Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCQYWQT6MG3PXKX1MZ6QZ03

The van smelled of wet dog and expired mayonnaise, which Bill insisted was "atmosphere" and Molly insisted was a health violation. She had spread a hand-drawn map across the dashboard, weighted at the corners with a tire iron, a half-eaten sausage roll, and two objects she had decided not to ask about. Outside, through a windshield fogged with their own breathing, the Hendersons' semi-detached house squatted in the drizzle, festooned with balloons that had already begun to sag in a way Molly found personally insulting. "Right," she said, tapping the map with a chewed biro. "Front door's a no. Grandmother's stationed in the hallway like a customs officer. We go in through the patio." Bill leaned over, squinting. "That's the patio? You've drawn a rectangle." "It is a rectangle." "It's got no character, Molly. Where's the shading?" She had known him for eleven years, and in that time she had learned that arguing about the shading cost roughly forty minutes she did not have. She rolled the map up instead and used it to point at the house, which was more satisfying anyway. The intelligence had come from Bill's nephew, a boy of nine with the moral flexibility of a career politician, who had reported that Toby Henderson's eighth birthday party would feature a bouncy castle, a magician of questionable licensing, and — critically — a present table groaning under an estimated eleven hundred pounds of unopened merchandise. Two scooters. A tablet. Something called a Mega-Blaster that Bill had looked up and then gone quiet about for a while. "Timings," Molly said. "Cake comes out at three. Lights go down, they all sing, everybody's watching the candles. That's our window. Ninety seconds." "Ninety seconds isn't a window, it's a letterbox." "Then be thin." Bill sat back and folded his arms across a stomach that had never once been described as thin. "And the parents? There'll be twelve of them. Watching. With phones." "Watching *the cake*, Bill. Nobody photographs a present table. It's the least documented surface in Britain." This was, annoyingly, true, and he hated when she was right before lunch. He picked up the sausage roll, examined it for evidence of ownership, and ate it while considering the plan from several angles, most of them involving prison. "And if we're spotted?" "We're entertainers," Molly said. "I've got the balloons in the back. You do the voice." "I hate the voice." "You *love* the voice." He did love the voice. That was the tragedy of Bill: a man built for honest labour, cursed with an excellent Australian clown. They sat in the damp quiet for a moment, listening to a distant chorus of shrieking children ramp up to a pitch that suggested the magician had arrived and immediately lost control of the room. Molly checked her watch. Two forty-one. Somewhere in that house, a woman was arranging eight candles with the precise, doomed care of the truly organised. "Bags," Molly said. Bill reached behind the seat and produced two enormous laundry sacks, printed, for reasons neither of them could reconstruct, with cartoon dinosaurs. He handed one over reverently, like a sword. "Happy birthday, Toby," he said.