It could have been worse. The view from the back terrace was even grander than the front. An orderly English estate had been hacked out of the rough Cornish countryside by main force, including a flat, still swimming pool that by some landscaper’s artifice had mostly escaped looking anachronistic. Beyond it a perfect Constable vista rolled down and away, green hills and fallow hay fields and pocket villages, all slowly dissolving in the viscous light of a golden English sunset.

Thomas enjoyed the attention. And Poppy—he’d give her this—was a heroically good sport. She had no real stake in how all this turned out, but she pitched right in. She was nothing if not game. Moreover she was better at it than he was, hardened as she was by many tours in the babysitting trenches.

It all finished up, predictably, in Thomas’s bedroom. By ten thirty even Thomas, with his titanically fresh-faced lust for life, couldn’t be coaxed into one more round of Find Fillory. They all sat or sprawled on the rainbow-colored woolly yarn rug in Thomas’s room. It was a huge room, a little kingdom all Thomas’s own. It even had an extra bed in it, in the shape of a space rocket, as if to cruelly emphasize Thomas’s only-childhood, the hilarious sleepovers he wasn’t having. Josh and Julia joined them there. The party raged on beneath them, into the night, having degenerated from a cocktail party into a regular party party.

They should leave, obviously. At this point Thomas had gone from harasser to harassed. Maybe Josh was right, maybe they’d try Stonehenge next. But not before they’d burned this bridge right down to its charred pilings.

So they played other games. They ground out rounds of Animal Snap and rummy and Connect 4. They played board games, Cluedo and Monopoly and Mouse Trap, until Thomas was too tired and they were too drunk to follow the rules. They dug deeper into Thomas’s toy closet, and thus further back into Thomas’s childhood, for games so mathematically simple they were barely games at all, lacking as they did almost any strategic element: War and Snakes and Ladders and Hi Ho! Cherry-O and finally High C’s, a primally simple alphabet game in which the main goal seemed to be to win the pregame argument with your fellow players over who got to be the dolphin. After that everything else was blind chance and cartoon fish.