We'd just finished. I was fetching Kleenex after a strenuous round while she lay on her back gathering her breath. My knees buckled as I limped to the bathroom and gave myself silent praise. Well done, Duck. Her response was reward enough, but I couldn't help thinking of the envelope of cash that would be waiting bedside in the morning.

My employment was difficult to define these days, but it had its perks.

I returned to bed, offered her the cleanup Kleenex, and kissed her on salty lips. She returned it with hunger and pulled me closer. I gave slight resistance and she laughed lightly into my mouth. "I'll give you a few minutes to recharge," she said.

My employer slash lover was a catch of considerable status in certain circles. Juliette Cohen: divorced, one child, worth a couple hundred bucks. Art dealers and headmasters and various hat shakers would genuflect in her presence. She was a long-legged blonde, who dressed like the fashion editor she once was. Now in her early forties, money was something to be spent, not earned.

Ostensibly, my job was tutor and swim teacher to her eight-year-old son, Stevie. I had surprised myself with competence. Stevie had responded to me, I'd managed to teach him a few things of value: like how not to drown, and how to play a bit of piano. His mother told me I was the only male he'd ever listened to. Never mind the father, his bitterness at losing a reported 300 million dollars in the divorce left him uninterested in parenting a son produced by that greedy slut. He was off on family number two now, with a pair of daughters and a younger wife who signed a favorable prenup.

* * *

I met Juliette in the usual way, on a case, a simple matter of deterring an overeager suitor. Divorcées with that kind of money become a mark. Eyed by rising finance guys, the sort who worship hedge fund managers like A-list celebrities. They keep an eye on ladies like these, tracking the constellations of fortunes like astronomers. This one was a chiseled smiling sack of flesh named Bret, a VP at Fortress. He made the common miscalculation, confusing proximity to wealth to possession of it. He was caught throwing a coke party at her Village apartment, while mother and son were out at their place in Amagansett. When she found out, he took a helicopter out east, and billed it to her account. He told Stevie to shut up when he tried to intervene in an argument. And finally, one high Saturday night, he refused to leave after too much blow prevented him from performing. He did not take the breakup well. He wouldn't leave her alone.

I was referred by a mutual acquaintance, one Margaret McKay, whose life I helped wreck after she hired me to find her missing daughter a year earlier. The search — and eventual horror show of discovery — had shattered both of our lives. I was still a cracked shell; I was surprised she was still alive. In the aftermath I was confident that suicide was inevitable for her. I'd set my own odds at 50/50, and so far the coin toss was settling on this side of life. I had Juliette to thank for that.

It didn't take much to deter the determined Bret. The threat of physical violence tends to backfire with these sorts. They want to fight back, and if that looks like a losing battle, they'll hire reinforcements. But the threat of shame is always effective. An email to the boss, a humiliating confrontation during a business meal at Per Se, these things put the fear of the money god into a man. He learns that it's easier than he thought to be excommunicated from the church of the Street. He falls in line and learns to set his sights a bit lower than the Juliette Cohens of his world.

I should have learned as much.

Instead I filled his bedroom void. It was a subtle arrangement with a noble cause. The night we settled our case, which ended with an emailed pledge from Bret never to contact her again, we enjoyed a few bottles of Chateau Latour. The conversation was easy and interesting and flirty, the sort that leads to the inevitable, but that night Stevie was having a sleepover. With a trio of eight-year-olds and multiple nannies mulling about, it would have been inelegant to stay late. We ended our evening by eleven, with me agreeing to give Stevie a swim lesson at their building's rooftop pool the next day.

Eight months later I was a part of her staff. I hadn't worked a case since. I felt like a rescue dog picked up by his best-case scenario, only to resent the taming process. I was healthier than I'd been in years, and trying to keep a lid on the self-loathing. Juliette helped keep me off the bourbon and painkillers. Our only indulgence was expensive wine and a bit of weed. It was as close to clean living as I cared to get.

She was disciplined in all things in her life, but sex. Her body preserved by a strict regime of yoga, Soul Cycling, and vegan eating. In the evenings she allowed herself a moderate amount of wine, followed by a single small bowl of sativa, inhaled from a one-hitter and exhaled with eyes-shut bliss through a cracked living-room window. She claimed to dislike the high of the healthier trend of vaping; burning fresh weed the old-fashioned way was her one private vice.

Then she would drag me off to the master bedroom, where I would earn my income. Since my teaching rates for her son were never clarified, the arrangement was loose but impossible to misunderstand. The thickness of envelopes bore no relation to Stevie's progress. They were based on the pleasure I provided after he'd gone to bed.

* * *

Juliette wiped between her legs and handed me the Kleenex.

"Love, would you mind getting me a glass of water?" she asked.

I swallowed a grumble and moved back toward the bathroom.

"From the kitchen, darling," she said. "You know I can't drink it from the tap."

Another gulp of sleepy pride, then I stepped into a pair of boxers and left to make the walk across the endless apartment. The floors did not creak. No sounds of the city filtered up through the windows. They were hermetically sealed to ensure total silence. The effect of lifeless luxury was unsettling. Large modern art from Gagosian and Zwirner stared down at me through the darkness with incomprehension. The sound of the refrigerator opening felt like an intrusion. On my way back I found myself tiptoeing aware of the slightest disturbance. As I approached the bedroom, I noticed a light shining beneath the door. Inside, Juliette was sitting up in bed, staring at my phone.

"You have a text," she said, icy as Arctic.

"From who?" I offered the water, reached for my cell.

She ignored the glass, looked down at the offending screen.

"From Cassandra Kimball," she said. "It reads, `Need you. Please call.'"

I snatched the phone from her grip. Ice water splashed from the glass across Juliette's bare chest. "Watch it, asshole!" she said.

She dried herself with the sheets, glared up at me.

"You're fucking her again?" she asked. "How dare you."

I looked at the screen, confirmed the message; I looked down at my snarling lover. "I never was," I said.

"Oh, bullshit. I'm supposed to believe that?" She kicked at the phone in my hands. I dodged the painted toes. Then she flung herself from bed and fled to the bathroom.

I looked back at the text. Need you ...

It had been twenty months since we'd seen each other. Twenty months since I'd almost gotten her killed. At the end of the McKay case, Cass had absconded to the...