This was who they sent to stop her? He was practically a boy. He wore a faded golf shirt and shorts, Tevas, a watch; his short hair was shaggy, overdue for a haircut. He looked like someone who generally thrived on routines but hadn’t passed a mirror lately, hadn’t seen his mother in a while. In other words, he was no problem.

Behind him there was a fancy little guardhouse, as if Martha Stewart had taken over the gates to Yosemite.

“I’m an old friend of Ted’s and James’s,” Phoebe said. “We used to work together. I know I’m a little early for the party tonight, but I thought it would be nice to catch up before the crowd arrives.”

She put her hand in one of the pockets she’d asked Mrs. Park to hide in the hanbok, grateful for the foresight. She smiled and let the dress speak for her. I belong here, it said with casual indifference.

“You’re not on the list.”

“That’s so weird. I should be.”

The young man frowned. Two faces in the window watched them.

Phoebe took out her phone and looked herself up on IMDb. “Here.” She showed him her two credits, Coproducer on The Starfighter and The Starfighter 2.

“Huh. Okay, um, why don’t you come inside while we sort this out?”

As Phoebe followed him to the guardhouse, she glanced up the driveway at the mansion where Ted slept. She could only see the top of it—giant windows, a red-tiled roof, and were those turrets? The front lawn was a shock of emerald green in this drought—they must have paid the city a fortune in fines to water it, or trucked the water in privately. They went inside the guardhouse, and while the young man explained his predicament on the phone to someone more senior, Phoebe nodded to his colleagues, a woman and another man. They were in their twenties and white, sorting through the mail as if they were indexing intelligence intercepts.

“Someone will be down in a minute,” the shaggy-haired one said, and his colleagues lifted their heads in surprise. Phoebe had cleared the first hurdle.

“Who’s coming?” the woman asked.

“Zanne and James,” he said, and he stepped outside to wait for them.

The woman’s eyes bulged, as if there was something intimidating about this development. Unless he’d had a personality transplant, James was a sweetheart. It must have been Zanne who inspired this reaction. What was it exactly that Phoebe sensed? Not fear, necessarily, but a familiar kind of scrambling toward professional rectitude.

A truck came down the driveway, the word Panache painted on its side in a loping script. A florist bringing flowers? A bakery delivering macarons? What did panache look like exactly and could it fit in the back of a truck?