“I was going to call and check on your sisters, but I’m sure they’d rather I didn’t.”

Shy’s older sisters—Chloe, twenty-two, and Anna, twenty-one—lived in Oxford, where they’d gone to university, and worked in a lab. They were science nerds and extremely dismissive of their father, mother, and little sister. They especially disapproved of the move to New York.

“I’ll watch a film with you if it’s at the local cinema and if we can get those tiny chocolate buttons with the white sprinkles on them.”

“Hold on.” Shy looked up the showtimes on her phone. “There’s one at one p.m. that looks good. That was like three minutes ago. Leave the crumbs. Come on, Dad, let’s go.”

“All of a sudden we’re in a huge rush,” Roy grumbled, but secretly he was grateful. If Shy left him alone he’d feel compelled to try and write something.

They hurried out to the cinema.

“Don’t eat them all before the trailers are over,” Shy whispered as Roy removed the cellophane wrapper from his box of sweets.

“Hush.” Roy slid down in his seat. “You’re supposed to be in school, remember?”

Shy hadn’t warned him that this was an R-rated French comedy about two bored teenage boys who snuck onto a cruise ship on a mission to lose their virginities. The trailers were all for foreign R-rated films too, full of sweaty naked people drinking wine and throwing vegetables at each other. Roy hunkered down in his seat, imagining the headline: Pervy Author Kidnaps Daughter from School and Forces Her to Watch Pervy French Film.

Shy nudged him with her elbow. “It’s okay, Dad. There’s no one else here.”

The film opened with a scene in which one of the boys was babysitting his little brother. They were watching a strange old film called The Red Balloon on TV. The balloon danced and flew over a sagging residential neighborhood of Paris. Its string became snagged in a tree, the balloon so red against the blue Parisian sky.

Red, Roy thought. Not Gold but Red.

Chapter 3

Cue music. Cue talking cat. Cue voice for cat. Cat sits in chair and slurps spaghetti from owner’s bowl. Sated, cat burps politely into his paw. And cut. There was a fraction of time for an ending, some sort of sound better than the burp. He had to get the audience out of the burp and to another, less-gross place. But where?

Stuart liked his job, and he was good at it. Plus, it paid ridiculously well, considering how easy it was. Touring was way harder, but he missed it. He missed the band.

“Wazzup?” Robbie always answered the phone the same way.