“She’s been trying to get out of this party all day. Remember? She wanted to rent a boat and go to Catalina. She gave us an impossible task to pull off with the elephant and the giraffe and the monkey and thirty goddamn giant yellow hats, and we did it, but what she really wants to do is sit in a dinghy and float. Remember this morning? She said her dad would roll over in his grave if he saw all of this.”

“Oh, Holly. Poor thing.”

“I guess,” Zanne said. She couldn’t summon the sympathy for Holly that Erin could.

“I’m going to just check with Rebecca’s assistant to make sure they didn’t reschedule.”

“Okay,” Zanne said, but she knew she was right.

Erin went to her office next door. Mark turned his chair to face Zanne. “What do we do now?”

“I don’t know. This wasn’t covered in the staff manual.”

“I heard...” He trailed off.

“What?”

“I heard something once, about an extraction plan.”

“An extraction plan?”

Something in the back of Zanne’s brain lit up, a weak flicker that began to throb more brightly as her attention went to it.

“You would know more about it than I do,” Mark said.

“But they didn’t mean it for a situation like this,” she said. “That was for, like, if one of the kids got kidnapped. Or if there was a custody dispute, and someone tried to leave the country with them.”

The protocol had been developed before her time, but Zanne remembered coming across it when she updated the emergency protocols a few years ago. She’d been focused on the common catastrophes and making sure the information provided was accurate and the reasoning sound—double-checking the addresses for the nearest hospital emergency rooms, swapping out the expired survival kits with new batteries and headlamps and fire extinguishers, making sure IT was backing up to an off-site server and upgrading the generators to newer models. Some of the hypotheticals were too outlandish to take seriously, though Flynn’s fishing trip had since reminded Zanne that nothing was too outlandish to prepare for. A heart attack in a blackout. A tsunami after an earthquake. Looting in the middle of a wildfire.

She remembered only the basic gist of the extraction plan. There were men who could be dispatched. The men were with law enforcement, but this would be moonlighting. They were paid a retainer to answer the call. They carried guns.

“No, this is crazy,” Zanne said. “We’re not siccing a bunch of goons on Holly.”

“No. Of course. I’m sure she’ll be back soon. You gonna tell him?”

“That is the question.”