“I’m not sleeping with him! Jesus, what an idea.” Fortunately Plum didn’t have to pretend to be appalled at the idea. Quentin was like her know-it-all older brother. “Who do you think I am?”

“So you’re just . . . living and working with this mysterious brooding older man twenty-four-seven,” Chelsea said.

“I have the phrase ‘Girl Friday’ in my mind for some reason,” Wharton said.

“Guys. It’s not anything like as intimate as you’re imagining. We live in the same house. I’m assisting him on a project.”

“Because, see, any amount of intimate there would be, you know—” Chelsea wrung her hands frantically. “Squick.”

“I don’t know,” Lucy said loyally, raising the flag for the backlash to the backlash. “I mean, come on, guys. He’s only what—forty?”

“He’s thirty,” Plum said.

“Sorry. It’s hard to tell with the, you know, the hair. I just meant that we’re not in Humbert Humbert territory here. Not quite.”

“We are not in any territory at all! God! There is no territory!”

“All right, all right.” Darcy held up her hands: we surrender. For now. “I just wish you’d give us a hint about what you are doing.”

Plum did. She’d had enough. Something in her wanted to rise to the challenge of defending herself, and Quentin too. At some point, she couldn’t have said when, this had gone from Quentin’s weird impulse project to something she cared about too. She wanted it to work.

“Look,” she said, “I know it sounds weird. And I have total respect for everything you guys are doing. I do. Even if you’re just going to get high all the time and make light shows on the ceiling.”

Chelsea gave the double V-for-victory sign.

“Those are your paths, and they’re awesome. I’m just on a different one, and it’s definitely a path, but it’s different because I don’t know where it’s going. What Quentin is doing—look, I don’t want to get into details, but it’s pretty brilliant, and he’s after something real. He’s taking a big risk. I like that. I think one day I might want to do something like that too.”

She finished her beer in silence. Everybody was a little embarrassed that Plum had made a speech that wasn’t self-deprecating or funny. Well, so be it, she thought.

“So . . .” Darcy broke the silence.

“So you want to know what we’re doing? We’re doing magic. And if it comes off it’s going to be a fucking masterpiece.”

That was magic for you, right? The thing about magic, the real kind: it didn’t make excuses, and it was never funny.

—