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he said, pressing a spot with his thumb, “that if you push hard enough here, you can knock someone unconscious?” And then he bent down and touched his lips to where his thumb had been, kissing the spot so lightly I might have imagined it. He walked out the door before I even noticed him moving, but I heard the sleigh bells tap against the steamed window glass. I stood there, swaying, and I wondered how I could be letting this happen again.

chapter 2
    Nicholas
    N icholas Prescott was born a miracle. After ten years of trying to conceive a child, his parents were finally given a son. And if his parents were a little older than the parents of most of the boys he went to school with, well, he never noticed. As if to make up for all the other children they’d never had, Robert and Astrid Prescott indulged Nicholas’s every whim. After a while he didn’t even need to verbalize his wishes; his parents began to guess what it was that a boy of six or twelve or twenty should have, and it was provided. So he had grown up with season tickets to the Celtics, with a purebred chocolate Lab named Scout, with virtually guaranteed admission to Exeter and Harvard. In fact, it wasn’t until Nicholas was a freshman at Harvard that he began to notice that the way he had been brought up was not the norm. Another young man might have taken the opportunity then to see the third world, or to volunteer for the Peace Corps, but that wouldn’t have been Nicholas. It wasn’t that he was disinterested or callous; he was just used to being a certain type of person. Nicholas Prescott had always received the world on a silver platter from his parents, and in return he gave them what was expected: the very model of a son.
    Nicholas had been ranked first in his class forever. He had dated a stream of beautiful, blue-blooded Wellesley girls from the time he was sixteen and realized they found him attractive. He knew how to be charming and how to be influential. He had been telling people he was going to be a doctor like his father since he was seven, so medical school was a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. He graduated from Harvard in 1979 and deferred his admission to the medical school. First he traveled around Europe, enjoying liaisons with light-boned Parisian women who smoked cigarettes laced with mint. Then he returned home and, at the urging of his old college crew coach, trained for the Olympic rowing trials with other hopefuls on Princeton’s Lake Carnegie. He rowed seventh seat in the eight-man shell that represented the United States. His parents had a brunch for their friends one Sunday morning, drinking Bloody Marys and watching, on television, their son stroke his way to a silver medal.
    It was a combination of things, then, that made Nicholas Prescott, age twenty-eight, wake up repeatedly in the middle of the night, sweating and shaking. He’d disentangle himself from Rachel, his girlfriend—also a medical student and possibly the smartest woman he’d ever known—and walk naked to the window that overlooked a courtyard below his apartment. Glowing in the blue shadow of the full moon, he’d listen to the fading sprint of traffic in Harvard Square and hold his hands suspended in front of him until the trembling stopped. And he knew, even if he didn’t care to admit it, what lay behind his nightmares: Nicholas had spent nearly three decades evading failure, and he realized he was living on borrowed time.
    Nicholas did not believe in God—he was too much a man of science—but he did think there was someone or something keeping track of his successes, and he knew that good fortune couldn’t last forever. He found himself thinking more and more of his freshman roommate in college, a thin boy named Raj, who had got a C+ on a literature paper and jumped from the roof of Widener, breaking his neck. What was it Nicholas’s father used to say? Life turns on a dime.
    Several times