This is the story of an apostate's execution. It begins two years ago, under Mars, when I invited the people of Plutus Communications to our apartment and served prosciutto palmiers, braised ram shanks, and bull-tail stew. The aim of the festivity was to welcome, to bewitch, to charm one George Gabriel, the Phildadelphia branch's new boss sent from New York. By appealing to him I hoped to circumvent the hierarchs who had prevented me from getting my own team at work, who had sequestered me in the wrongly named Special Projects.

The deeper I got into my thirties—the decade where choice replaces chance as the Prime Mover of life—the better I became at such supplicatory hosting. I wore charcoal slacks and an off-white cardigan with silver buttons. In America, those who want soemthing have to dress like those who already have everything.

I pulled open the curtain and confirmed the snow outside. The art museum, with green streaks in its fading copper, sat on its stony plinth like an old country dame, once a beautiful golden goddess, now criss-crossed with varicose veins, incapable of getting up. Chipped stairs fell like an aged necklace at her feet. A solitary man trudged up the steps, the gauzy snow-curtain a wedge that perforated around him. It was cold outside, but within me there was warmth.

I made the preparations alone, while Marie-Anne, my wife of nine years, after spending a week at Mimirco's headquarters in Virginia, took the train back from DC. I wondered how she would greet me. Her departure had not been amicable. When I had dropped her off at 30th Street Station I had made the mistake of gesturing toward a pair of toddlers. "Control your uterus," she had retored. "So tired of your ovulation."

Marie-Anne wasn't expected until eight, around the same time as the guests. But she took the Acela and got into 30th Street Station two hours early. She cabbed it home and burst through the door of our apartment, throwing the luggage near the umbrella rack, shuffling my way with arms extended. She had forgotten the events of a week ago and I was ready to forgive as well. If I was ever going to persuade her to start a family, I had to show her that I was an edifice of patience and absolution, like a father was supposed to be.

"I-can't-analyze-any-more-video," she droned.

"There's my busy buzzard." I always used that phrase, partly because of the consonance and partly because her job involved hovering above others. "How is work?"

"So many feeds. We are in four countries now."

Marie-Anne's job at MimirCo involved taking notes on video collected by unmanned aerial vehicles and writing brief summaries about the hours of footage. Most of what she described were naturalist scenes, with the occasional appearance by human subjects. As a creative writing graduate, Marie-Anne was well suited to writing about topography.

"Well, now it's the weekend. Now you can rest."

"MimirCo doesn't take a day off," she said. "I brought the laptop home. I have a bunch of reports to write."

"I thought you were gonna call them vignettes . . ."

"Yeah, then I can change the location and submit them to literary journals!"

She grasped me by the waist and pulled. She was a tall, full-figured, plump woman, standing six-fit-one over my five-foot-eight. When she wore heeled riding boots, like now, I had to look up at her even more than usual.