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“But when it comes to your mom’s death, she blames—”
“Because she knows nothing. She thinks she knows everything. I’m not sure my sister…” Had Betsy finished the sentence, she would have said, I’m not sure my sister can be saved. I thought so before I came out here. But not anymore. Instead, however, she switched gears and continued, “My sister was in Las Vegas when our mom died. And as for your son: he’s a great kid. He was going to pull himself out of that spiral with or without my involvement.”
“Lots of great kids don’t. I wouldn’t have relocated here if he weren’t in the place he was in. Emotionally. Psychologically. You got him there—to a good place. You got us as a family to a good place.”
To that, Betsy knew, Crissy would have said to him something like What family? You and your wife are getting divorced and you ran away to Las Vegas. But their family was in a better place now than it had been two years earlier. Betsy had a perfectly friendly relationship with Carolyn, Frankie’s ex-wife. The woman was seeing a new person in Burlington, and it sounded serious.
“Again, thank you. But he did the hardest work. And you and Carolyn did a lot of the heavy lifting.”
“We had good coaching.”
They were silent, and she was about to close her eyes, though she knew the specters from Vermont would prevent her from drifting off. She thought Frankie was done with this foray into her past. He wasn’t. “When you found her—your mom,” he said, his voice tentative, “did you know right away? Were you in shock?”
Found her? She didn’t find her. She witnessed it. “Let’s not discuss this.”
“I know the mistakes I made with my parents when they died.”
“Enough,” she said firmly. She pulled her sunglasses onto the top of her head so he could see her eyes and know she meant business. “Enough.” She was not going to be bullied by the best intentions into a conversation she had scrupulously avoided with everyone but the police (and even with them she had withheld so very much) since it happened.
“My regrets dwarf yours. I promise you. I—”
“I have no regrets.”
“I ruined the last year of my father’s life. I allowed the doctors to give him a colostomy that should never have taken place. What doctor does that to an eighty-two-year-old man whose eyesight is shot and who can’t see well enough to change his own goddamn bag, and so he winds up in assisted living? That’s fucked up. I’m a guy who had to be called twice—two times—once by the assisted living place and once by the ER after my dad had the stroke that would kill him before I got out of bed and flew to Florida. And don’t get me started on my mom. I missed her death by hours because I was playing golf. I—”
“You need to let those demons go. We’ve been through this,” she told him. Frankie’s self-loathing would have surprised his Futurium pals, but it was a part of the reason she was drawn to him. He was wounded, too. Yes, he was a very successful businessperson, and he worked with people who, if they weren’t criminal, had criminal ties. But two things can be true, she told herself. Multiple, seemingly divergent certainties can coexist. Paul Castellano loved his daughter but allegedly had both her boyfriend and ex-husband killed.
Frankie was ruthless, but he also worked with people who scared him: people whose blood ran colder than his. He wasn’t cruel casually, and that was the difference that mattered.
* * *
Betsy enrolled Marisa in school, and then the two of them took an Uber to the Versailles, a casino based loosely on the opulent French palace, so Betsy could meet more of the Futurium team. Betsy sent Marisa to the arcade room, and she went to the sushi restaurant there with Frankie and some of his Futurium associates, including Tony Lombardo, Damon Ioannidis, and Rory O’Hara, who were already there. There was also a woman named Lara Kozlov, who was a freelance political consultant for Erika Schweiker. Lara was Frankie’s next-door neighbor, but she was in Washington as often as she was in Las Vegas. Tony was as close as one got to royalty, it seemed to Betsy, based on the way everyone at the table deferred to him. It wasn’t just Frankie. Apparently, it was Tony’s grandfather who had started the Mastaba dynasty.
Everyone was closer to Frankie’s age than hers: they weren’t twentysomething crypto prodigies. Lara, like Frankie, had experience in banking before becoming a political operative, and Damon said he was an engineer, but he was also in charge of Las Vegas operations for the company. He was the chief operating officer in the United States. He’d arrived in Las Vegas after working with Rory in Phnom Penh. Betsy didn’t say much as the five of them had a conversation that pinballed between Frankie’s former bank, an exclusive, almost top-secret resort they had shares in on Grand Cayman, crypto pioneers they knew who were clean and ones who were—in Damon’s words—“dirty as fuck,” blockchains, and the Nevada Gaming Commission. The Justice Department had recently seized nearly three billion dollars in stolen Bitcoin and arrested three brothers who were laundering crypto, and they discussed that, too, quite sure that neither a renegade hacker nor the U.S. government could ever infiltrate their systems. Someone had tried to breach the mining farm in Cambodia and failed. They knew that someone would try again there or in Las Vegas, but they were confident their walls would hold.
“How is Erika’s war chest?” Damon asked a few minutes later. “What more can we give her?”
“There’s always room for more; there always are ways,” Lara answered.
Tony picked up a dragon roll with his chopsticks and held it suspended in midair as he answered. “John Aldred has very deep pockets,” he observed pensively. “But we’re in the hunt. It will help if Aldred does something stupid.”
“Like in a debate?” asked Betsy.
“No. Bigger. Dumber,” said Tony. He chewed the colorful little ottoman of seaweed and eel. After he’d swallowed, he looked right at her and said, “But we got something in mind. Still thinking it through.”
“Why does Senator Aldred dislike cryptocurrency?” she asked.
“Because he’s a dinosaur,” Lara answered. “Erika and people like her are the future.”
Betsy was about to ask Lara what she meant by people like her—she viewed Schweiker as an idiot at best, and a lunatic at worst—but then Damon was telling Tony about the pressure they were applying to the secretary of state in the event the November election was close, and then they were on to existing banking regulations and the roles of investment and commercial banks, and it was all over her head. Damon used the word custody, and she understood that he meant a crypto investor’s storage space. She asked him to tell her more.
“Ownership is ascertained with a seed phrase—sort of like a twelve-word password—and you want to keep it in cold storage,” he explained.
“Cold storage?” she asked.
“Offline. On a piece of paper. Weirdly old school for something as new school as crypto. Maybe keep a copy of the seed phrase in a safe. You don’t want it online, because it can be hacked.”
“And if you forget it?”
