I arrived twelve minutes late, which was not unusual. Late had become the default texture of my life since I made partner — a persistent low-grade condition, like the faint headache you stop noticing after the first few months. I had been on a client call since six, pacing my apartment in my work clothes while simultaneously trying to finish getting ready, phone tucked between my ear and shoulder, earrings in one hand and contract notes in the other. The client was a mid-size manufacturer in Peoria whose main lender was threatening to accelerate a loan, and the call had started at six as a quick check-in and had become something else entirely by six-twenty, which was how these calls always went. By the time I reached the restaurant I was still wearing my coat, still holding my phone, still in the mental posture of someone mid-negotiation who has temporarily suspended operations rather than concluded them.

The steakhouse was the kind of place Evan preferred for group dinners — dark wood paneling, low amber light, tablecloths that cost more per laundering than most people’s grocery budgets, staff trained to appear completely unsurprised by whatever unfolded at the tables they served. It occupied the ground floor of a building in River North, the kind of neighborhood that had made its peace with the idea that expense and quality were synonymous, and the restaurant played into that comfortably. Chicago in November, the windows steamed slightly from the cold outside, and inside everything had that polished, well-fed warmth that money creates in enclosed spaces.

I came through the door still looking at my phone. I had a message from my associate that I needed to respond to before morning, and I was composing the response in my head even as I navigated around other people’s coats and the host stand and the corridor between the bar and the main room. I almost walked into a server. I apologized, gave the name at the host stand, and followed someone in a pressed white shirt through the dining room toward the corner booth where I could already see, from a distance, the familiar arrangement of people I had spent the last two years calling our friends.Our friends. I was already revising that formulation even before I understood why.

Evan was at the center of the table. That was simply how his social geometry worked — he drew rooms toward him, unconsciously or otherwise, and conversation arranged itself around his position the way water arranges itself around a stone. He was holding a whiskey glass and sitting in the slightly reclined, leg-crossed posture he used when he was at ease, or performing ease, the two states in Evan being sometimes indistinguishable.