These moments never last for long—sometimes, all he has to do is sit up, and he will be reminded, as if slapped across the face, that his body owns him, not the other way around—but in recent years, as things have gotten worse, he has worked very hard to give up the idea that he will ever improve, and has instead tried to concentrate on and be grateful for the minutes of reprieve, whenever and wherever his body chooses to bestow them. Finally he sits, slowly, and then stands, just as slowly. And still, he feels wonderful. A good day, he decides, and walks to the bathroom, past the wheelchair that sulks, a sullen ogre, in a corner of his bedroom.

He gets ready and then sits down with some papers from the office to wait. Generally, he spends most of Saturday at work—that at least hasn’t changed from the days he used to take his walks: oh, his walks! Was that once him, someone who could trip, goatlike, to the Upper East Side and home again, all eleven miles on his own?—but today he’s meeting Malcolm and taking him to his suitmaker’s, because Malcolm is going to get married and needs to buy a suit.

They’re not completely certain if Malcolm is actually getting married or not. They think he is. Over the past three years, he and Sophie have broken up and gotten back together, and broken up, and gotten back together. But in the past year, Malcolm has had conversations with Willem about weddings, and does Willem think they’re an indulgence or not; and with JB about jewelry, and when women say they don’t like diamonds, do they really mean it, or are they just testing the way it sounds; and with him about prenuptial agreements.

He had answered Malcolm’s questions as best as he could, and then had given him the name of a classmate from law school, a matrimonial attorney. “Oh,” Malcolm had said, moving backward, as if he had offered him the name of a professional assassin. “I’m not sure I need this yet, Jude.”

“All right,” he said, and withdrew the card, which Malcolm seemed unwilling to even touch. “Well, if and when you do, just ask.”

And then, a month ago, Malcolm had asked if he could help him pick out a suit. “I don’t even really have one, isn’t that nuts?” he asked. “Don’t you think I should have one? Don’t you think I should start looking, I don’t know, more grown-up or something? Don’t you think it’d be good for business?”

“I think you look great, Mal,” he said. “And I don’t think you need any help on the business front. But if you want one, sure, I’m happy to help you.”

“Thanks,” said Malcolm. “I mean, I just think it’s something I should have. You know, just in case something comes up.” He paused. “I can’t believe you have a suitmaker, by the way.”

He smiled. “He’s not my suitmaker,” he said. “He’s just someone who makes suits, and some of them happen to be mine.”

“God,” said Malcolm, “Harold really created a monster.”

He laughed, obligingly. But he often feels as if a suit is the only thing that makes him look normal. For the months he was in a wheelchair, those suits were a way of reassuring his clients that he was competent and, simultaneously, of reassuring himself that he belonged with the others, that he could at least dress the way they did. He doesn’t consider himself vain, but rather scrupulous: when he was a child, the boys from the home would occasionally play baseball games with the boys from the local school, who would taunt them, pinching their noses as they walked onto the field. “Take a bath!” they would shout. “You smell! You smell!” But they did bathe: they had mandatory showers every morning, pumping the greasy pink soap into their palms and onto washcloths and sloughing off their skin while one of the counselors walked back and forth before the row of showerheads, cracking one of the thin towels at the boys who were misbehaving, or shouting at the ones who weren’t cleaning themselves with enough vigor. Even now, he has a horror of repulsing, by being unkempt, or dirty, or unsightly. “You’ll always be ugly, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be neat,” Father Gabriel used to tell him, and although Father Gabriel was wrong about many things, he knows he was right about this.

Malcolm arrives and hugs him hello and then begins, as he always does, surveying the space, telescoping his long neck and rotating in a slow circle around the room, his gaze like a lighthouse’s beam, making little assessing noises as he does.

He answers Malcolm’s question before he can ask it: “Next month, Mal.”

“You said that three months ago.”

“I know. But now I really mean it. Now I have the money. Or I will, at the end of this month.”

“But we discussed this.”

“I know. And Malcolm—it’s so unbelievably generous of you. But I’m not going to not pay you.”

He has lived in the apartment for more than four years now, and for four years, he’s been unable to renovate it because he hasn’t had the money, and he hasn’t had the money because he was paying off the apartment. In the meantime, Malcolm has drawn up plans, and walled off the bedrooms, and helped him choose a sofa, which sits, a gray spacecraft, in the center of the living room, and fixed some minor problems, including the floors. “That’s crazy,” he had told Malcolm at the time. “You’re going to have to redo it entirely once the renovation’s done.” But Malcolm had said he’d do it anyway; the floor dye was a new product he wanted to try, and until he was ready to begin work, Greene Street would be his laboratory, where he could do a little experimentation, if he didn’t mind (and he didn’t, of course). But otherwise the apartment is still very much as it was when he moved in: a long rectangle on the sixth floor of a building in southern SoHo, with windows at either end, one set facing west and the other facing east, as well as the entire southern wall, which looks over a parking lot. His room and bathroom are at the eastern-facing end, which looks onto the top of a stubby building on Mercer Street; Willem’s rooms—or what he continues to think of as Willem’s rooms—are at the western-facing end, which looks over Greene Street. There is a kitchen in the middle of the apartment, and a third bathroom. And in between the two suites of rooms are acres of space, the black floors shiny as piano keys.

It is still an unfamiliar feeling to have so much space, and a stranger one to be able to afford it. But you can, he has to remind himself sometimes, just as he does when he stands in the grocery store, wondering whether he should buy a tub of the black olives he likes, which are so salty they make his mouth pucker and his eyes water. When he first moved to the city, they were an indulgence, and he’d buy them just once a month, one glistening spoonful at a time. Every night he’d eat only one, sucking the meat slowly off the stone as he sat reading briefs. You can buy them, he tells himself. You have the money. But he still finds it difficult to remember.

The reason behind Greene Street, and the container of olives that are usually in the refrigerator, is his job at Rosen Pritchard and Klein, one of the city’s most powerful and prestigious firms, where he is a litigator and, for a little more than a year now, a partner. Five years ago, he and Citizen and Rhodes had been working on a case concerning securities fraud at a large commercial bank called Thackery Smith, and shortly after the case had settled, he had been contacted by a man named Lucien Voigt, whom he knew was the chair of the litigation department at Rosen Pritchard and Klein, and who had represented Thackery Smith in their negotiations.

Voigt asked him to have a drink. He had been impressed by his work, especially in the courtroom, he said. And Thackery Smith had been as well. He had heard of him anyway—he and Judge Sullivan had been on law review together—and had researched him. Had he ever considered leaving the U.S. Attorney’s Office and coming to the dark side?