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to discover that it was morning, the light hurting her eyes. She wandered downstairs as if in a dream. There were just a few stragglers left from the party. A short fat Spider-Man was making out with Snow White on the sofa, and the Grim Reaper was slumped on the floor in the kitchen, sharing a joint with a gorilla. There was no sign of Darth Vader. It was as if she had dreamed the whole thing, as if he had never existed. But she soon had proof that it was very real; and, nine months later, she held the living proof in her arms – all eight pounds, nine ounces of it. She named the baby Luke.

 
    Kit Masterson layon his narrow single bed, his hands behind his head, staring disconsolately at the ceiling as he listened to fireworks and bangers exploding outside the window. How the hell had he ended up back here? Two years ago, he had been a successful trader on Wall Street with a penthouse apartment on Riverside Drive and a beautiful trophy girlfriend at his beck and call. He had spent his summers in rented mansions in the Hamptons and his nights in upscale landmark restaurants and ritzy bars where the cocktails cost fifty dollars apiece. Now, he was in his old bedroom in his parents’ house, jobless and broke, the boxes full of the belongings he had brought with him when he had packed up his life in New York crammedinto the tiny space so that there was barely room to move. He hadn’t had the heart to sort them out in the two weeks since he moved home – two weeks that had been spent mostly lying on this bed in a state of numb shock, pondering the crap-heap that was his life. Where had it all gone so wrong?
    Of course, he knew where it had gone wrong – where it had gone wrong for so many people. This bloody recession was fucking things up for everyone. He knew it wasn’t just him, but he was taking it personally just the same. He was supposed to be the exception, damn it! Losing was something that happened to other people, not to him. Stocks could go up or down, but he had got used to his stock only rising. His stomach still churned when he thought of that day when he and his co-workers had been lined up to face the firing squad. They had known it was coming, but that hadn’t stopped it being a massive shock when it finally happened. Up until that moment, it hadn’t seemed real. Even then, he had still believed that there would be some loophole that would enable him to avoid what was happening to everyone else, a golden rope that would be pulled aside to let him slip through. But it had rolled through Wall Street like a tsunami, indiscriminately engulfing everyone.
    Still, he had been so ludicrously overpaid that he might have been all right – if he hadn’t invested so heavily in a friend’s property business. He had held out for as long as he could in New York, trying to hold the pieces of his life together. He downsized, he retrenched, he cashed in what few assets he had and he tried to find another job. But when the property market went tits-up, it was the beginning of the end. Finally, he had to admit defeat and let go, watching helplessly as the uncontainable tide swept everything out of his reach. And now here he was, sleeping in his old bedroom, surrounded by the remnants of his teenage life, with his mom cooking hisdinner and doing his washing, and his dad offering to give him money to go to the pub. He couldn’t live like this, but what the fuck was he going to do? He was thirty-one years old and fit for nothing.
    Dealing was all he knew – all he was good at. He had fallen on his feet when, drifting through a series of dead-end jobs, he had stumbled into a lowly office job at a Wall Street brokerage and found himself in an environment that suited his talents exactly. He had never been bright academically, but he was sharp, energetic and driven, and that combined with his street smarts and charm had taken him a long way – all the way to the frenzied dealing room, where he discovered an intuitive feel for