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By Root 565 0

lifting her out of herself. How believers might feel when they entered a church—it had something to do with suffering, she suspected, but beyond that she lacked the energy to analyze it. While Dennis and Aisha went through the books Jill tallied and stacked the morning’s output of clothes, looking over the room while she worked. Her gaze inevitably lingered on the women’s stumps; on some level she never really stopped thinking about that, though for a long time she’d tried to deny her obsession, this thing she had—which seemed shameful, vaguely pornographic—for visualizing her own mutilation. “It go red when you chopped,” one of the women had told her. “Everyt’ing go red, red, like your mind on fire.” Jill was sure she would die of horror if it happened to her; most did, ostensibly from shock or loss of blood, and how these women had survived was beyond her comprehension. Not just survived—how they seemed capable at times of quite genuine joy. Lately Jill had seen them laughing and chatting as they worked, edging back toward something like normal life. They had no idea that she was a couple of weeks away from shutting them down.

“I can’t make any promises,” Dennis said as she walked him across the compound to his jeep. The street noise beyond the walls roared like a slow avalanche.

“You know I appreciate it,” she said, and felt hopeful enough to try a joke: “Feel free to puff up the numbers all you want.”

“Well, you know that’s never a good idea.” He didn’t smile—did he think she was serious? At the jeep he turned and studied her so intently that she feared some sort of ridiculous scene.

“Jill.”

“What.” She avoided his eye.

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine, Dennis.”

“I don’t know, you just seem awfully tired lately. Frankly I think you’re depressed, not that it’s any of my business. But a lot of us are concerned.”

This affected her more than she might have expected. She had to swallow, then consciously smooth out her breathing, but even so the irony didn’t sound quite right. “Well, I may be having a normal reaction to this place.”

“It’s still depression, Jill. If I were you I’d be putting some thought into that.”

Sometimes at night, when they were alone in his room, Starkey would take out a batch of diamonds and instruct her on the finer points of valuation. He seemed to enjoy the ego-boost of mentoring her, the role-playing and not-so-subtle sexual subtext, and Jill went along with it, amused, not uninterested, though the diamonds themselves were disappointing. In their rough state they were such chalky little nubs, airy nothings that rattled around your palm like baby teeth, and yet they put him at the center of something vital. At night she watched him empty his pockets as he undressed, spilling out scraps of paper, cocktail napkins, matchbook covers, all with names and phone numbers scribbled on them. By eight the next morning his cell phone was going, and by nine he was meeting people downstairs, receiving them on the terrace like a little king. She was starting to see the point of it, how making money might actually be interesting, and how the more you made the more interesting it could be. And lately another revelation had come to her: Starkey was responsible only for himself. This was, she thought, the great luxury of business, of a life devoted solely to making money; it seemed strange to her, exotic in the way of forbidden things, until she remembered that this was how most people lived.

Yet in his way he took care of so many people—or was that simply part of working smart? He was extravagant with gifts and favors, a soft touch for beggars, and he tipped as if bent on keeping the whole staff afloat. He had a trade-school education—mechanical drafting, he’d confessed—and talked enough about his past for Jill to get the sense of a hardscrabble childhood, so different from her own. He wasn’t at all touchy or bitter about it; he seemed to take real pleasure in the narrative of what he called her “American” life, the big house, the horse stables, good schools, college. In bed he had definite ideas