the wooden spoon simply in his having made her stay in bed all day.

“I had a very long meeting with an assistant defense minister.”

“That’s impressive. What about?”

“I’ll be in the bar. Come down when you can.”

When she hung up the phone, her hands were shaking, her whole arms, really, from the shoulders down. Again the sensation of having no idea where she was. She could almost see the thing her mother had claimed to see, the not-right thing about Andreas’s interest in her. The swiftness with which she’d arrived at this moment, the straightness of the line from Annagret’s questionnaire to a room at the Hotel Cortez, definitely gave her a feeling of no-control. And yet she’d emailed Andreas of her own free will. She’d come to Bolivia for good reasons of her own, and there was honestly nothing so outstanding or attractive about her. Was it simply that she was proving to be the weakest lamb?

Andreas was at a table in a corner of the bar, typing on a tablet. As Pip crossed the room, she heard the words Toni Field from a table of three American businessmen. They were looking at Andreas, and it compounded her disorientation to be the person plunking her unfamous self down by him. He typed a little more before he turned off the tablet and smiled at her. “So,” he said.

“Yeah, so,” she said. “This is fully weird.”

“Do you want a drink?”

“Can we stay here if I don’t?”

“Certainly.”

She crossed her arms to suppress their shaking, but this only transferred the shaking to her jaw. She felt quite miserable.

“You look terrified,” Andreas said. “Please don’t be. I know this seems strange to you, but I brought you here for business only. I needed to talk to you, and I can’t do it at home. I’ve created a beehive of surveillance there.”

“There’s always the woods,” Pip said. “I seem to be the only one who walks in them.”

“Trust me. This is better.”

“Trust is kind of the opposite of what I’m feeling now.”

“I’m telling you: this is business. How are you liking working with Willow?”

“Willow?” She glanced over her shoulder at the American men. One of them was still looking at Andreas. “It’s just like you promised. She likes me. Although I do wonder if she’ll still like me after I’ve been in a hotel with you. I know Colleen won’t. I’m already pretty well compromised just by being here.”

Andreas looked at the Americans and gave them a little wave. “There’s a nice churrasquería around the corner. It will be empty at this hour. Are you hungry?”

“Yes and no.”

Walking with the Bringer of Sunlight on the city streets, carrying her dumb knapsack, she felt like a true San Lorenzo Valley yokel. A flock of green-and-orange parrots wheeled overhead, screeching louder than the buses and scooters. She wished that she could join their flock. At the churrasquería, in a secluded corner booth, Andreas ordered a bottle of wine. She knew she shouldn’t drink, but she couldn’t resist.

“Honestly?” she said when the wine was poured. “I don’t know why I’m here, but I wish I wasn’t.”

“It was your choice,” he said. “You didn’t have to get in the Land Cruiser.”

“How was that my choice? You’re the boss, you’re making my loan payments. You have all the power. You’ve got everything, I’ve got nothing. But it still doesn’t mean I want to be your special girl.”

He watched her drink without drinking from his own glass. “Is it so bad to be special?”

“Have you seen any kids’ movies lately?”

“I sat through Frozen with a woman I was seeing.”

“They’re all about being the special one, the chosen one. ‘Only you can save the world from Evil.’ That kind of thing. And never mind that specialness stops meaning anything when every kid is special. I remember watching those movies and thinking about all the unspecial characters in the chorus or whatever. The people just doing the hard work of belonging to society. They’re the ones my heart really goes out to. The movie should be about them.”

He smiled. “You should have grown up in East Germany.”

“Maybe!”

“But what if ordinariness is an unrealistic ambition for you?”

“I’m telling you what you can do to help me, if you really want to help me. Just leave me alone. Don’t make me sit around in a hotel room all afternoon, waiting for you. I’d rather be part of the hive.”

“That’s unfortunate,” he said. “I do understand what you’re saying. But I need your help, too.”

Pip refilled her glass. “OK. I guess we’re on to plan B.”

“I’m going to tell you something that I’ve only told one other person, ever. After you hear it, I want you to think about which one of us has the real power over the other. I’m going to give you the power you say you don’t have. Do you want it?”

“Oh boy. More truth?”

“Yes, more truth.” He looked around the empty restaurant. The waiter was polishing glasses, and dusk had fallen on the street. “Can I trust you?”

“I haven’t told anyone about you and your mom’s vagina.”

“That was nothing. This is something.”

He picked up his wineglass, held it in front of his eyes, and drained it.

“I killed a person,” he said. “When I was twenty-seven. I killed a man with a shovel. I planned it carefully and did it in cold blood.”

The wooden spoon was in her head again, and this time it was worse, because this time it felt as if the disturbance were emanating from his own head. There was torment in his face.

“I’ve lived with it half a lifetime,” he said. “It never goes away.”

He looked so anguished, so much like a person, so little like a famous figure, that she reached across the table and squeezed his hand.

“The victim was Annagret’s stepfather,” he said. “She was fifteen, he was sexually abusing her. He worked for the Stasi, and she had no recourse. She came to the church where I worked. I murdered him to protect her.”

What he was saying couldn’t possibly be true, but Pip suddenly didn’t want to be touching him. She withdrew her hand from his and put it on her lap. One day when she was in high school, an ex-convict had come to talk to her civics class about conditions in California’s prison system. He was a well-spoken middle-class white guy who happened to have served fifteen years for shooting his stepfather in the heat of an argument. When he described the trouble he now had with women, the question of whether to cop to being an ex-con and a murderer before a first date, Pip’s skin had crawled at the thought of dating him. Once a killer, always a killer.

“What are you thinking?” he said.

“This is very disturbing,” she said.

“I know.”

“Am I really the only person you’ve ever told about this?”

“With one terrible exception, yes.”

“It’s not, like, some initiation thing you do with everyone who works for you?”

“No, Pip. It’s not.”

She was remembering that after the ex-con had made her skin crawl she’d felt guilty and compassionate for him. How hard it must have been to carry around forever a thing he’d done once on an impulse. She did things on impulse all the time.

“So,” she said. “This must be the real reason you trust Annagret.”

“That’s right. I didn’t tell you everything about us.”

“Annagret knows what you did.”

“Indeed. She helped me do it.”

“Criminy.”

He refilled their wineglasses. “We got away with it,” he said. “The Stasi had suspicions, but my parents protected me. I eventually got the case files, and the case went away. But there was a problem. I made a horrible mistake, after the Wall came down. I met a guy in a bar and told him what I’d done. An American…” He covered his face with his hands. “Horrible mistake.”

“Why’d you tell him?”

“Because I liked him. I trusted him. I also needed his help.”

“And why was it a mistake?”

Andreas lowered his hands. His expression had hardened. “Because now, all these years later, I have reason to think he intends to destroy the Project with his information. He’s already made one rather pointed threat. Are you starting to see why I need an intern I can trust?”

“I sure don’t see why it’s me.”

“I can take you to the airport right now. We’ll send your bag after you. I’ll understand if you want to leave now and never have anything to do with me again. Would you like that?”

Something was very wrong, but Pip didn’t know what. It didn’t seem possible that Andreas had killed a man with a shovel, but it also didn’t seem possible that he would just make up the story. Whether the story was true or not, she sensed that he was trying to do something to her by telling it. Something not right.

“The questionnaire,” she said. “You didn’t really ever use it with anybody else. It was just for me.”

He smiled. “You were a special case.”

“Nobody else had to take it.”

“I can’t tell you how happy I am that you came here.”

“But why me? Wouldn’t you rather have a true believer?”

“Precisely not. We’ve had some anomalies in our internal network. Little things missing, transmission log discrepancies. This is going to sound extremely paranoid, but it’s really only moderately paranoid. I have some reason to worry that we have a journalist embedded with us.”

“No, that’s fairly high-grade paranoia.”

“Think about it. Somebody who wants to come and spy on us would pretend to be the truest of believers. That’s how they’d get in. And all I have is true believers.”

“What about Colleen?”

“She came as a true believer. I almost completely trust her. But not quite.”

“Jesus. You really are paranoid.”

“Sure.” Andreas smiled again, more broadly. “I’m out of my fucking mind. But this guy who I confessed to in Berlin — who got me to confess — he was a journalist. And do you know what he does now? He runs an investigative-journalism nonprofit.”

“Which one?”

“It’s better if you don’t know, at least for a while.”

“Why not?”

“Because I just want to you to listen. Keep your ears open, without preconceptions. Tell me your sense of what’s going on. I already know you have very good sense.”

“So basically be a horrid spy.”

“Maybe. If you want to use that word. But my spy. The person I can talk to and trust. Would you do that for me? You can keep learning from Willow. We’ll still help you try to find your father.”

She thought of good old mentally ill Dreyfuss—There was something not right about those Germans. She said, “You didn’t actually kill anyone, did you.”

“No, I did, Pip. I did.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“It’s really not a matter of opinion.”

“Hmm. And you say Annagret helped you?”

“It was terrible. But yes. She did. Her mother had married a very evil person. I have to live with what I did, but part of me doesn’t regret it.”

“And if the story comes out, that’s the end of Mr. Clean.”

“It destroys the Project, yes.”

“And the Project is you. You’re the product.”

“So you say.”

Something in Pip’s chest spasmed, almost retched. “I don’t like you,” she said involuntarily. She was having an outburst with no advance warning. She scrambled out of the booth, reached back into it for her knapsack, and ran to the door of the restaurant and out onto the sidewalk. Was she sick to her stomach? Yes, she was. She dropped to her knees beneath a streetlight and spat up a dark rope of liquid.

She was still on her hands and knees when Andreas crouched beside her and put his hands on her shoulders. For a while he didn’t say anything, just gently massaged her shoulders.

“We should get some food in you,” he said finally. “I think it would help.”

She nodded. She was at his mercy — it wasn’t like there was anywhere else she could go. And the way he was rubbing her shoulders was undeniably tender. No man old enough to be her father had ever touched her like that. She allowed herself to be led back to the booth, where he ordered her an omelet and french fries.

After she’d eaten part of the omelet, she started drinking again, really putting it away. In the haziness that ensued, there were the actual words he spoke, many more words about his crime, about Annagret, about East Germany, about the Internet, about his mother and his father, about honesty and dishonesty, about his breakup with Toni Field, and then there was the deeper nonverbal language of intention and symbol which constituted the wooden spoon. The working over her brain was getting now was far more prolonged and thorough than the first one. Each of the two languages, the verbal and the nonverbal, kept distracting her from the other, and she was in any case increasingly drunk, and so it was hard to follow what was being said in either language. But when a second bottle of wine had been emptied, and Andreas had paid the waiter, and they’d walked back to the Hotel Cortez, where Pedro was waiting with the Land Cruiser, she found that it didn’t matter whether or not she liked Andreas.

“You’ll be home by midnight,” he was saying. “You can make up whatever story you like. A broken tooth, emergency dental work — whatever you like. Colleen will still be your friend.”

Pedro was holding open the door of the Land Cruiser.

“Wait,” Pip said. “Can I go to my room and lie down first? Just for an hour. My head’s a little spinny.”

Andreas looked at his watch. It was clear that he wished she would leave now.

“Just for an hour,” she said. “I don’t want to be sick on the highway.”

He nodded reluctantly. “One hour.”

As soon as she was in her room, she felt sick again and threw up. Then she drank a Coke from the minibar and felt much better. But instead of going downstairs, she sat on the bed and waited for some time to pass. Making Andreas impatient seemed to her the only form of resistance available, the only way to assert herself against the spoon. But was resisting what she even wanted? The longer she waited, the more erotic the suspense felt. The mere fact of waiting in a hotel room implied sex — what else was a hotel room for?

When the phone rang, she ignored it. It rang fifteen times before it stopped. A minute later, there was a knock on the door. Pip stood up and opened it, afraid it would be Pedro, but it was Andreas. He was pale, tight-lipped, furious.

“You’ve been here an hour and a half,” he said. “You didn’t hear the phone ring?”

“Come in for a second.”

He looked up and down the hallway and came in. “I need to be able to trust you,” he said, locking the door. “This is not a good start.”

“Maybe you just won’t be able to trust me.”

“That’s not acceptable.”

“I have poor impulse control. This is a known fact about me. You knew what you were getting into.”

Still pale, still angry, he moved toward her, backing her into the corner behind the TV. He grasped her arms. Her skin felt alive to his, but she didn’t dare be the one to make the move.

“What are you going to do?” she said. “Strangle me?”

He could have found this funny, but he didn’t. “What do you want?” he said.

“What does every girl want from you?”

This did seem to amuse him. He let go of her arms and smiled wistfully. “They want to tell me their secrets.”

“Really. I find that hard to relate to, not having any myself.”

“You’re an open book.”

“Pretty much.”

He walked away and sat down on the bed. “You know,” he said, “it’s difficult to trust a person with no secrets.”

“I find it hard to trust people, period.”

“I’m not happy that Pedro knows I’m up here with you. But now that I’m here, we’re not leaving until I know I can trust you.”

“Then we could be here quite a while.”

“Do you want to hear my theory of secrets?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“My theory is that identity consists of two contradictory imperatives.”

“OK.”

“There’s the imperative to keep secrets, and the imperative to have them known. How do you know that you’re a person, distinct from other people? By keeping certain things to yourself. You guard them inside you, because, if you don’t, there’s no distinction between inside and outside. Secrets are the way you know you even have an inside. A radical exhibitionist is a person who has forfeited his identity. But identity in a vacuum is also meaningless. Sooner or later, the inside of you needs a witness. Otherwise you’re just a cow, a cat, a stone, a thing in the world, trapped in your thingness. To have an identity, you have to believe that other identities equally exist. You need closeness with other people. And how is closeness built? By sharing secrets. Colleen knows what you secretly think of Willow. You know what Colleen secretly thinks of Flor. Your identity exists at the intersection of these lines of trust. Am I making any sense?”

“Sort of,” Pip said. “But it’s a pretty weird theory for a person who exposes people’s secrets for a living.”

“Were you not listening in the restaurant? I got trapped into this job. I hate the Internet as much as I hated my motherland.”

“I guess you did say that.”

“Were you not even listening to yourself? I’m not doing this job because I still believe in it. It’s all about me now. It’s my identity.”

He made a gesture of self-disgust.

“I don’t know what to say to you,” Pip said. “I already told you my secret. I told you my real name.”

“Your name is nothing to be ashamed of.”

“I also went through a shoplifting phase in middle school. I had quite a masturbation thing going when I was ten.”

“Didn’t everyone?”

“OK, so there’s nothing. I’m boring and ordinary. Like I said, you knew what you were getting into.”

Suddenly, without her quite knowing how he’d traversed the distance between them, he was pressing her into the corner again. He had his mouth to her ear and his hand wedged between her legs. There was a weird suspenseful moment of adjustment. She couldn’t breathe, but she could hear him breathing heavily. Then his hand moved up to her belly and down again into her jeans and underpants.

“What about this,” he murmured in her ear. “Is this not a private thing of yours?”

“Fairly private, yes,” she said, heart pounding.

“This is the reason I trust you?”

She couldn’t believe what was happening. He was putting a fingertip inside her, and her body wasn’t exactly saying no to it.

“I don’t know,” she whispered. “Maybe.”

“Do I have your permission for this?”

“Um…”

“Just tell me what you want.”

She didn’t know what to say, but she probably should have said something, because, in the absence of a response, he was unzipping her jeans with his free hand.

“I know I was asking for it,” she whispered. “But…”

He drew his head back. There was an avid gleam in his eyes. “But what?”

“Well,” she said, squirming a little, “isn’t it kind of customary to kiss a person before you stick your finger in her?”

“That’s what you want? A kiss?”

“Well, I guess, between the two things, right at this moment, yes.”

He brought his hands up to her face and cupped her cheeks. She could smell her own private scent as well as his male body smell, a European smell, not unpleasant. She closed her eyes to receive his kiss. But when it came, she didn’t respond to it. Somehow it wasn’t what she wanted. Her eyes opened and found his looking into them.

“You have to believe this wasn’t why I brought you here,” he said.

“Are you sure it’s what you want even now?”

“In strict honesty? Not as much as I want to kiss a different part of you.”

“Whoa.”

“I think you’d like it. And then you could leave, and I could trust you.”

“Is this the way you always are with women? Was this how things went with Toni Field?”

He shook his head. “I told you. I’m not myself in transactions like that. I’m showing my true self to you because I want us to trust each other.”

“OK, but, I’m sorry — how does this make you trust me?”

“You said it yourself. If Colleen finds out about this, she won’t forgive you. None of the interns will. I want you to have a secret that only I know.”

She frowned, trying to understand the logic.

“Will you give me that secret?” He put his hands on her cheeks again. “Come lie down with me.”

“Maybe it’s better if I just go back.”

“You’re the one who wanted to go to your room. You’re the one who made me come up here.”

“You’re right. I did.”

“So come lie down. The person I honestly am is a person who wants his tongue in you. Will you let me do that? Please let me do that.”

Why did she follow him to the bed? To be brave. To submit to the fact of the hotel room. To have her revenge on the indifferent men she’d left behind in Oakland. To do the very thing her mother had been afraid would happen. To punish Colleen for caring more about Andreas than about her. To be the person who’d come to South America and landed the famous, powerful man. She had any number of dubious reasons, and for a while, on the bed, as he slowed down the action, kissing her eyes and stroking her hair, kissing her neck, unbuttoning her shirt, helping her out of her bra, touching her breasts with his gaze and his hands and his mouth, tenderly easing down her jeans, even more tenderly peeling off her underpants, her reasons were all in harmony. She could feel his hands trembling on her hips, feel his own excitement, and this was something — it was a lot. He seemed honestly to want her private thing. It was really this knowledge, more than the negocitos he was expertly transacting with his mouth, that caused her to come with such violent alacrity.

But after it was over, the sensation of not liking him returned. She felt embarrassed and dirty. He was kissing her cheeks and her neck, thanking her. She knew what the polite thing to do was, and she could tell, from his unabated urgency, that he wanted it. Not to deliver would be selfish and perverse of her. But she couldn’t help it: she didn’t feel like fucking what she didn’t like.

“I’m sorry,” she said, gently pushing him away.

“Don’t be sorry.” He pursued her and climbed onto her, moving his clothed legs between her bare ones. “You’re remarkable. You’re everything I could have hoped for.”

“No, that was definitely great. That felt really nice. I don’t think I’ve ever come so fast or so hard. It was like, wowee-zowee.”

“Oh God,” he said, shutting his eyes. He took her head in his hands and humped her a little with the hardness in his pants. “God, Pip. God.”

“But, um.” Again she tried to push him away. “Maybe I should go back now. You said I could go back after you did that.”

“Pedro and I worked out a story about a broken truck axle. We have hours if you want them.”

“I’m trying to be honest. Isn’t that the point here?”

He must have tried to hide the look that appeared on his face then, because it was gone again immediately, replaced by that smile of his. For a moment, though, she’d seen that he was crazy. As if in a bad dream, a dream in which some guilty fact is forgotten and then suddenly remembered, it occurred to her that he had actually once murdered someone; that this was real.

“It’s fine,” he said with that smile.

“It’s not that I didn’t like the way you made me feel.”

“Truly, it’s fine.” Without kissing her, without even looking at her, he got up and went to the door. He straightened his shirt and hitched up his pants.

“Please don’t be angry with me.”

“I’m the opposite of angry,” he said, not looking at her. “I’m mad for you. Quite unexpectedly mad for you.”

“I’m sorry.”

In the Land Cruiser, to salvage some shred of dignity, she told Pedro that El Ingeniero had needed help with his negocios. Pedro, in reply, seemed to say that El Ingeniero’s work was very complicated and beyond his understanding, but that he didn’t have to understand it to be a good overseer at Los Volcanes.

When they got home, long after midnight, a light was still burning in Colleen’s room. Deciding that lies were better told fresh than stale, Pip went straight up the stairs to the room. Colleen was in bed with a workbook and a pencil.

“You’re up late,” Pip said.

“Studying for the Vermont bar. I’ve had this book for a year. Tonight seemed like a good night to finally open it. How was Santa Cruz?”

“I wasn’t in Santa Cruz.”

“Right.”

“I lost a big filling at breakfast. Pedro had to take me to the dentist. And then he hit a speed bump too hard and broke an axle. I spent like six hours sitting outside a garage.”

Colleen carefully made a mark in the workbook with her pencil. “You’re a terrible liar.”

“I’m not lying.”

“There isn’t a rompemuelles within two hundred miles that Pedro doesn’t know.”

“He was talking to me. He didn’t see it.”

“Just get the fuck out of my room, all right?”

“Colleen.”

“It’s not personal. You’re not the person I’m hating. I knew this would happen sometime. I’m just sorry it was you. There was a lot to like about you.”

“I like you so much, too.”

“I said get out of here.”

“You’re being crazy!”

Finally Colleen looked up from the workbook. “Really? You want to lie to me? You want to prolong this?”

Pip’s eyes filled. “I’m sorry.”

Colleen turned a page in her book and made a show of reading. Pip stood for a while longer in the doorway, but Colleen was right. There was nothing else to say.

In the morning, instead of taking a hike, Pip went to breakfast with the others. Colleen wasn’t there, but Pedro was. He’d already told the story of his and Pip’s ill-fated trip to the dentist. If Willow and the others were suspicious, they didn’t show it. Pip was sick with general dread and specific guilt about Colleen, but to everyone else it was just another day of Sunlight.

Colleen left two days later. She’d been discreet about her reasons, saying only that it was time to move on, and once she was safely gone the other girls were frankly patronizing about her depression and her lovesickness for Andreas; their consensus was that her departure was a much-needed step toward restoring her self-esteem. Which, in a way, it was. But Pip inwardly burned with loyalty to her, and with guilt.

When Andreas returned, he gave Colleen’s job as business manager to the Swede, Anders. But since no one imagined that Anders was specially dear to Andreas, Colleen’s position at the top of the pecking order went to the person whom everybody knew Andreas particularly liked, the person whose presence at Los Volcanes was known to be more extraordinary than their own. Now it was Pip beside whom Andreas sat down for dinner, Pip whose table filled up first. To her vast amusement, tiny Flor was suddenly eager to be her friend. Flor even asked to join her on a hike, to experience for herself the smells that Pip had raved about, and once Flor had hiked with her the other girls vied for the same privilege.

The less than healthy satisfaction Pip took in being socially central for once in her life was linked in her mind to the memory of Andreas’s tongue and how explosively her body had responded to it. Even the dirtiness she’d felt afterward was agreeable in hindsight, in a wicked sort of way. She imagined an arrangement whereby she continued to receive the favor from time to time, and he could trust her, and she could have her dirty pleasure. He’d implied it himself: he was one of those cunnilingus guys. Surely some mutually satisfactory arrangement could be worked out.

But the weeks went by, August becoming September, and though Pip was now a full-fledged researcher, handling simpler assignments on her own and devoting her free time to laborious searches of databases for the name Penelope Tyler, Andreas still avoided talking to her one-on-one the way he did with Willow and many of the others. She understood that she was supposed to be spying for him, and that they should never be seen having hushed conspiratorial talks. But the spying thing seemed ridiculous to her — the only vibe she ever got off anyone was overpowering sincerity — and she began to feel that she was being punished by him; that she’d hurt him and shamed him by refusing to have sex with him. His unfailingly warm and affectionate manner with her meant nothing; she knew very well that he was a master dissembler; he’d all but said it himself, and his incessant talk of trust and honesty only proved it. Underneath, she became convinced, he was angry with her and regretted having trusted her.

And so, day by day, seduced by tongue and popularity, she formed the resolve to give him everything he wanted the next time they were alone. Quite unexpectedly mad for you: that still had to be operable, didn’t it? She wasn’t mad for him, but she was curious, sexually botherated, and increasingly resolute. She began looking for opportunities to accost him in private. Someone always seemed to follow him out of the barn to the tech building; Pedro or Teresa always seemed to be within earshot when he was alone in the main building. But one afternoon, toward the end of September, she looked out a window and saw him sitting by himself in a far corner of the goat pasture, facing the forest.

She hurried outside and crossed the pasture so briskly that the goats scattered. Andreas must have heard her coming, but he didn’t turn around until she reached him and saw that he’d been crying. It reminded her of something; of Stephen crying on their front porch in Oakland.

He patted the grass. “Sit down.”

“What is it?”

“Just sit down. I got bad news.”

Mindful of their visibility, she sat down at some distance from him.

“My mother is sick,” he said. “Kidney cancer. I just found out.”

“I’m so sorry,” Pip said. “I didn’t know you were even in touch with her.”

“She doesn’t hear from me. But I still hear from her.”

“Should I leave you alone?”

“Was there something you wanted?”

“It’s not important.”

“I’d much rather hear about you than think about her.”

“Is it bad, her cancer? What stage is it?”

He shrugged. “She wants to come and see me. Does that sound good? It’s not as if I can travel to her. That’s some small blessing. I’m spared that decision.”

“I feel like hugging you. But I don’t want to be seen doing it.”

“That’s good. You’ve been very good, by the way.”

“Thank you. Although … Are you mad at me?”

“Certainly not.”

She nodded, wondering whether to believe him.

“I’ve spent most of my life hating her,” he said. “I told you some of the reasons I hate her. But now I get this email and I remember that they weren’t the real reasons, or not the whole reason. They’re half the reason. The other half is that I can never stop loving her, in spite of all those other reasons. I forget about this, for years at a time. But then I get this email…”

He expelled air, either a laugh or a sob. Pip didn’t dare look to see which it was. “Maybe the love is more important than the hate,” she said.

“I’m sure for you it would be.”

“Well, anyway. I’m sorry.”

“Did you need to talk to me privately? Should we make some arrangement?”

“No. Either I’m a terrible spy or you were just being paranoid.”

“Then what did you want?”

She turned to him and showed him, with the look on her face, what she wanted.

His eyes, which were bloodshot, widened. “Oh,” he said. “I see.”

She looked down at the ground and spoke in a low voice. “I feel really bad about what happened the other time. I think it could be better. I mean, if that’s at all interesting to you.”

“It is. Absolutely. I’d hardly dared hope.”

“I’m sorry. You asked what I wanted, but I shouldn’t have answered. Not now.”

“No, it’s fine.” He sprang to his feet, his grief apparently forgotten. “I have to go to town next week, to see her. I was dreading that, but now I’m not. Let me think about how to get you there with me. How does that sound?”

Pip struggled to find breath to answer. “Sounds good,” she said.

One of the insaner things about the Project was that private electronic communication was impossible. The internal network was designed so that all chats and emails were viewable by anyone on the network, because everything was viewable to the tech boys and it wasn’t fair to give them an advantage. If a girl wanted to hook up with a boy (and it happened quite a bit, though the boys were physically a less prepossessing lot), she arranged it either openly on the network or in person. And so it was that Andreas pressed a handwritten note into Pip’s hand when she was leaving the main building the following night.

Be happy: your spying days may be over. No plausible story is available. You’re coming with me because I’m meeting potential investors and you’re the intern whose judgement I most trust. But think carefully about whether you’re ready for the others to see you differently. I’ll accept whatever you decide. Please burn this.—A.

On the veranda, above the dark river, Pip burned the note with a lighter that Colleen had left behind. She missed Colleen and wondered if she herself was in for three years of being strung along, but she also felt victorious and capable. She’d gone deeper into the dark river than Colleen had, deeper than just her knees, and she was pretty sure she’d already gone farther with Andreas. It was all very strange and would have felt even stranger if her life hadn’t been so strange to begin with. To her the strangest thought of all was that she might be extraordinarily appealing. It went against everything she believed in — or at least against everything she wanted to believe in; because, deep down, in her most honest heart, maybe every person considered herself extraordinarily appealing. Maybe this was just a human thing.

“Do I get to meet your mother?” she asked Andreas a week later, when Pedro was driving them up the steep road out of the valley.

“Do you want to? Annagret was the only woman of mine who ever did. My mother was very kind to her, until she wasn’t.”

Pip was too disturbed by the phrase woman of mine to answer. Did the phrase now apply to her? It sounded like it did.

“She’s very seductive,” Andreas said. “You’d probably like her. Annagret liked her a lot — until she didn’t.”

Pip rolled down her window, put her face to the cool early-morning air, and whispered, “Am I your woman.” She didn’t think Andreas could hear her, but it was possible he had.

“You’re my confidante,” he said. “I’d be interested in what your good sense has to say about her.”

He put his hand on her upper thigh and left it there. Pretty much every thought she’d had in the last week had led back to one thing. She was experiencing stronger symptoms of being in love, a queasiness more persistent, a heart more racing, than she remembered having had with Stephen. But the symptoms were ambiguous. A condemned person walking to the gallows had many of the same ones. When Andreas’s hand crept, thrillingly, to the inside of her thigh, she had neither the courage nor even the inclination to place a corresponding hand on his leg. The rightness of the phrase preyed upon was becoming evident. The feelings of prey in the grip of a wolf’s teeth were hard to distinguish from being in love.

Her Spanish was enough improved that she followed everything Andreas said to Pedro. Pedro was to be at the Cortez at six o’clock the next morning. Andreas would probably be waiting for him, but if he wasn’t, Pedro was to proceed to the airport with a sign that said KATYA WOLF and bring her to the hotel.

Evidently Andreas intended to spend all day and all night and possibly the next morning with Pip alone. How absurd that they first had to sit together in the back seat for three hours while Pedro braked for speed bumps. What a torture, these rompemuelles.

I am in love, she decided. I’m the least beautiful girl at Los Volcanes, but I’m funny and brave and honest and he chose me. He can break my heart later — I don’t care.

At the Cortez, he instructed her to wait in the lobby for fifteen minutes before joining him in his room. She watched damp-haired, morning-faced travelers surrendering room keys. It seemed to be no time of day in no place on earth. A Latin businessman idling by the reception desk was looking intently at her chest. She rolled her eyes; he smiled. He was an insect compared to the man who was waiting for her.

She found him sitting with his tablet at the desk in his room. A tray of sandwiches and cut-up fruit was on the bed. “Have some food,” he said.

“Do I seem hungry?”

“Your stomach seems sensitive. It’s important that you eat.”

She hazarded some papaya, which according to her mother was soothing to the stomach.

“What would you like to do today?” he said.

“I don’t know. Is there a particular church or museum I’m supposed to see?”

“I don’t love being seen in public. But, yes, the old town center is worth seeing.”

“You could wear sunglasses and a funny hat.”

“Is that what you want?”

The papaya made her burp. She felt that she had to stop being prey, to somehow take the initiative. She was still disinclined to touch him, but she walked over behind him and forced herself to put her hands on his shoulders. She ran them down onto his chest. It had to be done.

He took hold of her wrists so she couldn’t get away.

“I thought you never laid a hand on interns,” she said. “I thought it was bad press.”

“Serially bedding them would be bad press,” he said. “Falling in love with one of them is a very different story.”

Her knees quaked. “Did you actually just say that?”

“I did.”

The wooden spoon, the wooden spoon.

“OK, then,” she said, sinking to the floor.

He let go of her wrists, extricated himself from the desk, and kneeled in front of her.

“Pip,” he said. “I know I’m old. Probably as old as your father. But I have a young heart — I don’t have much experience with real love. Probably not much more than you do. This is new and frightening for me, too.”

The wooden spoon. Her brain was churning. It was more a father than a lover to whom she now pressed herself in her fear; more a father whom she clutched for safety. And yet, the night before, she’d trimmed her personal hair for him with a razor. She was massively confused. He held her tightly, stroking her head.

“Do you like me at all?” he said.

She nodded because she knew he wanted her to.

“A lot?” he said. “Or just a little?”

“Quite a lot,” she said for the same reason.

“I like you, too.”

She nodded again. But even though he’d made her do it, she felt bad about lying to him. If he truly was falling in love with her, it was a mean thing to do. To make up for it, she tried to say something both honest and nice. “I really liked the way you made me feel the other time. I can’t stop thinking about it. I’m fairly obsessed with it. I want you to do it again.”

His body tensed at this. She worried that she’d said the wrong thing — that he’d seen through her attempt to turn their talk away from love, and was hurt. And so she kissed him. Urgently, forwardly, offering him her tongue, opening herself to him, and he responded in kind. But the sensible side of her was still semi-functioning. A laugh came out of her before she could stifle it.

“What?” he said, smiling.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m just wondering if we’re both trying to do what neither of us actually wants.”

He seemed alarmed. “What do you mean?”

“No, just the kissing part,” she hastened to say. “You didn’t seem so into the smooching last time. You were honest about that. And, honestly, it’s fine with me too if we skip it.”

It happened again. Again, for a second, for less than a second, before he could turn his face away, she saw a wholly different person, a crazy person.

“You’re a remarkable woman,” he said, face averted.

“Thank you.”

He stood up and walked away from her. “I mean it,” he said. “I’ve never felt so off balance in my life. You make me feel smaller, in a good way. I’m supposed to be the great teller of truth, and you keep cutting me down. I hate it, but I love it. I love you.” He turned back to her and said it again. “I love you.”

She blushed. “Thank you.”

“That’s it?” he said wildly. “Thank you? Who made you this way? Where did you come from?”

“The San Lorenzo Valley. It’s quite the humble, democratic place.”

He strode back over to her and yanked her to her feet. “You’re driving me crazy!”

“All is not so well inside my own head, either.”

“So what are we? How do we do this? What is the way we’re going to be together?”

“I don’t know.”

“Take off your fucking clothes—does that work?”

“It has some promise.”

“So do it. Slowly. I want to watch you. Take your panties off last.”

“OK. I can do that.”

She liked taking orders from him. Liked it more than anything else about him. But as she did as she’d been told, unbuttoning one button of her shirt, and then a second button, she wasn’t sure that she liked that she liked it. She wished she could unhear what Stephen had said to her, in his bedroom, about needing a father. A dread began to build in her as she undid a fourth button, and then the last. She beheld an emotional vista in which she was angry at her missing father, at all older men, and provoked and punished this father-aged man, drove him wild, induced him to offer himself as the person missing from her life; and her body responded to the offer; but it was icky to respond to him that way. She let her bra fall to the floor.

“My God you’re beautiful,” he said, staring.

“I think you mean I’m young.”

“No. The inside of you is even more beautiful than the outside.”

“Keep talking,” she said. “It’s helping.”

When she was finally fully naked, he dropped to his knees and pressed his face to her crotch. “You shaved for me,” he murmured gratefully.

“Who said it was for you?” she said with a faltering laugh. Being so liked by him, she was liking herself quite a lot, but it deepened her sense of dread to hear herself continuing to provoke him, and to feel the effect her provocation had. His hands were trembling on her butt. He was kissing her, inhaling her, and she could feel how it would all happen again, the same as last time, except that this time she would have to submit to the whole deal; there would be no going back on her word.

All at once, at the prospect of being fucked by him, she experienced a different kind of climax. The lack of friction with which she’d arrived at this moment, the speed and directness with which he’d arranged an assignation with her, the ease with which he’d got her standing naked in a hotel room, combined with a complex of misgivings—father, killer, spoon-wielder, fugitive, crazy person—to produce a simple thought: she didn’t want to be his woman.

In the sober light of this thought, what they were doing seemed ridiculous.

“Um,” she said, stepping away from him. “I think I need a small time-out.”

He slumped. “Now what.”

“No, seriously, I’ve been looking forward to this for a month and a half. I’ve been touching myself every night, thinking about it. Imagining I’m you. But now — I don’t know. I’m wondering if touching myself might be enough.”

He slumped further. She picked up her bra and put it on. She put on her jeans, not bothering with the underpants, which were still right in front of him.

“I’m really sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“So what would you like to do instead?” His voice was strained with self-control. “Visit the picturesque town center?”

“Honestly I hadn’t thought past going to bed with you.”

“It’s still an option.”

“Maybe if you order me to. I like it when you give orders. I think I may have a slave personality.”

“That’s not an order I can give. I don’t want it if you don’t want it. You said you wanted it.”

“I know.”

He sighed heavily. “What changed your mind?”

“It just suddenly didn’t feel right to me.”

“Am I too old for you?”

“God, no. I like your age. If anything, maybe a little too much. Plus you’ve got that ageless German male thing going. You’ve got those blue eyes.”

He bowed his head. “So you just don’t like who I am.”

She felt terribly sorry. She kneeled by him and petted his shoulders and kissed his cheek. “Everybody likes you,” she said. “Millions of people like you.”

“They like a lie. You’re the person I showed my true self to.”

“I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.” She hugged his head to her chest and rocked him a little. Her heart was reengaging with him, and she wondered if a mercy fuck was in the offing. She’d never done one, but she now saw how it happened. An ulterior part of her was further considering that, at some later date, she might take retrospective satisfaction in having fucked the famous outlaw hero, and that this was her chance to do it, and that, conversely, this future self of hers would writhe with remorse if all she’d done was lead him on and chicken out. Chicken out twice.

He had his face between her breasts, his hands down the back of her jeans. The fact that she’d chickened out twice seemed significant. She thought of what her mother had said before she left Felton with her suitcase. “I know you’re very angry with me, pussycat, and you have a right to be. I worry about you in the jungle, on a different continent. I worry about you with Andreas Wolf. But the one thing I never worry about is your good moral sense. You’ve always been a loving person, with a clear sense of right and wrong. I know you better than you know yourself. And that’s what I know about you.” Pip, who could see nothing but the mess her bad behavior made of every relationship in her life, had felt quite sure, in the moment, that her mother knew nothing at all about her. But to have recoiled from Andreas twice, when everything argued for submitting — didn’t this mean something? Maybe her mother was right. Maybe she did have a clear moral sense. She could remember having loved Ramón and even Dreyfuss pureheartedly. What had ruined things in Oakland was her lust for Stephen, her anger at an older man.

She kissed the curly top of Andreas’s head and untangled herself from him. “It’s just not going to happen,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

She put on her shirt and went down to the lobby. Her decision seemed irrevocable, not even in her power, and she was prepared to sit in the lobby all day and all night if she had to. But Pedro was back with the Land Cruiser in less than an hour. She couldn’t face sitting in the front with him; her body felt prickly and contaminating. She lay down in the back and waited to be overwhelmed with shame and guilt and second-guessing.

When the feelings came, they were even worse than she’d foreseen. For two days she did little but lie in bed, unresponsive to her roommates’ comings and goings. She’d been flying high, liking herself, as long as she’d been liked by Andreas, but now, having incurred his displeasure, she fell into a pit of displeasure with herself. Even though she’d been the rejecter, not the rejected, the scene in the hotel room had been as bad as the one in Stephen’s bedroom. It played over and over in her head, particularly the moment when she’d been naked and he’d been on his knees.

On the third day, when she managed to drag herself to dinner, she found herself unpopular again. She ate with her head down and went back to bed. Nobody was honest with her now. She couldn’t tell if she was being ostracized because she was believed to have seduced Andreas or because he was known to be unhappy with her. Either way, she felt she deserved it. She composed an email epistle to Colleen, a full confession, before she realized that Colleen would only hate her more for it. She cut all but a few sentences:

You did the right thing, leaving. He really is a weird dude. All I did with him was talk, and that’s all it’s ever going to be. I’m not long for this place myself.

When Andreas returned, three days later, he was the same as before with her, cordial but distant, which made her feel all the guiltier. She believed that he really had told her a secret he’d told no one else at Los Volcanes — that he really had specially wanted her — and that, behind his smile, he had to be feeling hurt and ashamed. Unable to relive the moment of her decision, she fell to thinking that she’d made a ghastly mistake. What if she’d gone ahead and been his lover? What if she’d learned to be deliriously happy with him? Now his desire was bottled up inside him and she couldn’t enjoy it. She thought of begging him for a third chance, but she was afraid she’d chicken out a third time. She walked around for a week with a lump of near-clinical depression in her throat. She pretended to go for hikes but sat down after the first bend in the trail and wept.

He discovered her on one of these crying jags. It was late afternoon and getting dark; rain was falling from the outskirts of a thunderhead. He came around the bend in a yellow slicker and rubber boots and saw her with her back against a tree, her arms around her knees, getting soaked.

“I came looking for you.” He crouched down by her. “I didn’t realize you were so close.”

“I don’t hike anymore,” she said. “I just come here and cry.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, I’m the one who’s sorry. I ruined everything.”

“Don’t blame yourself. I’m a grown man. I can take care of myself.”

“I’m never going to betray you,” she blubbered. “You can trust me.”

“I won’t pretend that I don’t love you. I do love you.”

“I’m sorry,” she blubbered.

“But here, enough of that.” He took off his slicker, draped it over her, and sat down. “Let’s think about what you want to do now.”

She wiped her nose with her hand. “Just send me home,” she said. “I had one big opportunity here, and I blew it.”

“Willow tells me the search for your missing parent isn’t going well.”

“Sorry, two opportunities. Two things I failed at.”

“I’m afraid that Annagret and I did you a disservice, telling you we could help. What you’re looking for is pre — digital era, which makes it very hard. I spoke with Chen about you.” Chen was the chief hacker. “I asked if we could do a facial-recognition search with an older picture of your mother. It would take a lot of pirated computing power, and I’m willing to do it for you. But Chen thinks it would be a waste of time.”

In the clear gray light of her depression, Pip saw that she’d done again what she’d done with Igor at Renewable Solutions — had fallen for an employer’s empty sales pitch.

“It’s OK,” she said. “Thank you for asking him.”

“I’ll keep making your student loan payments as long as you’re here. But we should think about your next step. You’re a good writer, and Willow says you’re a very fast learner. You were miserable at your sales job. Have you ever thought about being a journalist?”

She managed a wan smile. “Isn’t the Project destroying the field of journalism?”

“Journalism will survive. There’s a lot of nonprofit money going into it now. Somebody as capable as you can find a job if she wants one. I’m thinking that old media might be more suited to you anyway, given how little you like what I’m doing.”

“I wanted to like it. I’m so sorry I can’t.”

“Enough of that.” He took her hand and kissed it. “You are what you are. I love what you are. I’m going to miss it.”

She started crying all over again. From somewhere in the mist came the thundercrack sound of sandstone splitting off the face of a pinnacle, followed by a muffled crash. She’d been on trails where shards of rock had fallen so close to her that she could hear the whistle of their plummeting.

“Can you order me?” she said.

“What?”

“Give me an order. Say I have to do journalism. Can you do that? I still want you to give me orders…” She squeezed her eyes shut. “I’m such a mess.”

“I don’t understand you,” he said. “But, yes, if you insist. I can order you to do it.”

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“So let’s work on that. I have a little present for you, to get you started. Talk to Willow. She’ll show it to you.”

“You’re being really nice to me.”

“Don’t worry. There’s something in it for me, too. Do you see what it is?”

She shook her head.

“You’ll figure it out,” he said.

He must have given Willow another talking-to that afternoon. After ten days of coolness to Pip, she’d saved her a place at dinner and was eerily friendly to her again. In the evening, in the barn, she showed Pip a set of photographs deleted by a Facebook user but still retrievable, by the likes of Chen, from Facebook’s bowels. On the back of a pickup truck, at somebody’s party in Texas, was what appeared to be an operational nuclear warhead. It couldn’t possibly be a real one, but it looked exactly like the real ones Pip had seen in presentations at her study group in Oakland.

In the weeks that followed, she tried to teach herself journalism. With the help of a hacker boy, she friended the Facebook user who’d put up the pictures, but this went nowhere. She had no idea how to approach the Air Force or the weapons plant with questions, and, even if she had, she would have been calling without credentials on a Skype-like connection from Bolivia. This gave her new respect for real journalists but was personally discouraging. She might have given up if Andreas hadn’t then connected her with a Bay Area whistle-blower who had information about groundwater contamination at a Richmond landfill. Using the information, and making phone calls to less intimidating local authorities — she wasn’t afraid of cold-calling; she’d developed at least one usable skill at Renewable Solutions — she produced a story that then magically appeared online at the East Bay Express, whose editor was a fan of Andreas. The Express also ran her next piece, “Confessions of an Outreach Associate,” which Willow had helped her with by failing to laugh at it until she’d made it genuinely funny.

Early in January, after she’d written two further, shorter pieces for the Express, on subjects supplied by the editor and reportable by telephone, Andreas went for a walk with her and suggested that she apply to work as a research intern at an online magazine called Denver Independent. “It specializes in investigative journalism,” he said. “It wins prizes.”

“Why Denver?” she said.

“There’s a very good reason why.”

“East Bay Express seems to like me. I’d rather be closer to my mom.”

“Are you asking me to order you?”

It was three months since their morning at the Cortez, and she was still wishing he’d ordered her to go to bed with him.

“Denver’s just a name to me,” she said. “I don’t know anything about the place. But sure. Tell me what you want, and I’ll do it.”

“What I want?” He looked up at the sky. “I want you to like me. I want you never to leave me. I want to get old with you.”

“Oh!”

“I’m sorry. I had to say that once before you left.”

She wished she could believe him. He seemed to believe himself. But her inability to trust him was in her marrow; in her nerves.

“Anyway,” she said.

“Anyway, I’m not asking for much. If you get the job in Denver, which I think you will, I want you to open an attachment I’ll send you when you have an office email account. The editor and publisher is a man named Tom Aberant. All you really have to do is open the attachment. But if you want to keep your ears open, and get a sense of whether Denver Independent is coming after me, I’d be grateful for that, too.”

“He’s the other person who knows what you did. He’s the journalist.”

“Yes.”

“You want me to be your spy.”

“Whatever you feel comfortable with. If it’s nothing, so be it. The only thing I ask, besides opening the attachment, is that you not tell anyone that you were down here. You never left California. Telling Aberant you were here is the one thing that could actually harm me. Harm you, too, needless to say.”

A dark thought occurred to her.

“Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “I’m liking being a journalist. But is this person in Denver the real reason you suggested it?”

“The real reason? No. But part of the reason? Of course. It’s good for you and good for me. Do you have a problem with that?”

In the moment, it didn’t seem like much for him to ask. She’d withheld her heart and her body from him, and she remembered, from her experience with Stephen, the ache and desolation of being denied the heart and body you desired. She may not have trusted Andreas, but she had compassion for him, including his paranoia, and if a click of a mouse would suffice to make her less indebted to him, less guilty for hurting him, she was willing to click. She thought it might help close the books on her and him. And so she went to Denver.

* * *

When she returned to Tom and Leila’s house, very late, after a night of drinking with the Denver Independent interns, she was surprised to find Leila on the steps outside the kitchen, bundled in a thick fleece jacket, with cigarette smoke in the vicinity.

“Aha, you caught me,” Leila said.

“You smoke?”

“About five a year.” In a white cereal bowl next to Leila were four stubbed butts. She covered the bowl with her hand.

“What is it like to be so moderate?” Pip said.

“Oh, it’s just another thing to feel insecure about.” Leila gave a self-disliking laugh. “The interesting people are always immoderate.”

“Can I sit here with you?”

“It’s freezing. I was about to go inside.”

Following Leila into the house, Pip worried that she herself was the cause of Leila’s smoking. She’d sort of fallen in love with Leila, in the same way she had with Colleen in Bolivia, but ever since she’d moved in with her and Tom she’d had the sense that she was causing trouble between them. She was a little bit in love with Tom, too, because she could afford to be, because she wasn’t physically attracted to him — he was both older and safe—and Leila, of late, had been all too visibly jealous of one or both of them. Pip knew she should just move somewhere else. But it was hard to let go of the family she’d fallen into.

In the kitchen, Leila poured the butts and ashes onto a sheet of foil and balled it up. Aided by the four margaritas in her, Pip asked her if she could ask her something.

“Of course,” Leila said, taking coffee from the refrigerator.

“Would you rather I find my own place to live? Would that help?”

For a moment, Leila froze. She seemed pretty in a very particular way to Pip. Not irritating-pretty like the Sunlight Project interns; older-pretty; lovely in a way to be aspired to. She looked at the coffee can in her hand as if she didn’t know how it had got there. “Of course not,” she said. “Does it seem like I want you to?”

“Um. Well. Yeah. A little bit.”

“I’m sorry.” Leila moved briskly to the coffee maker. “You’re probably just picking up on insecurities that have nothing to do with you.”

“Why are you insecure? I admire you so much.”

The coffee can fell to the floor.

“This is what I get for smoking,” Leila said, bending down.

“Why are you smoking? Why are you making coffee at one thirty in the morning?”

“Because I know I’m not going to sleep anyway. I might as well work.”

“Leila,” Pip said plaintively.

Leila gave her a look worse than annoyed; a fierce look. “What?”

“Is something wrong?”

“No. Nothing.” Leila composed herself. “Did you get my text from Washington?”

“Yeah! It sounds like this is bigger than we thought.”

“Well, that’s all it is. I’m half out of my mind with fear that somebody’s ahead of us on the story.”

“Is there something I can do to help?”

“No! Go to bed. It’s late.”

In the upstairs hallway, Pip could hear Tom snoring off whatever he’d drunk. She sat on the edge of her bed and typed out an email to Colleen, the latest of many, all of them unanswered.

Yes, me again. I thought of you because I just caught Leila smoking behind the house and it made me miss you. I keep missing you. I know all I do is betray people. But I can’t stop wishing you’d give me another chance. Much love, PT

Emailing drunk was never a good idea, but she went ahead and hit Send.

Her problem was that it was true: all she did was betray people. Almost as soon as her email account at Denver Independent had been activated and she’d clicked on the attachment from Andreas, she’d regretted it. The symphony she’d failed to hear in Bolivia had commenced immediately in Denver. Her fellow interns were ordinary young people, not goddesses or prodigies. The reporters and editors were lumpy and sarcastic, the division of labor gender-neutral, the office atmosphere serious and professional but not remotely cool. Though Andreas liked to tell his interns that every hand was raised against the leaker, to stake his claim to the sympathy accorded underdogs, the Project was too cool and famous to be an underdog. The real underdogs were the journalists. Though much was made of Andreas’s personal penury, the purity of his service, it was the ordinary financial stresses of the journalists, their child-support and mortgage payments, the four-dollar sandwiches they ate for lunch, that reminded Pip of her mother and her struggling neighbors in Felton. After six hours she felt more at home at DI than she had in six months at TSP.

And Leila: lovely in body and soul, motherly in a way that felt sisterly, not suffocating, a Pulitzer-winning journalist whose personal life was even stranger than Pip’s. And Tom: earnest about his work but silly in private, indifferent to anyone’s opinion of what he said or how he looked, his manner as reserved and ironic as Andreas’s was invasive and self-important, his commitment to Leila the more obvious for being unspoken. Pip loved them both, and when they asked her to move in with them she felt as if, after a life of constraints and poor decisions and general ineffectiveness, she’d finally caught a major break.

Which made it all the more disastrously unfortunate that she’d planted spyware on DI’s computer system, pretended to be responsible for finding the warhead pictures that Andreas had given her, and told Tom and Leila a dozen other lies. She’d succeeded in walking back the smaller lies without undue damage or embarrassment, but the biggest lies — and presumably the spyware — remained in place. And now Leila was turning against her, and now Tom, too, was suddenly uncomfortable around her; the two things, taken together, made her afraid that, although she respected Tom too much to have flirted with him or laid her authority-questioning shtick on him, he might have developed a romantic interest in her. Two nights ago, he’d taken her to the theater, and as if it weren’t unsettling enough to be there as his date, he’d lowered his guard on the drive home and asked her personal questions, had seemed distinctly pale when she said good night to him, and had been avoiding her ever since.

There was also the matter of the email Willow had sent her recently. It was newsy and surprisingly sentimental and came with a picture attached, a selfie that Willow had taken with Pip outside the barn. The caption could have been “Alpha Girl with Beta Girl.” But Willow had been party to the fabrication of Pip’s journalistic credentials; surely she knew that encrypted texting was the only safe way for anyone at the Project to communicate with her. So why an email? And why the clunky business of sending an attachment? Pip had been doing her best to forget that she’d opened it at home, using Tom’s private Wi-Fi.

All things considered, she was proud of having drunk only four margaritas with the interns tonight. Between her lies and the tensions in the house, it seemed only a matter of time before she found herself jobless and on the street again, her major break squandered. And she knew what she had to do. She had to betray Andreas and tell Tom and Leila everything. But she couldn’t bear to disappoint them.

By saying nothing, she was protecting a killer, a crazy person, a man she didn’t trust. And yet she was reluctant to lose her connection with him. He’d messed with her head, and it brought her an unwholesome pleasure to mess with his head — to be the person in Denver who knew his secrets and had to be worried about. Without his daily presence to remind her of her distrust, his power and his fame and his special interest in her were all the more conducive to sexual fantasy. He scored zeroes in certain important love metrics but was off the charts in others.

She texted him every night at bedtime and didn’t turn off her phone until he’d texted back. She’d come to think it would have been less bad to sleep with him, less of a moral surrender, than to open the email attachment he’d sent her. Why, why, why hadn’t she slept with him when she had her chance? Running away from Bolivia seemed all the more regrettable now that she knew that his fear of Tom was unfounded. Planting spyware was a pointless and truly vile sin that she could have obviated by staying with Andreas and committing a pleasurable sin.

She had to fight the temptation to sext him a picture of her private thing. She was the latest of those women who stayed loyal to him. The alteration of her brain by wooden spoon was apparently ongoing.

It wasn’t hard to conceal the state of her brain from Tom and Leila, but its alteration was the reason she’d flown directly from Bolivia to Denver without stopping to see her mother. Her mother could be scarily perceptive about her state of mind. No sooner had Pip arrived in Denver than she’d been forced to conceal it from her.

“Purity,” her mother had said on the telephone. “When you told me you couldn’t find anything out about your father in Bolivia, were you lying to me?”

“No. I don’t tell lies to you.”

“You didn’t find anything out?”

“No!”

“Then tell me why you had to go to Denver.”

“I want to learn to be a journalist.”

“But why did it have to be Denver? Why that online magazine? Why not someplace closer to home?”

“Mom, this is the time when I need to be on my own for a while. You’re getting older, I’m going to be there for you. Can’t I have a couple of years where I get to be away?”

“Did Andreas Wolf want you to go to that place?”

Pip hesitated. “No,” she said. “They just happened to have an intern position I applied for.”

“It was the only news service in the country accepting applications?”

“You just don’t like it because it’s in a different time zone.”

“Purity. I’m going to ask again: are you telling me the truth?”

“Yes! Why are you asking me?”

“Linda helped me use her computer, and I looked at the website. I wanted to see for myself.”

“And? It’s a great site, right? It’s serious long-form investigative journalism.”

“I have the feeling you’re not telling me things you should be telling me.”

“I’m not! I mean, I’m not not.”

However sensitive to smells her mother was, she had an even keener nose for moral failings. She could smell that Pip was doing something wrong in Denver, and Pip resented her for it. She’d already denied herself Andreas because of something her mother had said. To live up to her mother’s ideal, she’d behaved more worthily than she’d had to, and she felt she deserved credit for it, even though her mother knew nothing about it. She was in no mood to be lectured.

But her mother had been sulking ever since. Not returning phone messages and then, when Pip did reach her, not joyfully ejaculating but making her displeasure known with sighs and silences and monosyllabic answers to Pip’s dutiful questions. Pip had finally gotten angry and stopped calling altogether. She hadn’t even told her mother she’d moved in with Tom and Leila. For a while, living with them, she’d felt vindicated in her belief that she could have been a well-adjusted and effective person if she’d had a pair of parents like these. They’d already done so much to help her that finding her real father had ceased to be a burning priority. But preferring them as parents made her pity her mother, who was alone in Felton and had done her best with the poor resources she had. Pip’s life seemed like a conspiracy to betray every single person in it. And now Tom seemed to have a thing for her, which amounted to yet another betrayal, a betrayal of Leila that Pip hadn’t intended and couldn’t control. It was all making her even more dependent on her nightly textings with Andreas and the self-touching she often did afterward.

Tom was still snoring when she ventured out to the bathroom. From downstairs came a smell of coffee and the faint patter of a keyboard. Pip felt pity for Leila, too. And for Tom, if he was attracted to her. And of course for Andreas, and for Colleen. Apparently pity and betrayal were related.

Back in her bed, she texted Andreas. It was too late at night to expect a reply, and she should have just gone to sleep, but instead she appended further texts.

She was erasing the last message, which she’d typed only as a masturbation aid, when a reply came in from Los Volcanes.

She was surprised. It was four in the morning in Bolivia.

She waited ten minutes, second-guessing herself, for his reply to her temerity. She knew she was behaving badly, trying to keep him interested after having twice rejected him. But right now their texting was the closest thing she had to a sex life. She typed more:

His text was like a sock in the jaw. Her hands jumped away from her device, letting it fall between her legs. Was he jealous of Tom? It seemed important to set the record straight, and so she picked up the device again. She cursed the errors her trembling finger made.

She fell on her side with a whimper and pulled the comforter over her head. She couldn’t figure out what she’d done wrong — she’d said she wasn’t interested in Tom. Why was Andreas punishing her now? She writhed under the comforter, trying and failing to make sense of what he’d written, until the comforter became a tormentor. Sweating all over, she threw it off and went downstairs to the dining room, where Leila was working.

“You’re still awake?” Leila said.

Her smile was troubled but not phony. Pip sat down across the table from her. “Can’t sleep.”

“Do you want an Ambien? I have a veritable cornucopia.”

“Will you tell me what you found out in Washington?”

“Let me get you an Ambien.”

“No. Just let me sit here while you work.”

Leila smiled at her again. “I like that you can be honest about what you want. It’s something I still struggle with.”

Her smiles were taking some of the sting off Andreas’s brutal words.

“But let me try it,” Leila said. “I want you to not sit here while I work.”

“Oh,” Pip said, very hurt.

“It makes me self-conscious. If you really don’t mind?”

“No, I’ll leave. It’s just—” Outburst Alert. Outburst Alert. “I don’t know why you’re being so weird to me. I didn’t do anything to you. I would never do anything to hurt you.”

Leila was still smiling, but something was glittering in her eyes, something awfully similar to hatred. “I’d appreciate it if you’d just let me work.”

“Do you think I’m a home-wrecker? Do you think I’d ever in a million years do that to you?”

“Not intentionally.”

“Then why are you being this way, if it’s not my fault?”

“Do you know who your father is?”

“My father?” Pip made an insultingly baffled face and gesture.

“Are you ever curious?”

“What does any of this have to do with my father?”

“I’m just asking.”

“Well, I wish you wouldn’t. I already feel like I walk around in life with this sign hanging from my neck, BEWARE OF DOG, DIDN’T HAVE FATHER. It doesn’t mean I want to have sex with every older man who comes my way.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I can pack my things and move out tomorrow. I’ll quit my job, too, if that would help.”

“I don’t want you to do either of those things.”

“Then what? Wear a burka?”

“I’m going to be spending more time with Charles. You and Tom can have the house to yourselves to work out whatever you have to work out.”

“There is nothing to work out.”

“The point is simply—”

“I thought you guys were sane and normal. That’s part of what I love about you. And now it’s like I’m a lab rat you’re leaving alone in a cage with another rat to see what happens.”

“That’s not what I’m doing.”

“Sure feels like it.”

“Tom and I are having some trouble. That’s all it is. Can I get you an Ambien?”

Pip took the Ambien and woke up alone in the house. In the windows was a pale gray Colorado morning sky of the sort from which she’d learned not to predict the afternoon weather — it could snow or turn shockingly warm — but she was grateful for the bright overcast; it matched her spirits. She’d been terminated by Andreas but also released; she felt both bruised and cleaner. After reheating and eating some frozen waffles, she went out walking toward downtown Denver.

The air smelled like spring, and the Rockies, behind her, all snowy, were there to remind her that she still had many things to do in life, such as going up to Estes Park and experiencing the mountains from close range. She could do this after she made her confession to Tom and before she returned to California. In the crisp air, she saw clearly that the time to confess had come. As long as she’d had her late-night textings and touchings, she’d had some reason to have planted the spyware and to avoid the awfulness of telling Tom about it: she was bewitched and enslaved by Andreas. Now there was no reason, nor any sense in trying to preserve the life she had going in Denver, however eagerly she’d taken to it. The whole thing was built on lies, and she wanted to come clean.

Her resolve was firm until she arrived at DI and was reminded that she loved the place. The overhead lights were off in the main space, but two journalists were in the conference room and Pip could hear Leila’s pretty telephone voice in her task-lighted work space. Pip hesitated in the corridor, wondering if she could still avoid confessing. Maybe if the spyware disappeared? But whatever was upsetting Leila wasn’t going away. If she was upset about Tom liking Pip too much, a full confession would certainly put an end to that. Pip took the long way around to his office, avoiding Leila.

His door was standing open. As soon as he saw Pip, he reached quickly for his computer mouse.

“Sorry,” she said. “Are you in the middle of something?”

For a moment, he seemed totally guilty. He opened his mouth without saying anything. Then, collecting himself, he told her to come in and shut the door. “We’re in battle mode,” he said. “Or Leila’s in battle mode. I’m in Leila-care mode. Her engine runs hot when she’s afraid of being scooped.”

Pip shut the door and sat down. “I gather she got something big yesterday.”

“Ghastly thing. Major story. Bad for everyone except us. It’s very good for us, assuming we’re the ones to break it. She’ll fill you in — she’s going to need your help.”

“An actual weapon went missing?”

“Yes and no. It never left Kirtland. Armageddon was averted.” Tom leaned back in his chair, catching the fluorescent light on his terrible glasses. “This was probably before your time, but there used to be a countdown-to-Armageddon clock. Union of Concerned Scientists, I believe. It would be four minutes to midnight, and then there’d be a new round of arms-control talks, and the clock would go back to five minutes before midnight. It all seems vaguely cheesy and ridiculous now, like everything else from those years. What kind of clock runs backward?”

He seemed to be free-associating to conceal something.

“They still have that clock,” Pip said.

“Really.”

“But you’re right, it feels dated. People are more advertising-literate these days.”

He laughed. “Plus it turns out that it wasn’t actually five minutes to midnight in 1975, otherwise we’d all be dead now. It was nine fifteen or something.”

Pip’s own countdown-to-confession clock was stuck at one second before midnight.

“Anyway, Leila’s on the ragged edge,” Tom said. “She comes across as so unthreatening that people don’t realize how competitive she is.”

“I’m realizing it, a little bit.”

“A couple of years ago, she was way out in front on the Toyota recall story, or she thought she was. She thought she had time to nail it down tight and break it complete. And then suddenly she starts hearing from her contacts in the agencies. They’re calling her to tell her they just heard an amazing story from the Journal’s guy. These were people who hadn’t known anything, hadn’t told her anything, and now they had the whole story! She’s hearing that the Journal’s guy was up all night drafting. She’s hearing that the Journal is already lawyering it. And there’s no worse feeling. No worse thing to write than a story where you have to credit the guy you were way ahead of until two days ago. Apparently the WaPo’s on the Kirtland story — Leila found that out yesterday. We’re still ahead, but probably not by much.”

“Is she drafting?”

“That’s what sleepless nights are for. I’d almost rather get scooped than see her in the state she’s in. You need to help me try to keep her halfway sane.”

Pip was starting to feel bad about having lashed out at Leila; to wonder if she was simply overstressed by work.

“But listen,” Tom said, leaning forward. “Before you go, I want to ask you a personal question.”

“I actually had something to—”

“We were talking about your dad the other night. And I’ve been thinking — you’re a great researcher. Have you ever tried to find him?”

She frowned. Why did people keep asking her about her father? In her guilty frame of mind, she had the curious thought that Andreas was secretly her father. That this was why her mother was so hostile to him. That Tom and Leila had discovered the spyware and knew more about her than she herself did. Andreas as her dad: the thought was crazy but had a certain logic, the logic of ick, the logic of guilt.

“Yeah, I’ve tried,” she said. “But my mom covered her tracks really well. The only thing I’ve got is her made-up name and my approximate date of birth. I always seemed to be the right size for the grade I was in. But I know my birth certificate is fake.”

The look Tom was giving her was worrisomely loving. She lowered her eyes.

“You know,” she said, “I’m not a very good person.”

“What are you talking about? What’s not good about you?”

She took a deep breath. “I don’t always tell the truth.”

“About what? About your father?”

“No, that part is true.”

“Then what?”

Just say it, she thought. Say: I was in Bolivia, not California …

There was a tap on the door.

Tom jumped to his feet. “Come in, come in.”

It was Leila. She looked at Pip and spoke to Tom. “I was on the phone with Janelle Flayner. I was thinking last night about something she’d said to me. Something like ‘It’s about time someone listened.’”

“Leila,” Tom said gently.

“Hear me out. This is not paranoia. She said that, and I called her, and it turns out that, yes, she did communicate with someone else. Before me. While Cody’s pictures were still up on Facebook, she sent a message to the famous leaker. ‘The Sunshine Boys?’ That’s what she said. The Sunshine Boys. The place that everybody sends their tips to.”

Pip had one of those double blushes, a mild one followed by a burning whole-body wave.

“So what?” Tom said, less gently.

“Well, Mrs. Flayner didn’t hear back. Nothing ever happened.”

“Good. Happy ending. He couldn’t do shit from Bolivia. To cover a story like this, you need boots on the ground.”

“Well, but Wolf never put the pictures up. He puts up twenty things a day — there’s no filter. But for some reason he didn’t put this one up.”

“I’m serenely unworried.”

“I’m radically worried.”

“Leila. He’s had the information for almost a year. Why would he suddenly decide to float it in the next five days?”

“Because these stories have a boiling point. Suddenly everyone starts talking overnight. If he gets one more leak, he can spit in the soup. It’s bad enough if the Post does it to me. But if that guy gets there first—”

“The world looks very scary when you haven’t slept. You’re the one who’s sitting on the elephant. You’re the only one who can connect the dots from Amarillo to Albuquerque.”

“People steal elephants. It happens all the time.”

“If you want to worry about something, worry about the Post.”

Leila laughed raggedly. “I’m all over that, too. They’ve got to be days ahead of me on the Kirtland drug scandal. Probably weeks. There’s no way I can cover it when I’m also confirming the nuke story.”

“You’ll pick up enough of it collaterally. It’s fine if the Post has more detail on it, so long as we’re first. Let them add the salt to our soup. Worst case, they’re out in front with a drug story, and we follow with an Armageddon story.”

“You’re sure you don’t want to do a co-op with them?”

“With a Jeff Bezos joint? I can’t believe you’re even asking.”

“Then prepare for me to be a wreck.”

Leila left, and Tom gazed after her. “I hate to see her like this,” he said. “It feels like the end of the world to her when she gets beaten.”

Pip wondered if she’d been mistaken. He wasn’t seeming like a man in love with anyone but Leila.

“Do you have your phone?” he said.

“My phone?”

“I want to make some calls to the Post. Dial some numbers and see who’s there on a Saturday. If the people I have in mind aren’t there, she can worry a little less.”

Even though Pip had come here to confess, she was tempted to say she didn’t have her device with her; it was radioactive with incriminating texts. But to claim not to have it was dumb and implausible. When she handed it over to Tom, it felt like a small bomb, and when she left his office she stationed herself outside the door, hoping her proximity would inhibit him from reading her texts.

She saw that she’d lost her nerve and wouldn’t be confessing anything today. If, as she now suspected, she’d been mistaken about Tom’s interest in her, there might be nothing so terrible about her situation that uninstalling Andreas’s spyware couldn’t fix it. When Tom emerged from his office, smiling, she took her phone to the ladies’ room and locked herself in a stall.

She sent the text and went to Leila’s work space, where Leila was on the phone again. Pip stood in the corridor with her head bowed, trying to look penitent.

“I’m sorry if I make you self-conscious,” she said when Leila was off the phone. “Are you too upset with me to let me help you?”

Leila seemed about to say something angry that she reconsidered. “We’re not going to talk about that,” she said. “You need to be a journalist this week. Not a researcher, not a houseguest. Do you think you can work with me?”

“I love working with you.”

The first task Pip was given was to gather basic facts about the execution-style killing of two women in Tennessee. The facts turned out to be consistent with the appalling story Leila told her. The women, sisters with the maiden name Keneally, had been abducted within minutes of each other in different cities; neither body showed signs of sexual trauma, and officially the police had no leads. As Pip proceeded to learn what she could about the hospitalization and disappearance of the sisters’ brother, Richard, she began to think she’d been petulant and childish in threatening to quit her job. Although living with Tom and Leila was clearly a mistake, the job wasn’t.

She kept retreating to the ladies’ room to check messages, but it wasn’t until she and Tom had gone home for a late dinner and she was in bed, at the usual texting hour, that Andreas’s reply came in.

She turned off the device without replying. She’d forced him to break his vow not to text her again, and she felt good about it. Less like a child, more like an adult who had some power. Not like a rigorously moral person, certainly; but moral absolutism was childish. Downtown, at her desk, Leila was gutting out some private misery, sitting alone at the office after midnight, drafting her story, because Leila was an adult. Her toughness made Pip see Andreas in a new light, as a kind of child-man, obsessed with spilling secrets. She squirmed with displeasure at the recollection of his hand in her pants. She could see — she thought she could see — that what adults did was suck it up and keep their secrets to themselves. Her mother, a gray-haired child in so many ways, was an adult in this one regard at least. She kept her secrets and paid the price. Pip imagined herself continuing to work at DI, knowing what she knew, having done what she’d done, and not confessing it, just as Leila had said: We’re not going to talk about that.

Her new feeling of adultness persisted through the days that followed, as Leila went back to Washington to confirm her story, returned home triumphant but even more anxious (one of her sources had uttered the words “You might not be alone”), and pulled yet another all-nighter to finish her draft. By Thursday morning the lawyer was on it. Pip had slept very little herself and was going to be rewarded with an additional-reporting byline. She hadn’t had an unexhausted moment to think about Andreas or whether the spyware was still installed; she was fact-checking like a madwoman. The suspense in the office seemed both silly and exciting. Silly because the whole thing was just a game that had nothing to do with social utility (what did it matter if they beat the WaPo by an hour or a day?) but exciting in the way the Manhattan Project must have been exciting: they’d been building their information bomb for months, and now they were waiting to explode it.

She was still checking less essential facts when the story went up on Friday morning.

THEFT OF THERMONUCLEAR WEAPON IN NEW MEXICO THWARTED BY ACCIDENT

MISSING PERPETRATOR TIED TO MEXICAN CARTEL AND DRUG ABUSE AT KIRTLAND AFB; ALARM FIRST RAISED AT WEAPONS PLANT IN TEXAS

Leila had gone home with a fever that she hoped to sleep off in time for interviews with NPR and cable news. The social-media team was manning its battle station, and more phones than usual seemed to be ringing, but the office was otherwise unshaken by the detonation of the information bomb. Other reporters still had their own stories, and Tom had been closeted in his office for more than an hour. The blast wave and radiation pulse were occurring in cyberspace.

Pip was on the phone with a Sonic Drive-In manager, trying to reach Phyllisha Babcock, whose tale of death-bomb sex had squeaked into the article in one-graf form, when the office IT manager, Ken Warmbold, came by her desk. He waited while she wrote down the hours of Phyllisha’s shift, and then he told her that Tom wanted to see her. She left her desk reluctantly. Fact-checking had tapped into her compulsion for cleanliness. It was making her crazy to have the article up with even tiny facts unchecked.

Tom was sitting at his desk with his fingers knit together and pressed to his mouth. His interlocked knuckles were white with the force he was applying to them. “Shut the door,” he said.

She obeyed him and sat down.

“Who sent you here?” he said.

“Just now?”

“No. To Denver. I know the answer, so you might as well tell me.”

She opened her mouth and closed it. She’d been so deep in fact-checking, it hadn’t occurred to her to wonder why Tom was closeted with the IT manager.

“Obviously I’m upset,” he said, not looking at her. “But I’m willing to consider the possibility that you’re not entirely to blame. So just say what you have to say.”

She tried to speak. Swallowed. Tried again. “I wanted to say it. On Saturday. I’m sorry I didn’t.”

“So say it now.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Why is that?”

“You’ll hate me. Leila will hate me.”

He tossed some stapled pages across his desk. “This is Ken’s report on the office network. We have extremely good security here. We’re protected against every form of spyware known to man. But apparently there’s one not known to man. It has a completely alien signature. It took some finding, but Ken found it.”

Pip’s eyes weren’t working right. The words of the report were just a blur.

“Did you know about this?” Tom said.

“Not for positive. But I did worry. I opened an attachment I shouldn’t have.”

He tossed another document at her. “What about this? This is the report on my home computer. Did you open any suspicious attachments at home?”

“There was one…”

He slammed his hand down on his desk. “Say the name!”

“I don’t want to,” she whimpered.

“My home hard drive’s been scraped for two weeks. My business network’s been an open book since three days after we hired you. And who brought me the story I just broke? Who was the intern who brought me the Facebook pictures? What is the name of the leaker who we now know had those pictures last summer?”

“I don’t know.”

“Say it!”

She burst into tears. “I’m sorry! I’m so ashamed!”

Tom pushed a box of tissues toward her and waited, with crossed arms, for her tears to abate.

“I lied,” she said, sniffling. “I was in Bolivia for six months. The Sunlight Project. That’s where I got the Facebook pictures. From him. I lied to you about that. I lied about everything, and I’m so sorry. I know it’s a disaster.”

“Do you really?”

“Yes! All our confidential sources, all our databases, everything. I know. I get it. I’m so sorry.”

Tom’s eyes were fixed on some unseen presence, not her.

“I met this German woman in Oakland,” she said. “She wanted me to go to Bolivia. She said the Project could help me find my father. And so I went there, and he was—”

“Say the name.”

“I can’t. But he took this special interest in me, and he told me something. I think you may know it.”

“Say it.”

“That he killed someone. That there was one other person he’d told, and it was you. And then I gave up on finding my father and I wanted to leave, and he told me to come here. He was afraid you wanted to expose him. He sent me an email attachment. I knew what it was, and I opened it anyway. But I swear to you that’s all I did.”

Tom pressed his fingertips to his forehead. “And why would you do this for him?”

“I don’t know! I felt bad for him — he came on really strong with me. I thought I had to respond. I did respond, I was bad. I mean, he’s really famous, I couldn’t help it. But then I didn’t like him, and he was hurt, and, I don’t know, I guess I felt I owed him something. And then I was so happy here — the whole thing started seeming like this horrible dirty dream.”

“Dirty.”

“I didn’t sleep with him. I didn’t.”

“Why would I care who you sleep with?”

The phone rang. Tom looked at it, unplugged it, and continued to look at it.

“Well, anyway,” she said. “I was a willing accomplice. You can call the police if you want.”

“What would that serve?”

“To punish me.”

“I admit that I have no patience with liars. I think it’s best if you hand in your resignation and go home to your mother. But I’m not interested in punishing you.”

Pip had never been arrested, never sent to a principal’s office, never yelled at by a father. She’d done some bad things in her life but nothing so bad that she hadn’t been able to get away with it by being cute, or pitiable, or obviously well-meaning. She’d always managed to avoid scenes of harsh discipline; and now she was getting what she deserved. But still it seemed cruel and unusual that Tom was the man she was in trouble with. She couldn’t think of anyone whose standards she would have wanted less to run afoul of. His maturity and manliness, his fleshy shaved cheeks, his bald head, his crookedly knotted tie, his fashion-defying glasses all seemed to brook no nonsense. She felt wretchedly sad that this had to be the man, of all men, whom she’d betrayed and disappointed.

He was flipping through one of the IT reports. “The office breach doesn’t worry me too much,” he said. “The guy’s whole business depends on protecting his sources. I think he’ll protect mine. At worst, he’ll try to poach them. What concerns me is the home computer.”

“I’m sorry,” Pip said. “That was so dumb of me. One of the Project girls sent me an email attachment. I never should have opened it.”

“Have you had access to my home computer since then?”

“Me? No! I mean, how could I? Don’t you have passwords?”

“The software records keystrokes.”

“I don’t know anything about it. I didn’t even know there was spyware. I mean, I was worried, but I wasn’t sure.”

“He didn’t send you any passwords?”

“No.”

“So you haven’t seen anything on my hard drive. He hasn’t sent you any documents from it.”

“No! We broke off contact!”

“Why should I believe you? You’ve done nothing but lie to us.”

“You and Leila are my heroes. I would never spy on you. I would never read anything I wasn’t supposed to. I adore you guys.”

“And what if he sent you a document now? What would you do?”

“If I knew it was yours,” she said, “I wouldn’t read it.”

Tom released a long sigh, his shoulders caving inward around the loss of the air that he’d been holding in. Again he was staring at some invisible presence. Pip wondered what document of his could be so explosive that he had to worry about her reading it. She couldn’t imagine that he, of all men, had anything to hide.