“Lucien Armstrong,” her boyfriend—fiancé, apparently?—said, shaking hands with me too. His hand was massive, and practically closed over mine, and I saw he was wearing a thick gold class ring with a blue stone in the center. Maybe he’d been feeling left out and wanted a ring as large as his fiancée’s.

“Are you here for an event or something?” Amy asked, looking around.

“No, I was just… um…,” I said, then paused. All at once, I was no longer so sure that I actually wanted to find my parents after all. Which now meant that I’d gone, quite quickly, from trying to find them to hoping they didn’t see me, like I’d just rapidly switched sides in hide-and-seek.

“Well,” she said, after it became clear to all of us that I was apparently ending that sentence there. “We were here for a party, but it was kind of…”

“It was on the roof!” Lucien jumped in, sounding horrified. “In November! It’s gonna snow!”

“It’s not going to snow,” Amy said, smiling as she shook her head. “He’s from Kentucky.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” he asked, sounding so comically offended that I laughed.

“So we’re going to find something else to do,” she said, patting his arm. “Something less… Hollywood.”

“What about that loft party?” he asked, rocking back on his heels. “The one that producer was talking about? It sounded so cool.”

“The one in Dumbo?” she asked. He nodded. “We didn’t get an invite, honey. You had to be notified where to wait for a pay phone to ring, and then when you answered you’d get a password, too… apparently, it’s a whole thing.”

I looked between them, my mind suddenly racing, pieces of a puzzle snapping together. I flashed back to the message I’d heard on the pay phone, and the uber-hip couple behind me who’d been waiting for something. Had I accidentally gotten their invite? It couldn’t be… but then again, what else could it be?

“I think…,” I started. There was a pen lying on a side table, and I picked it up and pulled the piece of paper with the Gansevoort’s address out of my pocket. I closed my eyes and tried to remember, not caring for the moment if the movie star and her fiancé thought I was being weird.

I tried to pull it up—the woman’s voice, its low timbre… what exactly had she said? Elephant, I wrote, starting with what I was sure about. Pilgrim. 113. Alaska? Daedalus??

I turned to look at Amy and Lucien, who both had slightly frozen, concerned looks on their faces. “I think I got one of those invites.” I held out the paper to them, then immediately felt embarrassed about my scrawly handwriting. They were probably used to getting fancy invitations on beautiful stationery.

“You did?” Amy asked, sounding surprised.