For now, she had to clear her mind and concentrate. There were emails to return from Hong Kong, London, and New York, agendas to review and talking points to draft. And there was the events team’s run-of-show for the party to drill down on and make sure there were no loose ends, no mistakes. Zanne got to work, anxiously at first, but soon she felt herself dissolving into the flow, no body, no breath, only brain, consuming information and either rejecting or reshaping it according to the sole criterion of how well it hewed to the Stablers’ priorities. She savored these last moments of peace before the main house would begin to buzz with the urgency of the Stabler family’s wants and needs. Meanwhile, she knew the cottages tucked behind the main house were already filling with the landscapers and housekeepers and executive assistants and IT geeks and travel assistants and researchers and drivers and jacks-of-all-trades who kept this place running better than a Swiss watch, even better than an atomic clock, striving collectively for the exactitude contained in Coordinated Universal Time, pegged to the leap second even as the rest of the world spun on in uninformed bliss.

At 6:30 a.m., an email crashed into Zanne’s inbox, shattering her flow. Monkey got loose. In the server cage. Come quick!

Ninety seconds later, Zanne stood among the small crowd of landscapers gathered at the end of a long hall in the IT cottage, fingers pressed against their ears to tune out the high-pitched screeching. She poked her head inside the server room to confirm with her eyes what her ears already knew. Yep, that right there, crouched atop the racks, was Alfie, an escaped capuchin monkey that was supposed to be “adorable in a suit” and “well-behaved” and “good with all people, including children.” Instead, he was losing it.

“Shitshow,” Zanne said under her breath.

If only Bill, the animal handler, had arrived on time at 10:00 a.m. instead of keeping farmer’s hours, this would have been the events team’s problem and not hers. Then again, you could go down a rabbit hole of if only’s—if only Holly Stabler hadn’t thought a jungle nursery theme for tonight’s party would be “cute,” if only academic jobs grew on trees, if only capitalism didn’t exist. Life had taught Zanne to let go of hypotheticals and deal with the conditions before her. She shouted at the others, “Where’s Bill?”

One of them pointed to the storage room next door, where a ladder was set up beneath the access panel to the cottage’s attic. She climbed up and popped her head in the vaulted space.