She blinked and then found an abyss to stare into a few inches to his left. Perhaps he’d spilled too much—the stuff about the Pulitzers, being a Rhodes Scholar, and reporting for The New Yorker was already a lot, but now she knew he came from money, and his family had a spare house for when the prodigal son needed to be on the West Coast in a nice-ass Orange County town like Yorba Linda. He didn’t know much about Nils’s family situation, but he did know that he never sent them any money.

“My family owns a few, but I only own my apartment in New York.” Her bewildered expression told him that made things worse, not better, as if he were trying to insinuate merely owning an apartment in Tribeca was a sign of humble means. Like sure, my parents own six properties in the area (and a few more out of state) but me, I only got the one! “It’s a . . . two bedroom.”

“So what are you writing about?”

“Well, I wanted to get out of New York for the winter to work on a piece about some of the shenanigans in Hollywood, specifically some of the big names who use their power to, shall we say, take advantage of the talent, but then the, um, shit show happened last year—”

“ET-gate,” she said derisively.

“And I’ve been a little distracted with that. A lot of people are looking for answers and demanding accountability. Hence Jano Miranda’s Third Party showing up and putting up a real challenge to the establishment. But that’s not the only group that’s exploded in membership in the last few months—there was a big showing yesterday from this fringe group called the Gadsden Line. Big fans of Nils, those guys.”

“Conspiracy theorists?”

“Sort of. Real big Second Amendment types. Gotta defend us from all those dangerous aliens. But they basically see themselves as the glorious militia that stands behind groups like Jano Miranda’s Third Party should the need arise. The Gadsden Line ringleader, guy named Angus Normandy, lives over in Chino. So I was there yesterday covering them, not Enola Gay and definitely not Sol Kaplan.”

“What’s interesting about those guys?”

“Oh, you know. Their brand of conspiracy theory tends to leak into real-world consequences. Religious fundamentalism, xenophobia— the human-on-human kind. Anti-Semitism is a biggie.”

“Anti-Semitism?”

“Yeah, it’s a thing. The Jews are using the aliens to control the world, see. The Jews hate Western Civilization just like they always have, so they’re helping the aliens make it crumble in exchange for, I don’t know, power or something.”

She tilted her head as if expecting him to say, “Psych!” “People actually believe that?”

He stopped mid-chew. “Yes, a lot of people actually believe that.”