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‘They're going to make a deal with the Kid.'

‘Maybe they already have, for all we know. They tell him: give us Van Bender and you can walk away. You can keep working in the industry, no public censure, nothing on your record. In fact, I'll give you five to one that he makes up stuff about you, exaggerates the things you said, makes you seem much worse than you are.'

‘That's hard to do.'

‘I know.' Frank bit into his toast, ripped it in half with his teeth. ‘My point is, you have to assume the worst.'

‘So what can I do?'

‘You could always kill him.' Frank laughed. ‘Just kidding, of course.'

‘Of course.'

‘I think you need to have a talk with him. See where he stands. Once you feel him out, we can decide what to do.'

Before he could feel out the Kid, to see if he would betray him, Timothy had another betrayal to think about. He returned to his office and called his wife on the telephone.

‘What are you doing now?' he asked nonchalantly.

‘Just cleaning up around the house.'

‘You have lunch plans?'

‘I was going to meet Ann Beatty at noon. But I can cancel.'

‘No,' he said. ‘You should meet her. It's important that Tricia gets to know people around the neighborhood. I'll stick around here.'

‘You sure?'

‘Yes,' he said.

When he hung up, he knew what he was going to do. At noon, when Tricia left the house for lunch, Timothy went home.

He no longer believed her. It wasn't merely the episode the previous night, in which he found her studying Katherine's diaries in the attic at two o'clock in the morning. It was a series of strange incidents: her using the word
awesome
, knowing that the necklace was an anniversary present, forgetting that first sexual experience in her childhood bedroom, bringing up marriage but rejecting a prenuptial agreement …

Now, in the daylight, without a drop of alcohol in him, without the buzz of sexual desire clouding his judgment, he thought maybe he had been a fool. Maybe the woman sharing the house with him, the woman inhabiting Tricia's young body – maybe it was simply Tricia after all. How long ago had she started planning this game? Did she take a job at Timothy's firm knowing all along that she would try to marry him? Or did the plan come to her when she learned of Katherine's suicide?

She had known that, as Tricia, she might be able to seduce him, but that he would never trust her completely, and she would never be able to get her hands on his money. But as Katherine, his wife of twenty years, the woman he loved and missed, the woman he trusted, it could be different. That was the reason for the rush to marriage, and the anger over the prenuptial agreement.

It was brilliant. The story was convincing, but only because he wanted to be convinced. He wanted his wife back. He wanted a second chance. At the same time, he desired Tricia. And in a fit of genius, she made it all possible – to have another chance with his wife, while simultaneously possessing a beautiful twenty-three-year-old girl. The plan itself required almost nothing – a rented office on Sand Hill Road, some cheap computers stuffed into racks, a Chinese actor playing a scientist – and he had fallen for it. Because he
wanted
to fall for it. Because he was weak. And because he missed his wife. And because Tricia was beautiful.

What gave it away were the diaries, of course. It was a stroke of luck for Tricia that Katherine had kept such detailed journals. How had Tricia known? Timothy must have mentioned it to her,
as he did to others – a flip remark about his wife's bizarre obsession with recording the details of her life. He couldn't remember telling Tricia about the diaries, but it was certainly possible.

And when Tricia found the diaries in the attic, she made the most of them, studying them, like a legal student poring over case law before the bar exam, learning the citations, memorizing the important facts.

Perhaps she had even entered his house to read them, before coming back as Katherine? It was possible. And then, once she had the opportunity, she studied them every day, learning more about Katherine and her life, until, finally, she could
become
Katherine.

But the simulation was only as good as the material she had to work with. And that was the problem with her plan: she only knew the things recorded in the diaries.

The sex gave it away. Katherine recorded how many pieces of toast she ate for breakfast, but about sexual matters she was very private. That was why Tricia ‘remembered' certain details about Katherine's life – the time they received a speeding ticket and Timothy tried to bribe the police officer – but not other details – not sexual details, for example, like the first time she fellated him in her childhood bedroom. Tricia didn't know about it because Katherine didn't write about it.

Now Timothy needed to make sure. He needed to read the diaries for himself, to prove that his theory was correct, that Tricia could only recount incidents that had been written about, and not others.

He arrived home at five minutes past noon. Tricia's car was gone from the driveway. He knocked and rang the doorbell, to make sure no one would answer. He wanted time to study the diaries on his own, without interruption.

He turned the key and entered the house. In the foyer, he called out, ‘Tricia?'

The house was empty.

He went immediately to the staircase and climbed to the second floor, then opened the attic door at the end of the hall. The air inside was warm and humid. He turned on the lights,
and climbed the staircase. It smelled musty. At the far end of the space he saw the journals, piled neatly where Tricia had left them the night before.

He looked at his watch. He decided he had about an hour before Tricia would return from lunch. And so for the third time in his life, he sat down on the floor, and he began to read his wife's diaries.

He was right, of course.

The incident about the bribe and speeding ticket was there, as he knew it would be:

‘When the police officer pulled us over, Timothy smiled at him and tried to bribe him. He did it in his usual charming way, so that it hardly seemed like a bribe. It was, of course, typical of him. Why does he feel that he is above all rules, that he can get away with anything, that the laws of the universe do not apply to him? I suppose it gives the people who work for him a kind of comfort – that this man is so clearly in charge, and able to navigate the world without impediment. But, truthfully, it
disgusts
me.'

The passage was familiar, because he had read it years before – the first time he sneaked around the house to read her journals. There it was, the word ‘disgusts' underlined twice, the second line harder than the first, the pen pushing through the vellum.

Now, he needed to confirm his theory about the sex. He would search the diary for a mention of the sex in her childhood bedroom. He was sure that he would not find it.

He tried to think back: when had she done that? It was years ago, when they were first married … in 1979. They had traveled back east to visit her parents. He scanned the pile of journals on the floor, with the years handwritten on the fabric binding: 1977, 1978 … there. 1979.

He lifted the volume and began to flip through. It didn't take long to find it. It was November. Yes, they were visiting her parents for Thanksgiving. Reading her description of those days, the memories came back to him: their arrival at Logan; Mr. Sutter
shaking Timothy's hand and calling him ‘Son,' the cold wind snapping in their faces when they stepped out of the airport; Katherine showing him upstairs in her Cambridge house, to her old bedroom. It happened the first night there:

‘November 20, 1979. I'm in Cambridge, back home with Timothy. I showed him around Mom and Dad's. It is strange to have the man I married sleeping in the tiny bed where I used to sleep as a girl, before I even knew about men, or sex, or marriage. He is snoring now, under my pink covers. We just had sex. How strange.'

That was it. Six words about sex. But she did not describe the act in detail, did not note that it was the first time she had fellated him; did not remark upon what it felt like, or what she thought.

Which was why, Timothy understood, Tricia did not know about it. She couldn't, because it was not in the journal.

He continued reading the journals, and lost track of time. He could not stop himself. Once he began, he needed to continue, to follow the arc of her story, from her girlish excitement when he proposed to her, to her realization that Timothy was not who she thought he was, to her ultimate loneliness and despair. It happened gradually over the course of volumes, interspersed between details about what she wore and what she ate. It was a story told in static still-lifes, like a cartoon book with hundreds of individual sketches that, when you flipped the pages, revealed a smooth motion from one side of the page to another.

He read about her depression when she miscarried, her excitement when she finally carried to six months – and then her despair when she miscarried again, that final time.

He read about her growing realization that he was selfish, and egotistical, and did not consider her feelings.

But what Timothy did not read was anything about his affairs. At first, it was remarkable to him. He kept reading the pages, waiting for the shoe to drop, to finally see the passage where she described her fears that he was cheating, to read about himself as an unfaithful cad.

It took him some time to realize that he would never read such a passage. He would not read it for the same reason he would not read about explicit sexual details: because it embarrassed her to write about them. And so the angry words about his affairs were mysteriously missing from those pages. Posterity would never learn about his philandering.

And that led him to a Plan, a way to learn for certain exactly who Tricia was – a way he could be sure.

He scanned the pile and found the journal from 1996. That was the year in which Timothy cheated on her for the final time. It was the year he traveled to Palm Beach and visited Mack Gladwell, the cocaine-snorting record producer, and had gone home with the cocktail waitress who then called Katherine.

Of course it was an incident neither of them ever forgot. But he was sure that it would not appear in her journal. He opened the 1996 volume and read the days leading up to his trip to Palm Beach. He found the pages.

On April 30 she wrote, ‘Timothy left for Palm Beach today, and will return on Friday.'

Then on Friday, May 3, her entry was three words long, ‘Timothy returned today.'

On May 4 she wrote: ‘Breakfast: toast and jam.'

On May 5, she wrote, ‘Breakfast: soft boiled egg.'

The journal entries continued in that laconic fashion for an entire week. Finally, on May 11, she wrote, ‘He came back.'

It was all he needed to read. No mention of Mack Gladwell, of the phone call from the waitress, or of Katherine kicking Timothy out of the house for a week and making him stay in the Hyatt. Now Timothy knew how to test Tricia one final time, to know for certain if she was lying to him. He closed the journal with a solid thump and replaced it on the pile. He straightened the edge of the bindings so that the books appeared the way he found them.

In the house down below, he heard keys tinkling and the front door opening. He walked calmly out of the attic and went downstairs to greet Tricia.

39

He did not confront her immediately.

It was more than simply wanting to revel in his secret knowledge. He didn't want the illusion to come to an end. He had enjoyed believing the yarn, that Katherine had returned to him, that somehow a scientist had backed up her brain like so many computer files, and then had restored it into a young girl's body.

Now, following her around the house as she described her lunch with Ann Beatty, he realized that the last few weeks, with Tricia playing the part of his wife, had been the happiest in his life. He now had everything he wanted. He had a second chance with the woman he loved. He slept each night with a young, beautiful girl. It was a fantasy. Which was why, he understood, he had believed it. And why he did not want the fantasy to come to an end.

They sat together on the patio as she told him about her lunch.

He said suddenly, ‘Would you like some wine?'

Tricia cocked her head. ‘A bit early in the day, isn't it? Even for you?'

‘It's such a beautiful afternoon,' he said, waving his hand across the back yard.

‘All right, then.' She smiled.

And so he went down to the wine cellar and picked out a fine chardonnay, a 1998 Whitehall Lane, returned to the patio with it, and said, ‘Momentous days call for great wines.'

‘What makes this a momentous day?'

‘You'll see,' he said.

He uncorked the bottle and poured them each a glass of wine, and then sat in the wicker chair and pulled it alongside hers, so that their knees touched. He reached out and stroked her knee,
and underneath her linen pants he felt her flesh, shapely and taut, and he knew that he would miss it.

‘I think Ann really likes me,' Tricia said. ‘She likes the idea of taking a young girl under her wing. It makes her feel young, I guess. It's hard, not letting her know that it's me. There are so many times I want to say, ‘You already told me that, Ann.' Or I want to blurt out: ‘Ann, it's me, Katherine!''

‘Really?' Timothy said. He stroked her thigh. He wondered: should he have sex with her, one last time, before he revealed to her that he knew about her game? ‘It must be hard.'

‘If you only knew,' Tricia said.

‘Maybe I do know.'

Tricia looked at him, as if to say, What a strange thing to say. Then she said, ‘Okay, Timothy, what's going on now? Are you having another breakdown?'

‘If that's what you call it.' He gripped her leg, tighter now. It was not exactly threatening, but it could become so, quickly. He felt a strange sensation, a combination of anger and sexual excitement, as if he wanted to fuck her and then knock her head into the patio flagstone.