To the jail, Meredith had worn jeans and a white button-down shirt and suede flats and her trench coat, and she carried a clutch purse with two rolls of quarters inside. Her hair hadn’t been colored in months, and there had been no trips to Palm Beach, so she was graying and her skin was the color of paste. She wore no makeup-she couldn’t insult the American public by bothering with mascara-although she knew that by not prettying herself, she would invite the press to comment on how worn-out she looked. Well, she was worn-out. The mob of photographers and reporters was waiting for her, snapping pictures, sticking microphones in her face, but Burt and Dev were there to fend them off and hail her a cab.

Later, she would wish she’d stayed in the relative safety of her apartment.

There had been a terrific wait to get in to see Freddy, during which Meredith experienced thirty-one flavors of anxiety. Burt and Dev were with her-together, they were costing her nine hundred dollars an hour, though how she would ever pay them, she had no idea. Burt checked his BlackBerry with a compulsivity that unsettled Meredith. Dev paged restlessly through an outdated National Geographic from the sad, wobbly lounge table that was scarred with other people’s initials. He then set the magazine down and studied the other denizens of the waiting room-the men and women who looked even more hopeless and lost than Meredith felt-as though he were going to put them in a novel. They didn’t speak until Meredith was called to go through security, when both Burt and Dev wished her luck. They weren’t going in with her. Security was another long and arduous process where Meredith and her clutch and trench coat were subjected to scrutiny. Meredith was patted down-roughly-by a female officer twice her size. The woman did everything but pick Meredith up, turn her upside down, and shake her. She didn’t say so, but she must have recognized Meredith and felt the predictable contempt. At the end, she shoved Meredith, just for fun.

Meredith didn’t protest. She was too nervous to protest because she was being escorted through locked doors and down long, stark hallways, to see Freddy. Meredith had promised herself she wouldn’t break down. She would fight off sentimentality and longing. She would simply ask Freddy the questions she needed the answers to, maybe not all eighty-four-there wouldn’t be time for that-but the top two or three: Where was the rest of the money? What could they do to clear Leo’s name? How could she prove to the world she was innocent? At this point, Freddy was the only person who could help her.

When she finally did see Freddy, she lost her legs. The guard had her firmly by the arm and kept her upright.

Freddy! A voice inside her head was echoing down a long tunnel.

He was wearing an orange jumpsuit, just like the prisoners they’d seen on countless reruns of Law & Order; his hands were cuffed behind his back. His hair, which had been salt-and-pepper curls, was shaved down to the scalp, and nearly white. He was fifty-two; he looked seventy-five. But it was him just the same, the boy who had accosted her in the stacks of the Princeton bookstore. They had been enrolled in the same anthropology course, and Meredith had picked up the last used textbook, thinking she would save her parents some money. Freddy had begged her for it. He’d said, I can’t afford a new textbook, so if you buy that one, I’ll have to go without, and if I go without, I’ll fail the course. You don’t want me to fail the course, do you? And she’d said, Who are you? And he’d said, I’m Freddy Delinn. Who are you?

She’d told him her name was Meredith Martin.

He said, You’re very pretty, Meredith Martin, but that’s not why I’m asking you for the book. I’m asking you because I’m here on six different scholarships, my mother works at a bottling plant during the day and at Kmart as a cashier at night, and I need that used book.

Meredith had nodded, taken aback by his candor. Growing up on the Main Line, she had never heard anyone admit to poverty before. She liked his black hair and blue eyes and his pale, smooth skin. She would have mistaken him for just another beautiful, assholish upperclassman had it not been for his humility, which pierced her. Meredith had found him instantly intriguing. And he had called her pretty! Toby had broken up with Meredith only a few months earlier, and he had so decimated her self-esteem that she’d been certain no one would ever call her “pretty” again.

She handed Freddy the used book and took a new book, at more than double the price, for herself.

This entire memory was encapsulated in a single moment as she looked at Freddy. Meredith thought, I never should have given him that book. I should have said, “Tough luck,” and walked away.

The warden released Freddy’s wrists from the cuffs so he could talk to Meredith on the phone.

Meredith found herself unable to speak. She didn’t pick up the phone and neither did he. He had always believed that Meredith was smarter than he was-true-that she was classier, better bred, more refined. He had always treated her like a rare, one-of-a-kind treasure; he had lived in awe of her. Deep in her heart, she worried-God, how she worried-that he had started all of this as a way to impress her.

She picked up the phone. “Fred.”

The guard standing behind Freddy helped him pick up the phone and put it to his ear.

“Fred, it’s Meredith.” Saying this made her feel idiotic, but she wasn’t sure he recognized her. She had pictured him crying, apologizing; she had, at the very least, pictured him expressing his undying love.

He regarded her coolly. She tried to get the guard’s attention to ask “Is he okay?” but the guard was staring off into middle space, perhaps willfully, and Meredith couldn’t snag him.

“Fred,” Meredith said. “I need you to listen to me. I’m in trouble and Leo’s in trouble. They’re trying to get me on a conspiracy charge.” She swallowed. “They think I knew about it!” Freddy seemed to be listening, but he didn’t respond. “And they think Leo was working with you on the seventeenth floor. Someone named Deacon Rapp told them this.” Meredith watched Freddy’s face for a flicker of recognition or interest. “Where is the rest of the money, Fred?” She had the list of eighty-four questions in her clutch purse-no one from security had even bothered to look at it-but if he could just tell her this one thing, then she could turn the information over to the Feds, and maybe that would get them off the hook. Even if there wasn’t very much left-a few billion or hundreds of millions-to give the Feds this information would help her and Leo. There would be no helping Freddy at this point. “Please tell me where the rest of the money is. An offshore account? Switzerland? The Middle East? It does nobody any good hidden, Freddy.”

Freddy removed the receiver from his ear and looked at it like it was something he might eat. Then he set the receiver down on the counter in front of him.

She said, “Freddy, wait! They’re going to prosecute me. They’re going to prosecute Leo. Our son.” Maybe Freddy didn’t care about Meredith; she had to acknowledge the possibility that, along with lying about everything else, he had been lying about his devotion to her. But he would never knowingly allow Leo to go to prison.

He stared at her. The Plexiglas between them reminded Meredith of being at the zoo. Freddy was watching her like she was some curious specimen of wildlife.

She tried another tack. “I brought you quarters,” she said. “For the vending machines.” She held up the quarters, the only thing she had to bargain with.

He tilted his head but said nothing.


“He had no intention of talking to me,” Meredith said to Connie. “He wasn’t going to explain himself, he wasn’t going to give me any answers. He wasn’t going to give me anything. He didn’t care if I went to prison. He didn’t care if Leo went to prison.”

Connie said, “He’s a bastard, Meredith.”

Meredith nodded. She had heard people say this again and again. Her attorneys had said it. Even Freddy’s attorney, Richard Cassel, had said it to Meredith, out in the hallway before Meredith’s deposition: You knew he was a bastard when you married him. But it wasn’t that easy. Freddy had been many things during the thirty years of their marriage and a bastard wasn’t one of them. Freddy was smart and charming and driven to succeed like nobody Meredith had ever known. And he had made it clear that Meredith was part of his success. How many times had he said it? She was his winning lottery ticket. Without her, he was nothing. She, in turn, had done what any devoted wife would do: she had defended him. He had returns of 29 percent in good years. Meredith reminded people that he had been the star of the economics department at Princeton. He delivered returns of 8 percent in down years, and people were even happier. Meredith said, “Freddy’s got the magic. He understands the stock market like nobody else.”

But those who weren’t invited to invest with Delinn Enterprises had been jealous, then suspicious. He’s lying. He’s cheating. He’s breaking the law. He’s got to be; you just can’t deliver returns like that in this economy. Although it was difficult, Meredith learned to snub these people. She took them off the lists of the benefits she was chairing; she had them blackballed from clubs. These actions, now, seemed abominable, but at the time, she had only been defending her husband.

Was Freddy a bastard? Yes-God, yes! Meredith knew it now but didn’t understand it. She didn’t understand how she had lived with the man for thirty years without knowing him. He had always been generous to a fault; he made good things happen for people. He called the dean of admissions at Princeton to get his secretary’s son off the waiting list. He gave a pregnant woman his seat in first class, while he took her seat in coach-on a transatlantic flight! He sent Meredith’s mother orchids every year on her birthday without a reminder from Meredith. Was he a bastard? Yes, but he had hidden it well. And that was part of the allure of Freddy Delinn-he came across as mysterious and unknowable. What was it Freddy was hiding in the deep recesses of his mind, behind his kind and generous facade?