“What is going on?” I opened my car door and stepped out onto the pavement, and I felt, for the first time in six hours, completely calm.

“Exactly what I told you,” I said.

“By nine tonight.” I walked across the street and took my place beside Arthur, who had come around his SUV with a thick leather portfolio under his arm, unhurried, immaculate in a dark suit, a man arriving precisely on schedule to do a thing he had done many times before.

The two police officers came up the walk behind us.

And Julian and Chloe stood together in the bright doorway of the house they had stolen, their party still going on obliviously behind them, and watched the law walk up their front path.