What is their secret? Both couples talk, all the way down to the amphitheater, coaxed-up secrets, conjured quick, they wouldn’t reveal any other day or some other place. “Vic took me down there, this was years ago,” Padgett is telling Rachel, “to this grouping of warehouses absolutely no place. And in the basement was a cage.”

“Every so-called mogul,” Vic says to Ben, “had to have some weird impossible project, right? Dinner delivered by tiny helicopters, big clock in the desert, green trains, cars driven by ghosts. This complete fraud of a man, Ariel’s brother actually, and fuck him, sold me the idea. Foxes sense each other, right? They track each other, they trail each other. So we thought we could use animal proteins as the basis for a digital system. So we went here together, right here, dead of night, like an old movie, bagged a fox and drove it to a warehouse I owned in deep secret.”

“Ben was working late all the time and I started flirting with him in a bar. I mean, I must have been losing my mind.” Rachel gestures to the trees around them, as if that were where her mind had gone. “We would walk together, right here, me and the vicar. And then he got a place in the Sunset.”

“And one day he took her to some rental place,” Ben says, and both men look back at their wives. “A faraway neighborhood, right under my nose.”

“Do you think something actually happened?” Vic asks.

Ben shakes his head, but maybe not at that. “It wasn’t the barman,” he says. “I was wrong about that.”

“He wasn’t torturing the fox in the cage,” Padgett says. “I was wrong about that. But—”

“Nevertheless,” Rachel says, “when he asked for money I gathered as much as I could.”

“She pawned wedding gifts! About ten thousand in cash, it was.” Ben wipes his head, almost completely bald now, his hand shaking with the idea of it.

“It was the first creature on the Trail,” Vic says, “but the digital tag killed it. Some beasts are too wild to pin down and cage like that. I was crazy paranoid about what to do. Someone could have found out and that would have been a scandal we couldn’t afford. We ended up basically cremating the poor thing just to destroy the little chip we’d put in it to begin with.”

“I stole the money back. When she got home she took a shower, and I just grabbed it and went back to faking sleep.”

Rachel looks from her husband to the shivery trees. “I think maybe he followed me from the park that night, broke in and stole the money? I don’t know.”

“—and I never asked him about it again,” Padgett says to Rachel.

“—and she never asked me about it,” Ben says to Vic.

“—and I never saw him again,” Rachel says to Padgett.