Clear Conscience

When Sasha, Michael’s sister-in-law, was offered a consulting job at a big teaching hospital that needed help setting up its new outpatient facility, she had to commit to spending half the week in Chicago. Her home was in Madison with Jim, Michael’s brother, and their twelve-year-old daughter Quinn, who loved horses and shopping and had plans to become a hostage negotiator after college, if not before, something Michael and Jim found amusing, Sasha preposterous. After she accepted the job at the hospital, there had briefly been talk of her staying at Michael’s place three nights a week during the six months that she would need to commute to and from Chicago. Ultimately, his offer was rebuffed: she rented her own apartment, one closer to the hospital than his place, which was in a neighborhood several miles north of the medical campus.

Whether Sasha or her employer was paying the rent on her small, opulent one-bedroom in a high-rise that overlooked Lake Michigan, Michael didn’t know, but he suspected that regardless of who paid the bills, it was his brother who had insisted that Sasha find her own lodgings. It was also possible that she wanted her own place, an eventuality that bothered Michael slightly more than his brother opposing their occasional cohabitation.

A year and a few months before Sasha was hired for the Chicago job, Michael had gone through an unpleasant divorce, his ex-wife Tess adding extra enmity to the proceedings by writing, under a pen name, acerbic blog posts about her view of the divorce and its causes. The pen name was a mockery of anonymity—all of their friends and family knew of the blog, which made scathing fun of Michael’s perceived shortcomings and infuriating habits. The one scrap of good fortune in his marriage’s demise was that there had been no children to argue and recriminate each other over along with everything else.

After Sasha settled into the routine of her three nights and twenty-seven weekly hours of work for the hospital, Michael met her for dinner on Wednesday evenings. This was usually the third night of the three she spent in his city, and often an air of subdued festivity suffused their meetings. Sasha claimed not to have read Michael’s ex-wife’s blog, where he was referred to alternately as the tightwad and the crocodile, and sometimes, more inexplicably, the mole. In addition to serving as the focus of his ex-wife’s virulent frustration with the scale of her life so far, he was the supposedly spoiled younger brother, Jim five years his senior. Jim was also four years older than Sasha, and Michael liked that he and Sasha had grown up listening to the same music and seeing the same movie matinees, whereas Jim with his half-decade handicap was sometimes teased for being an old man when they were all together—how could he not remember who Pauly Shore was? Or Blind Melon and Mazzy Star? That he could recall dialogue verbatim from Casablanca and Apocalypse Now and all three of The Godfather movies, that he favored the classics over the junkily ephemeral, that he was wittier and more cultured than Michael and his entire graduating high school class combined (as Jim had once claimed during a fractious family Christmas party, slightly drunk on strong eggnog)—these qualities were thrilling to Sasha when she met Jim, but now much less so.

“I shouldn’t talk about him when he’s not here to defend himself,” she said, looking down at the second fish taco on her plate, deciding, Michael thought, if she should eat it. If she didn’t, he would ask for it. Jim would have started eating it without permission, but he was her husband, and also always ravenous, in part because he claimed to be too busy to eat lunch, or else decided to make do with an apple and handfuls of raw, unsalted almonds at his desk while the other attorneys in his office went down the street for sandwiches and...