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she didn’t consider herself a jock, she moved with a sinewy grace. She played with immense concentration. She had the rare ability to completely lose herself in the flow of the game.

    She wasn’t easy to talk to, but since I was Frankie Heller’s son, and she loved my mom unambivalently, and since I wasn’t her dad, eventually I broke through. She still hadn’t metabolized the terror of the abduction. I told her that was normal, and that I’d worry about her if she hadn’t been so deeply frightened by that day. I said it was great she was being so defiant.

    She looked at me with disbelief, then suspicion. What kind of mind game was I playing?

    I said I was serious. Defiance is great. That is how you learn to resist. I told her that fear is a tremendously useful instinct, since it’s a warning signal. Fear tells us we’re facing danger.
    We have to listen to it, use it. I even gave her a book about “the gift of fear,” though I doubt she ever read it.

    I told her that she was not only a girl but a beautiful girl and a rich girl, and that those were three strikes against her. I taught her how to look for danger signals, and then I showed her some rudimentary self-defense techniques, a few basic martial-arts moves. Nothing fancy, but enough. I’d hate to be a drunken Exeter boy who tried to push her too far.

    I took her to a dojo outside Boston and introduced her to Bujinkan self-defense techniques. I knew it would be great discipline for her, instill some self-confidence, be a healthy outlet for some of the aggression that had been building up inside her. Whenever I came to Boston and she was home from school, we’d make a point of getting together and practicing.
    And even, after a while, talking.

    It wasn’t the solution I’d hoped it would be, though. She continued doing stuff she knew would get her in trouble—smoking, drinking, whatever—and Marcus had to send her to some kind of reform school for a year. Who knows why she went through such a difficult period. It might have been the trauma of the abduction. But it might just as well have been a reaction to her mother’s running off.

    Or maybe it was just being a teenager.

    “WHAT’S WITH all the security?” I asked. “It wasn’t here last time I visited.” Marcus paused. “Times have changed. More crazies out there. I have more money.
    Newsweek did a story about me. Forbes , Fortune , the cable news—I mean, it’s not like I’m a shrinking violet.”

    “Have you received any threats?”

    “Threats? Like, did someone come up to me on State Street with a gun and threaten to blow my brains out or something? No. But I’m not going to wait.”

    “So it’s just a precaution.”

    “What, you don’t think I should be taking precautions?”

    “Of course you should. I just want to know if you had any specific warning, a breakin, whatever—anything that inspired you to tighten your security.”

    “I made him do it,” a female voice said.

    Belinda Marcus had entered the kitchen. She was a tall, slender blonde, extremely beautiful. But icy. Maybe forty, but a well-cared-for forty. A forty that got regular Botox and collagen fillers and the occasional well-timed mini-facelift. A woman whose idea of “work” was something you had done at a plastic surgeon’s office.

    She was all in white: skinny white ankle-slit pants, a white silk top with wide shoulder straps that looked like they were made out of origami, a low neckline with seamed cups that drew your eye to her small but pert breasts. She was barefoot. Her toenails were painted coral.

    “I thought it was absolutely mad that Marshall didn’t have any guards. A man who’s worth as much as Marshall Marcus? As prominent as he is? We’re just sitting ducks out here at the end of the point. And after what happened to Alexa?”

    “They were out shopping , Belinda. A movie, whatever. That coulda happened even if we had a … an armed battalion surrounding the house. They were