“Purgatory's a transition. This is a rut. No matter how good you are, you never hit better than the guy you're playing against.” Leonard's sport had been tennis, Seeley's football; Seeley drilled hard passes over center while Leonard's every return had a topspin on it. “Who do you go up against here? Government lawyers counting the days until they retire? Kids two years out of law school?”

Was this was why Leonard had come-to rescue him? As a boy, Seeley protected his younger brother, then abandoned him. Now it was Leonard's turn to be the hero.

“You're afraid you've lost your edge, aren't you? That you're not up to handling a big case.”

Leonard was here to save him, and to remind him that no one knows your fears better than a kid brother.

Two joggers in velour suits, mufflered against the cold, passed them on the asphalt path that traced the contours of the lake. The brothers continued past the Naval and Military Park where a guided missile cruiser, a destroyer, and a submarine as black as carbon clustered like tamed, implausible beasts. It had taken years for Seeley to observe the incongruity of it: none of these oceangoing vessels, now mothballed, would ever have seen action on Lake Erie.

Out on the lake, a few rubber-suited kids were hotdogging hydroplanes, oblivious to the cold, and a tugboat made its careful way through the small sailboats that flitted across the water. Farther out, a low unmoving barge could have been of a piece with the horizon, and on a deserted jetty was a Chinese-roofed pavilion, its former painted brilliance now a rusty gray. One of Seeley's aunts, or sometimes a neighbor family, would bring Leonard and him here for evening picnics as children, and the pavilion, its lively dance music audible on the shore, had embodied for Seeley all of the exotic possibilities of grown-up life. Years later, he learned that it was a weekend dance hall for workers from the Bethlehem Steel and Chevrolet plants in nearby Lackawanna.