He would have been lying if he said he hadn’t. All around him, people were leaving. Citizen, he knew, was talking to an international firm in Washington, D.C. Rhodes was wondering whether he should go in-house at a bank. He himself had been approached by two other firms, and had turned them both down. They loved the U.S. Attorney’s Office, all of them. But Citizen and Rhodes were older than he was, and Rhodes and his wife wanted to have a baby, and they needed to make money. Money, money: it was all they spoke of sometimes.

He, too, thought of money—it was impossible not to. Every time he came home from a party at one of JB’s or Malcolm’s friends’ apartments, Lispenard Street seemed a little shabbier, a little less tolerable. Every time the elevator broke and he had to walk up the flights of stairs, and then rest on the floor in the hallway, his back against their front door, before he had the energy to let himself in, he dreamed of living somewhere functional and reliable. Every time he was standing at the top of the subway stairs, readying himself for the climb down, gripping the handrail and nearly breathing through his mouth with effort, he would wish he could take a taxi. And then there were other fears, bigger fears: in his very dark moments, he imagined himself as an old man, his skin stretched vellum-like over his ribs, still in Lispenard Street, pulling himself on his elbows to the bathroom because he was no longer able to walk. In this dream, he was alone—there was no Willem or JB or Malcolm or Andy, no Harold or Julia. He was an old, old man, and there was no one, and he was the only one left to take care of himself.

“How old are you?” asked Voigt.

“Thirty-one,” he said.

“Thirty-one’s young,” said Voigt, “but you won’t be young forever. Do you really want to grow old in the U.S. Attorney’s Office? You know what they say about assistant prosecutors: Men whose best years are behind them.” He talked about compensation, about an accelerated path to partnership. “Just tell me you’ll think about it.”

“I will,” he said.

And he did. He didn’t discuss it with Citizen or Rhodes—or Harold, because he knew what he’d say—but he did discuss it with Willem, and together they debated the obvious benefits of the job against the obvious drawbacks: the hours (but he never left work as it was, Willem argued), the tedium, the high probability he’d be working with assholes (but Citizen and Rhodes aside, he already worked with assholes, Willem argued). And, of course, the fact that he would now be defending the people he’d spent the past six years prosecuting: liars and crooks and thieves, the entitled and the powerful masquerading as victims. He wasn’t like Harold or Citizen—he was practical; he knew that making a career as a lawyer meant sacrifices, either of money or of moralities, but it still troubled him, this forsaking of what he knew to be just. And for what? So he could insure he wouldn’t become that old man, lonely and sick? It seemed the worst kind of selfishness, the worst kind of self-indulgence, to disavow what he knew was right simply because he was frightened, because he was scared of being uncomfortable and miserable.

Then, two weeks after his meeting with Voigt, he had come home one Friday night very late. He was exhausted; he’d had to use his wheelchair that day because the wound on his right leg hurt so much, and he was so relieved to get home, back to Lispenard Street, that he had felt himself go weak—in just a few minutes, he would be inside, and he would wrap a damp washcloth, hot and steamed from the microwave, around his calf and sit in the warmth. But when he tried the elevator button, he heard nothing but a grinding of gears, the faint winching noise the machine made when it was broken.

“No!” he shouted. “No!” His voice echoed in the lobby, and he smacked his palm against the elevator door again and again: “No, no, no!” He picked up his briefcase and threw it against the ground, and papers spun up from it. Around him, the building remained silent and unhelpful.

Finally he stopped, ashamed and angry, and gathered his papers back into his bag. He checked his watch: it was eleven. Willem was in a play, Cloud 9, but he knew he’d be off stage by then. But when he called him, Willem didn’t pick up. And then he began to panic. Malcolm was on vacation in Greece. JB was at an artists’ colony. Andy’s daughter, Beatrice, had just been born the previous week: he couldn’t call him. There were only so many people he would let help him, whom he felt at least semi-comfortable clinging to like a sloth, whom he would allow to drag him up the many flights.

But in that moment, he was irrationally, intensely desperate to get into the apartment. And so he stood, tucking his briefcase under his left arm and collapsing his wheelchair, which was too expensive to leave in the lobby, with his right. He began to work his way up the stairs, cleaving his left side to the wall, gripping the chair by one of its spokes. He moved slowly—he had to hop on his left leg, while trying to avoid putting any weight on his right, or letting the wheelchair bang against the wound. Up he went, pausing to rest every third step. There were a hundred and ten steps from the lobby to the fifth floor, and by the fiftieth, he was shaking so badly he had to stop and sit for half an hour. He called and texted Willem again and again. On the fourth call, he left the message he hoped he would never have to leave: “Willem, I really need help. Please call me. Please.” He had a vision of Willem calling him right back, telling him he’d be right there, but he waited and waited and Willem didn’t call, and finally he managed to stand again.

Somehow he made it inside. But he can’t remember anything else from that night; when he woke the next day, Willem was asleep on the rug next to his bed, and Andy asleep on the chair they must have dragged into his room from the living room. He was thick-tongued, fogged, nauseated, and he knew that Andy must have given him an injection of pain medication, which he hated: he would feel disoriented and constipated for days.

When he woke again, Willem was gone, but Andy was awake, and staring at him.

“Jude, you’ve got to get the fuck out of this apartment,” he said, quietly.

“I know,” he said.

“Jude, what were you thinking?” Willem asked him later, after he had returned from the grocery store and Andy had helped him into the bathroom—he couldn’t walk: Andy had had to carry him—and then put him back into bed, still in his clothes from the day before, and left. Willem had gone to a party after the show and hadn’t heard his phone ring; when he had finally listened to his messages, he had rushed home and found him convulsing on the floor and had called Andy. “Why didn’t you call Andy? Why didn’t you go to a diner and wait for me? Why didn’t you call Richard? Why didn’t you call Philippa and make her find me? Why didn’t you call Citizen, or Rhodes, or Eli, or Phaedra, or the Henry Youngs, or—”

“I don’t know,” he said, miserably. It was impossible to explain to the healthy the logic of the sick, and he didn’t have the energy to try.

The following week, he contacted Lucien Voigt and finalized the terms of the job with him. And once he had signed the contract, he called Harold, who was silent for a long five seconds before taking a deep breath and beginning.

“I just don’t get this, Jude,” he said. “I don’t. You’ve never struck me as a money-grubber. Are you? I mean, I guess you are. You had—you have—a great career at the U.S. Attorney’s. You’re doing work there that matters. And you’re giving it all up to defend, who? Criminals. People so entitled, so certain they won’t be caught that being caught—that very concern—doesn’t even occur to them. People who think the laws are written for people who make less than nine figures a year. People who think the laws are applicable only by race, or by tax bracket.”