She ordered pad thai from the Seamless app on her phone and sat down behind the drum set. She’d been playing drums since her boring but weirdly intuitive parents put her in a Girls Rock summer day camp at the age of nine. The crazy thing about it was, despite being married to a musician, she didn’t know how to read music. She didn’t even know the official terms for anything she did. Her music teacher at the camp had been all about “feeling it,” so she’d always just listened for the rhythm in a song and felt her way, trying out different things until she got it. For the last month she’d been working on the Talking Heads song “Burning Down the House.” She played the song quietly on her phone, on repeat, and played along, getting louder as she gained confidence. She could keep up the pace now that she’d been practicing. It was faster than she’d first thought.

A guy on a bike arrived with her pad thai. She sat at the empty bar and ate it as the big, round, rose-gold sun dipped behind the old hospital buildings across the street, falling into New York Harbor only to be run over by the determinedly orange Staten Island ferry. That was the best thing about Cobble Hill. With its proximity to the water, its low buildings, and gradual, gently rising streets, the sunset was clearly visible and always startlingly beautiful.

The high, whiny vibration of an electric tool resounded from below. Elizabeth was either cutting tile or mixing cake batter.

A shadow darkened the window. Then it brightened again. A woman wearing gigantic sunglasses, her body and head shrouded in an enormous black rain poncho with the hood pulled up, darted behind a nearby tree and then slunk away again. Probably an actress, Peaches thought, paranoid about the paparazzi. There were quite a few of them in the neighborhood, but none so famous that they needed to hide behind trees. The bar door swung open and the rain poncho woman stepped inside. Her black hood fell away, revealing white-blond hair pulled back in a severe braid, a severe jawline, and a severely downturned mouth. It was Elizabeth.

“I need your help in the basement,” she announced. “We’ll enter from the street. The stairs in here need to stay clean.”

The Sublime drop began at eight. Liam and Ryan arrived at six thirty. They’d gone out for pizza after cleaning the toilets and felt sort of gross, but they knew they’d feel less gross outside than they did inside, so they decided to go into Manhattan and stand on the sidewalk outside the store with all the other losers and wait.