When she pulled up to these gates for the first time, Zanne had expected yurts on the lawn and Buddha statues by the door, or else an overgrown mansion and a Victorian woman hiding inside. She hadn’t been expecting the visitor’s cottage she whisked Gaby past now with a wave. Inside, Tom and Dylan and Britney logged in and out delivery trucks and repairmen, piano teachers and yoga instructors. They sorted the mail and checked ID and called the local police on speed dial whenever a car lingered too long on the road out front, whose traffic they monitored on screens.

The driveway led up the hill to the main house. On the right was a lush lawn, on the left thickly manicured woods that obscured the paths the staff traveled to and from the main house and the structures where they worked. Zanne led Gaby to the parking lot at the bottom of the hill. From here the main house was largely hidden from view. Then they headed up a stone path into the woods.

“Okay, the fifty-cent tour. That’s the visitor’s cottage,” Zanne said, gesturing to where they’d just been. “That,” she said, pointing at a small structure just beyond the parking lot from which men and women dressed in shorts and assorted T-shirts and hiking boots, bandanas slung around their necks, came and went, “is the garden cottage.”

“Is everything a cottage?” Gaby asked.

“Yep.”

How twee, Zanne had thought during her own tour, but soon she’d been overwhelmed by the number and specialties of each cottage. She couldn’t believe one family could employ so many people and still need more. She’d met a few personal assistants after high school, in those two disastrous years she’d spent in LA before college, trying and failing to break into the film business. She knew there were thousands of young assistants all over town working in isolation, bringing a producer coffee, running an agent’s desk, fluffing an actor’s ever-wilting ego, all of them making peanuts and living off their parents’ generosity and Hulu passwords.

This was something else.

A family office. Ivy League–trained, highly specialized, well compensated, lifers. Your average movie star couldn’t afford it. A family office was for billionaires or the heirs of billionaires. People on the Forbes 400 list, people with philanthropic foundations and a chalet in Davos, people with more money than they could ever hope to spend in a thousand lifetimes. Zanne hadn’t known that there was a name for the army of unexceptional people behind the exceptionally rich one, that there were headhunters who searched exclusively for this kind of help, and family office associations geared toward networking and the development of best practices.