Numbered Account by Christopher Reich

appetite for work. But five minutes after setting foot inside his apartment, he found himself pasted to his desk scrabbling through his father’s agendas, and he knew he’d been lying to himself. The world, or at least his view of it, had changed.
    Nick went back to work the next day, and the day after that. He managed to keep up an eager facade, to pay attention in class and to laugh when required, but inside him a new plan was taking shape. He would resign from the firm, he would fly to Switzerland, and he would take the job Wolfgang Kaiser had offered him.
    Friday night, he broke the news to his fiancée. Anna Fontaine was a senior at Harvard, a dark-haired Brahmin from the crustiest section of Boston with an irreverent wit and the kindest eyes he’d ever seen. He’d met her a month after beginning his studies. And a month after that they were joined at the hip. Before moving to Manhattan, he asked her to marry him and she’d said yes, without hesitation. “Yes, Nicholas, I want to be your wife.”
    Anna listened without speaking as he laid out his argument. He explained that he had to go to Switzerland to find out what his father had been involved in when he was killed. He didn’t know how long he would be away — a month, a year, maybe longer — he only knew that he had to give his father’s life an ending. He handed her the agendas to read, and when she had finished, he asked her to go with him.
    She said no. Without hesitation. And then she told him why he, too, could not go. First off, there was his job. It was what he’d been slaving for his entire life. No one passed up a slot at Morgan Stanley. One in seventy. Those were the odds of nabbing a slot as an executive trainee at Morgan Stanley, and that was after you’d made it through college and business school. “You did it, Nick,” Anna said, and even now, he could hear the pride in her voice.
    But all he had to do was look at the agendas to know he hadn’t done anything at all.
    What about her family? she asked, her delicate fingers interlaced with his. Her father had taken to Nick like a second son. Her mother couldn’t go a day without asking how he was and cooing about his latest successes. They would be crushed. “You are a part of us, Nick. You can’t leave.”
    But Nick could not become part of another family until the mystery of his own was solved.
    “And what about you and me?” she asked him finally, and he could see how much she hated to resort to her own attachment to convince him to stay. She reminded him of all the things they’d said to each other: that they were in it for the long haul; that they were the ones who really loved each other; friends forever, lovers who would die in each other’s arms. Together they’d take Manhattan. And he’d believed her. Hell, he’d believed all of it because it was true. As true as anything he’d ever known.
    But that was before his mother died. Before he found the agendas.
    In the end, Anna couldn’t understand. Or she just refused to. She broke off their engagement a week later, and he had not spoken to her since.
    A sharp wind blew, mussing Nick’s hair and bringing tears to his eyes. He had given up his job. Shit, he’d even returned his seven-thousand-dollar signing bonus. He had cut off his fiancée, the one woman he’d ever really loved. He had turned his back on his entire world to track down a phantom lying hidden almost twenty years. For what?
    It was at this moment that for the first time Nick felt the unalloyed impact of his decision. And it hit him like a sucker punch to the gut.
    The number thirteen tram pulled into the Paradeplatz, metal wheels groaning as the brakes were applied. Nick climbed aboard and had the pick of the entire car. He slid into a seat halfway back. The tram started forward with a jolt, and the abrupt movement refocused his attentions on the memories of the day. The moment of utter panic when for one life-ending second he’d truly believed that in a