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there was a moment when he’d looked at her mouth—not something you usually do, he realized, unless you’ve got some ideas—but then he’d backed away, and scratched his neck, and went off to get some cheese cut into cubes which, as Karen pointed out, was not really the best way to maximize the surface area of cheese.
    Andrew did not know what Karen had wanted from him. There was nothing he could really do for her, he didn’t think, besides write her the glowing recommendation she was already going to get. But there must be something—some power he had that he hadn’t yet unpacked—because there was no way she’d be talking to him if it weren’t strategic. She was a student of Kissinger, after all, a believer in realpolitik. And though there might be permanent interests, there were no permanent allies.
    In the taxi, Anna was still staring out the window. “Hey,” said Andrew. He pulled on her ponytail and she shook it away from him. “What do you think of the city?”
    “I don’t like it,” said Anna, still looking out the window. Outside, the midafternoon light was coming down in great golden bars, like some kind of ancient currency.
    “Do you think you’d like it here if this weren’t happening?” said Andrew.
    “I don’t know,” said Anna. There was a long pause, and then she said, “No.”
    On Tuesday, Andrew left Anna at the hotel and went to Tribunales to meet with the lawyers. There were only two of them—Franco Ojeda and Leo Velazquez—but Andrew couldn’t help but think of them as a phalanx; they were mercenaries, it seemed to him, come to fight for pay. The conference room where Andrew met them was wood paneled and high ceilinged; it reminded Andrew of 1987, a terrible year. Ojeda was very fat and Velazquez was very bald; the overhead light caught his pate in a complicated, adamantine shine. Ojeda offered water, which Andrew declined, and Velazquez pulled down the blinds, which Andrew did not understand. And then, with the help of audiovisual supplements, the lawyers laid out the criminal case against Andrew’s oldest living daughter.
    “First,” said Ojeda. His English was only very lightly accented; Andrew cringed at how much this surprised him. “The emails.”
    The emails—which the lawyers had helpfully printed out, color coded by date and arranged in a binder—had emerged almost immediately after Lily’s arrest; Andrew could only assume Lily had accidentally left herself logged in on one of the school computers, which was the kind of thing she would do. Andrew had read them over and over already, and they never sounded any less damning; this time, he closed one eye and half-skimmed, not wanting to look at them straight. Lily really could sound awful if you didn’t know her.
    “Second,” said Velazquez, opening a new binder. “The love triangle.”
    The lawyers had produced pictures of all three of them, somehow—Andrew recognized Lily’s picture from her Facebook page—and with their images all lined up like that, Andrew saw something important that the lawyers were not saying. Lily’s looks did not help. She was pretty, but it was a sloppy sort of prettiness, suggesting carelessness,sensuality, unearned privilege. Her breasts were, to her eternal chagrin, her mother’s. “I have the breasts of a medieval peasant!” she’d shouted as a teenager once. Andrew had been waiting in the foyer to pick the girls up for the weekend; he’d gazed at the ceiling and pretended not to hear. “What the hell do I need them for?”
    “You’ll like them one day,” he’d heard Maureen say.
    “I won’t,” said Lily miserably. “I got a 2300 on the SAT. I am never going to like them.”
    “You got a 2280,” said Maureen.
    Lily dressed them with varying degrees of success; in the heat, she tended to dress them very inadequately indeed. In the Facebook picture, she was wearing something ridiculous—some spaghetti strap thing, Andrew didn’t know what to call it—and they