Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCPSD4C5ZRVMCHK8H6HTMND

The van smelled of stale crisps and ambition. Molly had parked it under a lime tree three doors down from number forty-two, where a bouquet of pastel balloons strained against a gatepost like a small, festive mob. Bill lowered the binoculars. He had not needed binoculars — the house was thirty feet away and the curtains were open — but he had bought them specially, and refused to be talked out of joy. "Seventeen children," he said. "Give or take. Some of them keep moving." "They do that." "And presents." He said the word the way other men said *Rembrandt*. "Molly. There's a mountain of them. There's a *foothill*." She unfolded the floor plan, which was in fact a takeaway menu with biro scribbled over the noodle section. The kitchen was the Sichuan chicken. The conservatory, where the presents were stacked, was the prawn toast. "Cake comes out at four," she said. "Everyone goes to the garden for the candles. That's our window." "How long's a window?" "Ninety seconds if the mother's efficient. Four minutes if there's a speech." Bill considered this. "There's always a speech. Grandads can't help themselves." Molly did not look up. She was drawing an arrow through the prawn toast and out the back gate, and she was aware, in the part of her brain she kept curtained, that they were forty-one and thirty-eight years old respectively and this was their plan for a Saturday. "Costumes," she said. Bill reached into the back and produced a bin bag. From it he pulled a purple felt hat with a bell on it, and a pair of shoes that curled at the toe like they were embarrassed. "Entertainers," he announced. "Nobody questions an entertainer. An entertainer can walk anywhere. An entertainer can carry a large sack and people *applaud*." "You've thought about this." "I've thought about nothing else since Tuesday. Ask my wife." "You don't have a wife." "Ask her anyway." The bell on the hat rang softly as he put it on, and something in Molly's chest performed a small, unauthorised flinch. She flattened the menu against the steering wheel. "Rules," she said. "One. No touching anything with a name tag still on it — the parents check, and I'm not having some six-year-old crying on the news at ten. We take the pile, we take the tags off in the van, we're ghosts." "Two?" "Two. If a child talks to you, you talk back. You don't freeze, you don't run. Children can smell a runner." "Three?" "Three. Nobody touches the cake." Bill's mouth opened. "*Nobody*, Bill." He shut it again with the wounded dignity of a man denied his one small pleasure in an unfair world. Out on the pavement, a woman in a cardigan was wrestling a piñata donkey into the garden by its throat. Somewhere inside the house a whistle blew, and a sound went up like a kettle boiling in a zoo. Molly checked her watch. Twenty past three. "Hat straight," she said. "How do I look?" "Like a man about to make some very bad memories." Bill grinned and opened the door, and the bell rang all the way up the path.