Of course the ones in the second and third wave were thinking, Why wasn’t I invited? Not that I’d even think of going, of course, but why was I left out?

Then the second-wave invitation would arrive and there’d be a sense of relief—grateful relief that they hadn’t been passed over. The post office’s fault. Same with the third wave.

Thus the invitations would not be automatically tossed away. And then the talk that it might be rather interesting to attend—Hamptons slumming, you might say—and it will give us so much to talk and laugh about afterward… we’ll postmortem it for days.

But with everything at the party arranged and orchestrated by Kim, seeing to it that only the very best of everything was served, and in the most tasteful manner, the only fodder for their postparty conversation would be how the affair had far exceeded their expectations.

The result would be that no one would turn down his invitations next year.

And in time Milos saw himself winnowing the list, cutting those who were not properly respectful. An invitation to the annual Milos Dragovic soiree would become an object of envy, to be coveted and striven for… like a membership at the Maidstone Club.

He wondered if any members of the self-styled East Hampton Environmental Protection Committee were present. If they hated him enough to dump refuse on his house, how could they bring themselves to attend his party?

Then again, there was the old adage: hide in plain sight. Milos’s enemy might assume he’d be above suspicion if he attended. But there he was wrong.

No one was above suspicion. No one.

“Excuse me, Mr. Dragovic,” said a voice to his left.

Milos turned and saw a tall, fair man. He stood with a glass of red wine in his left hand and his right extended. Milos recognized his face but the name eluded him.

“Jus Slobojan,” the man said as they shook hands.

Of course. Justin Karl Slobojan. The wildly successful action-thriller director, worth a hundred million or so… originally a New Yorker, now living mostly in LA but still summering as much as possible in Amagansett.

“Mr. Slobojan,” Milos said. “I’ve long admired your work.” This was no lie. Even though his villains were often drug lords and gangsters, and always met a bloody end, Milos never missed a Slobojan film. “I am so very pleased to meet you.”

And pleased he had come, especially after Mike Nichols and Diane Sawyer had turned him down.

“And I’m pleased to be here. This is a wonderful party.” He leaned closer. “Did I hear that you had some trouble here the other night?”

Milos stared at the director. Could he be involved with this East Hampton Environmental Protection Committee? Unlikely. He spent too little time out here to get upset over who moved in. In fact, he was probably an outsider himself. Milos understood he’d been born in the Ukraine. In a way, that made them almost neighbors.