On Monday evening, former Donald Trump attorney and putative American hero Michael Cohen ran into an old frenemy, naturally, at Scalinatella—the subterranean restaurant on the Upper East Side known for the preponderance of older finance types in Kiton jackets dining beside their generationally younger wives. As Cohen finished up dinner, he noticed that Michael Avenatti, Stormy Daniels’s attorney and inveterate citizen of the green room, was seated at a neighboring table. On cable news and in the media, Cohen and Avenatti have been engaged in a months-long, multi-front battle over a nondisclosure agreement that Cohen brokered in October 2016 to keep Daniels’s alleged affair with Trump quiet in advance of the presidential election. On behalf of his client, Avenatti has filed a civil case against Cohen and Trump alleging defamation.

But things had shifted since their initial face-off. In early April, F.B.I. agents executed search warrants for Cohen’s home, hotel room, and office as part of a criminal investigation pertaining, in part, to the Daniels N.D.A. The civil case that Avenatti filed—a way out of her N.D.A.—has gone largely dormant, after a California judge issued a stay while the criminal investigation in the Southern District of New York proceeds. Plus, New York’s air-kissing society has its rules, after all. When the two Michaels realized their coincidental proximity on Monday night, they exchanged a cordial hello. (Cohen declined to comment on the run-in. Avenatti called it “both random and productive.”)

The greeting underscored the fact that Cohen and Avenatti’s paths are more closely aligned than they may have appeared a few months ago. Earlier this month, Cohen added former Clintonworld veteran Lanny Davis to a legal team that now includes Guy Petrillo, a former head of the S.D.N.Y. criminal division. The acquisition of the latter suggested to some that Cohen would be willing to work with the government, should it offer him some sort of deal for his cooperation. The ascension of Davis and Petrillo has chilled some in the White House and in the Trumps’ innermost circle, according to two people familiar with the situation. “These guys are obviously so seasoned, and we were extremely worried for Trump when he hired them,” one person in the Trump orbit told me. “We’re all just happy he hasn’t gone up against Rudy,” this person added, referring to Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal attorney who, over the last few months, has uttered a series of controversial, nonsensical remarks that have not always served his client’s best interest. “Trump has disassociated himself from Michael at this point. He’s given up.” When I mentioned this to Davis, he told me that he accepted it as a compliment.

That disassociation appears to be reciprocal. In an interview with George Stephanopoulus earlier this month, Cohen made it plain where his loyalty now lies. “My wife, my daughter, and my son have my first loyalty and always will,” he said. “I put family and country first.”

Much was made of the unambiguous gulf Cohen created between himself and Trump in the ABC interview. But Cohen’s distancing from the president began even earlier, according to people familiar with his thinking. Last fall, shortly after Cohen told me he would take a bullet for the president and grew misty-eyed over breakfast while recounting how much he missed the First Family, a few pivotal events shifted his motivations. Cohen, these people said, had felt for months that he was becoming collateral damage stemming from the president’s misdeeds; he also believed he had become the victim of false narratives. But the most unlikely antecedent in his predicament began with a misbehaving toilet.

Last fall, around the time when he was called to testify as part of the Congressional investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, Cohen got an offer to sell an apartment he owned for nearly two decades in Trump World Tower for about $3.3 million. In order to avoid taxes on the sale, he executed a 1031 exchange, in which the profit from the sale was re-invested into another, more expensive residential property. In November, Cohen went into contract on a 2,697 square-foot 19th floor Tribeca apartment for $6.7 million.

The building, still in development, was not close to being finished when he went into contract. This complicated his ability to secure financing from a bank, which would likely require a temporary certificate of occupancy. Since Cohen needed to comply with the 1031 exchange’s timing requirements, the developer—a longtime friend—offered a short-term $3.5 million mortgage, assuring him that the building would be complete and units would start closing in late winter or early spring of 2018.

Around the same time, Cohen found himself checking a rickety toilet in the marble-clad bathroom of the apartment he shared with his family in a different Trump building. As he fidgeted, the toilet exploded, expelling chunks of porcelain—and Cohen, himself—across the room, while errant pieces cracked nearby marble fixtures. The toilet had been recalled. The Cohens, alas, were unaware.

The renovations were only completed a few weeks before they left for a winter holiday trip to London. While they were gone, the so-called “bomb cyclone” descended on New York—a freak and devastating winter storm, which became doubly poignant for Cohen after an upstairs neighbor, according to a person familiar with the situation, accidentally left a window open. A pipe from the neighbor’s dishwasher froze and exploded. For days, while Cohen was across the Atlantic, water flooded into his apartment. The ceilings collapsed. The wood floors buckled. The walls were ruined. Most everything needed to be gutted and the family had to move out. They relocated to the Regency, a hotel a few hundred feet from their home. Insurance continues to foot the bill for his hotel stay. Then came the real natural disaster, Stormy Daniels.

The Tribeca apartment closed in early April, around the time when the F.B.I. executed its search warrants. No bank would give them a mortgage on the apartment once the temporary mortgage from the building sponsor ended. “The flood in the apartment, kicking off the year that Cohen’s had?” one person close to Cohen said to me recently, “there’s your metaphor. The idea of him living this high life in a suite in the Regency couldn’t be further from the reality.”

Cohen’s mounting financial pressure—the result of real-estate transactions, the waning value of his taxi medallions, his prodigious legal fees—remains at the forefront of his mind moving forward, according to people familiar with the situation. The government is reviewing the documents seized in April, but he has not yet met with prosecutors.

Now, Cohen, who has worked every day since he was a teenager, does not have much to fill his days. His clients have disappeared. Stories that he believes are untrue circulate on cable news for days on end. Even the contents of the shredder in his officer have come under the scrutiny of investigators. Buzzfeed reported earlier this month that the records included notes about a taxi business involving Gene Freidman, a taxi medallion manager who agreement to cooperate with the government. That Freidman was referred to as his “business partner” rankled Cohen. Freidman, he told friends, simply operated his medallions.

Cohen’s mood has lifted some after the ABC interview and since his new lawyers came on board. According to two people familiar with their thinking, Davis and Cohen are not shying away from comparisons others are drawing between Cohen and John Dean, Richard Nixon’s White House counsel, who was the first member of the Nixon administration to directly implicate the president in the Watergate cover-up. This, it seems, has buoyed him. As he walks about New York City these days, people whisper, Did you see who that is?, and point their phones in his direction to surreptitiously snap photos. He watches cable news, often seeing his face splashed across the screen; he waits for what’s next; and sometimes, he gets seated in a restaurant next to Michael Avenatti.