The Albion Club did not allow telephones, laughter, or women who didn't have a membership number of their own, and it had been quietly breaking the third rule since 1994.

The car had been a black sedan with a driver who said nothing for eleven minutes and then said "Here." King Street was grey and wet. Under an awning stood a door of green lacquer with a brass plate no larger than a playing card. Nia gave her name to a man in a waistcoat who held a leather book and looked at her as though she might be on fire.

"Mr. Pruitt's table," he said, after a moment. "This way."

She walked behind him through the dining room. It was long and dim and smelled of beeswax and boiled beef. Chandeliers hung low enough to bump. At each table sat men whose faces she half-knew from the business pages, and they all looked up as she passed with exactly the same faint disapproval, the way a pond looks at a stone.

At the second-last table by the window, a young woman in an enormous cream hat was explaining a crossword clue loudly to a man in a cheap suit who looked as though he wanted to die.

"Seven across!" said Pinky. "'Debt collector, in retreat.' It's got to be an anagram, Marcus."

"I don't think it's an anagram, Priyanka."

"It's *always* an anagram."

Nia did not break stride. She had told them: *do not look at me, do not speak to me, and do not draw the attention of a single member.* Pinky had heard that as a challenge. The hat was the size of a satellite dish. She'd said it was "heiress camouflage".

Gerald Pruitt rose from the corner table as she arrived. He wore a tie with seahorses.

"Nia! My dear. Thank you for coming. Doesn't it smell like a funeral parlour? I like it for that. You can say anything." He pulled out her chair. "I took the liberty of ordering. They do a very good sole. You do eat fish?"

"I do."

"Wonderful."

The pen in her breast pocket, a plain black ballpoint with a tiny red light she had covered with a dot of nail varnish, hummed very gently against her sternum. A recorder. She'd bought it for forty dollars in a shop on Spadina, from a man who told her it was "for lectures." The law in Ontario was simple: if one party in a conversation consents to the recording, it may be made. She was the one party. It was quite enough.

The sole came. It was very good. Pruitt talked for twelve minutes about his daughter in Vancouver, and a sailboat he had never sailed, and a trouble with his knee. She let him. The best interviews, like the best fishing, began with a long, empty stretch of water.

"I owe you an apology," he said at last, setting down his fork. "For the first morning. I was cagey. I get cagey when I'm worried, and I've been worried about that account for a long time."

"Why?"

"Because it's dirty, my dear." He said it with perfect cheer, and took off his glasses, and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Not dirty in the sense of anyone being hurt. Dirty in the sense of a stain on a cuff. It was created in 2008 to cover a hole that was larger than the company could afford to show the market. A bridging entry. A temporary thing. Very common in a crisis. And then there was a — a family tragedy — and nobody had the heart to unpick it."

"Alexander Halvard."

"Poor Alex." He shook his head slowly. "He was the best of them. Warm. Brilliant. Absolutely hopeless with money."

"And he countersigned the entry."

"He did."

"Did he?" said Nia.

It was only a small movement of her head. The faintest tilt, the thing that in an interview you do with your face when you've noticed a shape in the curtain.

Pruitt's glasses stopped halfway to his nose.

"What an odd question."

"I study signatures. It's a hobby."

"Do you." The smile stayed. The eyes did something else entirely, a quick, nervous skate back and forth across her face. "Well. In that case, you've seen the page. You know what it looks like. And you know, I'm sure, that a page like that can be — interpreted."

"As what?"

"As a harmless administrative artefact. Or as something that can do a great deal of damage to a great many people." He leaned forward. His voice dropped, not to a whisper but to the register of a man selling a boat. "Nia. Let me be plain. I'd like that page. I'd like it back in the box, or in a fire, or in my safe, wherever you prefer. In exchange, I'd like to make you very comfortable."

"How comfortable?"

"A consultancy fee. Four million dollars, over two years, to a company of your choosing. And at the end of the engagement, if you like, a role. Head of Treasury. I'm retiring in the spring; the succession is wide open." He spread his hands. "You're clearly gifted. You'd be thirty and running the money for a listed company. Do you know how rare that is?"

"I'm twenty-nine."

"Better still."

At the next table, Pinky said, loudly, "Is it a *hidden* word, Marcus? Like the answer's *inside* the clue?"

"I think the answer is that we should leave," said Marcus.

Nia lifted her glass of water, and the ice in it clinked. "That's a very generous offer, Mr. Pruitt."

"Gerry."

"Gerry. May I ask what you're afraid of?"

He laughed. It was the old reflex, bright and automatic, but a half-second late, like a clapper hitting a bell that had already cracked. "Nothing at all."

"You signed that entry yourself. It's your signature on it. If it was a harmless administrative artefact you'd be able to say who asked you to book it."

"I booked it because I was told to."

"By whom?"

"By the board."

"The board didn't meet that week."

"By the *family*." The word was sharp. A little breath of white at the corners of his mouth. He glanced round the room, and Nia watched him do the arithmetic: the nearest table, the waiter, the woman in the absurd hat. "Listen. The entry arrived on my desk already complete. Already countersigned. All I did was book it. It came in a sealed envelope, from upstairs, with a note, and I had one hour. It's not my —" He stopped, swallowed, and the glasses were in his hand and rubbing, rubbing. "It's not my signature that matters. It's the one next to it."

"From upstairs."

"From a person with a key to sixty-one."

Cold stillness in her ribs. Her pen hummed against her chest.

"And you never asked whether Alexander had actually signed?"

"Alex would never have signed it." It came out of him fast, with a violence that startled them both. "Alex would never — he wouldn't have put his name to a —" His face closed like a hand. "That's not what I meant. He was a busy man. He signed a great many things."

"Of course."

"I'm tired, Nia. I'm sixty-one years old. I have a bad knee and a daughter who wants me to come home. I would like to retire into a quiet room with a fish and some very good wine, and have none of this be my problem." He dabbed his forehead with a napkin. "Take the money. Give me the page. In a year nobody will remember who asked."

She did not move. She was careful not to hurry the silence. Silence, in her trade, was a currency: whoever spent it first lost.

"I'll think about it," she said at last.

"Of course you will." His shoulders dropped, with something that looked appallingly like relief. "That's all I ask."

The waiter brought coffee. Pruitt stirred sugar into his and began to talk about the weather. He talked about it for a long time, in the unmoored, comfortable voice of a man who has told the truth by accident and is hoping the room will cover it with noise. Nia let him. She finished her coffee. She thanked him for the sole.

When she stood to leave, he rose too, as old men do, with the napkin in his hand. And then he said something she hadn't prepared for.

"You know, you remind me of a little girl I once knew."

She had her coat half on. She stopped with one arm in its sleeve.

"Do I?"

"At a Christmas party. Years ago. The company used to hold them at the old house in Rosedale, great long tables, dreadful carols." He was smiling, fondly, vaguely, looking out of the window at the wet street. "There was a child of eight. Very serious. Hair in two tight braids. Her nanny, a lovely Ghanaian woman, brought her down from the nursery, and she sat under the piano for an hour, and when Konrad crouched to ask her name, she bit him. Hard. Right on the thumb."

Under the pale pearl of the chandeliers, the room was warm and low and full of the clink of silver on china. It was entirely, perfectly quiet.

"I'm sorry," said Nia. "I don't think that was me."

"No." Pruitt turned his head, and looked at her at last. The glasses were off. Without them his eyes were blue and red-rimmed and frightened, and as old as the table. "No, of course not. I'm an old man. I tell stories. It's the braids, I think. You have that same way of standing, like someone about to be told off." He lifted a hand. "Forgive me."

"There's nothing to forgive."

"Isn't there?" said Gerald Pruitt softly. "I've always thought there was an awful lot."

She walked out between the tables with her back straight and her face arranged, a woman with a briefcase and a good coat and no history. At the green door she nearly collided with Pinky, who had abandoned the hat and her crossword and was holding Marcus by the elbow.

"We're leaving," Pinky said, not quite quietly. "Marcus has a *fish allergy*."

"I don't —" Marcus began.

"Walk," said Pinky.

They were in the wet street, under the awning, with the traffic hissing past, before Nia realised her hands were shaking, and that she had never in her life been so sure of anything as that Gerald Pruitt had spent the last four minutes telling her, in a way that could never be repeated, that he knew exactly who she was.