The dog has rolled over — genuinely, completely, all four legs in the air — and appears not to know how to get back up, and Gemma has fallen down laughing, and Lorelai is shouting something about a treat, and Barnaby is still lying in the grass with his arm over his eyes.

“Dad!” Lorelai is on her feet, waving both arms over her head.

“Dad, come out, he actually did it — Barnaby taught him, come on—”

Chadworth Prescott is already up.

He goes out through the open doors into the cool September afternoon, and behind him on the desk his phone sits face down where it has been all day, and it will still be there in the evening, because the truth about that house — the thing it cost him four months, four hundred thousand dollars, a fiancée, a company, and very nearly his daughters to learn — is that the most dangerous thing that ever happened in it did not break in through a window.

It came through the front door, beautifully dressed, and it was let in by the man who owned the place.

And the woman who stopped it was in the kitchen the whole time, cutting toast into triangles, with no authority at all except the kind you can’t be given.