Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCRBY0ENBCQ7X4GC2QBR4D4

The blueprints spread across the kitchen table were, technically, a place mat from a Pizza Palace, but Bill had drawn on it with a red marker and that made it official. "Bouncy castle here," he said, tapping a grease stain. "Piñata suspended from the pergola. Presents stacked on the folding table, northwest corner, under the banner that says *Happy 6th Birthday Tobias*." Molly leaned over his shoulder, chewing a licorice whip. "Tobias. Of course it's Tobias. Rich kid names are all just Victorian orphans." "The rich kid name is the entire strategy. Do you know what a Tobias gets for his sixth birthday? I clocked the guest list. Forty-two children. Forty-two gifts from forty-two households in a postcode where the average car costs more than my mother." "So we're stealing from babies." "We're stealing from *parents* who bought gift baskets to impress other parents." Bill sat back, wounded. "The children get cake. Nobody's taking the cake, Molly. I'm not a monster." She sat down and put her boots on the place mat, directly over the pergola. "Fine. Talk me through entry." "Two o'clock. Entertainer arrives — Mr. Wobbles, balloon artist, credit card on file, van the color of an infected tooth. Service gate off the alley. Nobody looks twice at a clown." "Everybody looks twice at a clown. That's the *point* of a clown." "Nobody looks twice at a clown's *hands*," Bill said, which was so unsettling that Molly let it go. "And me?" "You're the assistant. Sequined waistcoat, comedy honking, general misdirection. When the piñata goes up, forty-two children charge northeast, every adult in the garden turns to film it, and you and I walk the presents out to the van in three trips." "Three trips." "Four if the Hendersons brought the trampoline again." Molly extracted the licorice from her teeth and pointed it at him like a rapier. "You're forgetting something. Grandmothers." Bill blinked. "Grandmothers." "There's always one. Ninety-one, sits in the shade with a glass of sherry, doesn't say a word, and sees *everything*. She'll clock us before the gate shuts. Grandmothers are the CCTV of the animal kingdom." "So we neutralize her." "You are not *neutralizing* a grandmother, Bill, you're going to hell as it is." She thought. "We give her a job. Ask her to hold the spare balloons. Old ladies love a responsibility, they get territorial about it. She'll spend forty minutes guarding a bag of latex and defending it from small boys." Bill stared at her with the frank adoration of a man watching someone else do his thinking. "That's beautiful." "That's *experience*." She swung her boots off the table. "One more thing. What's the exit?" "Alley, left onto Bellamy, van's clean, plates are borrowed." "And if it goes wrong?" "Then we're two grown adults dressed as clowns fleeing a birthday party," Bill said, folding the place mat into his pocket, "and honestly, Molly, who would ever believe the children?" Molly considered this. She had known him eleven years, and it was, she admitted, the first plan of his that had ever accounted for anything. "Get me a waistcoat," she said. "Sequins. And I'm keeping the honker."