Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCQWZ3AZQ9PJVH56Q34MX6A

The blueprint spread across the hood of Bill's Vauxhall was, technically speaking, a placemat from the Happy Otter Family Restaurant, but Molly had drawn on it in red crayon and that lent the whole operation an air of legitimacy. She had circled the bouncy castle. She had circled the trestle table. She had drawn an arrow toward a lopsided rectangle labeled PRESENT MOUNTAIN and beside it, for reasons known only to herself, a skull. Bill leaned in, squinting through the drizzle at her handiwork, and felt the familiar sensation of his life going somewhere he had not personally agreed to. "Molly." "Don't." "It's a child's birthday party." "It's an *unguarded* child's birthday party," Molly said, tapping the crayon skull. "Eleven kids, one exhausted mother, and a magician who's already had two ciders. This is the softest target in the county." The house in question sat two hundred yards up the lane, sagging under a banner that read HAPPY 7TH BIRTHDAY DEXTER in letters that had clearly been cut out by someone weeping. Balloons strained at the gatepost. From within came the sound of eleven children discovering, simultaneously, the concept of screaming. Molly produced a second document, which was a napkin. "Phase one. You go in as the entertainer's assistant." "I don't have an assistant costume." "You have a waistcoat." "I have a waistcoat because I was *at a funeral*, Molly, that's not the same thing as—" "Phase two," she continued, riding straight over him the way a tram rides over a coin, "I take the side gate, cross the patio behind the bouncy castle, and load the presents into the wheelie bin. Nobody looks twice at a woman moving a bin. Women moving bins are invisible. It's basically a superpower and I refuse to squander it." Bill rubbed the bridge of his nose. Behind the fence, something popped, and the screaming changed key. "And phase three?" "Phase three is we wheel a bin full of Lego down the lane like two people who have absolutely nothing to hide." "That's not a phase. That's just walking." "Walking," Molly said, with enormous dignity, "is a phase." He looked at the house. He looked at the banner. He thought about Dexter, whoever Dexter was, and about the specific, medical hollowness that would open in a seven-year-old's chest upon discovering that his presents had gone off in a bin, and then he thought about the four hundred and twelve pounds he owed a man called Pinch, and the two things sat side by side inside him, and neither of them would move. "There'll be a trampoline," he said finally. "There will." "I go over the trampoline, I'm not coming back. My knees are historical artifacts." "Nobody's asking you to go over the trampoline." Molly folded the placemat with great care and slid it into her coat, as though it were worth something. "You're going in the front door, smiling, holding a bunch of balloons. Nobody suspects a man with balloons." "Everybody suspects a man with balloons." "Not at a birthday party." She stood, straightening her collar in the wing mirror, and then, briskly, she pinched his cheek. "Come on. It's presents. It's not like anyone's going to remember this for the rest of their lives." Dexter would remember it for the rest of his life.