“Well, she said she was going to.”

“And she did,” Gavin said.

The influx of money from the gala tickets made Gavin giddy. His stockpile was getting bigger and bigger. He had moved it out of the utensil drawer (in anticipation of his parents’ arrival on August 1) and stuffed it in a green L.L. Bean duffel bag under his bed. It was so much money, he was afraid to count it. And yet he was no longer afraid of getting caught. The letter to the women’s shoe company, as it turned out, had been perfectly fine. (He marveled that he had ever feared otherwise.) His affairs were in order; his trail was covered. Meanwhile, the people all around him were committing indiscretions—first Lock and Claire, and then, the other night, Siobhan Crispin and Edward Melior. He should get out of theft, he thought, and into blackmail.

Isabelle called, now, every day—to see who had responded, who had merely sent donations, who had requested seating with whom.

“Did the Jaspers respond?”

“They did not.”

“What about Cavanaugh?”

“Sent a donation.”

“How much?”

“A thousand dollars.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

Isabelle sighed. “They have more money than Beckham. They could have sent ten times that much. But they didn’t—because of me.”

Gavin did not know how to respond. He felt he was growing closer to Isabelle. He felt that perhaps she was calling so often because she wanted to talk to him.

“Did Kimberly Posen respond?”

“Not coming. Sent a donation.”

“Not coming?”

“No,” Gavin said. “But she sent twenty-five hundred.”

This was met with silence. “She used to be my best friend,” Isabelle said. “I’m her daughter’s godmother.”

“Oh.”

“You’re sure she’s not coming?”

“I’ll check again,” he said.

Gavin wanted to make Isabelle happy; he wanted to give her good news. When she next called, he said, “Your friend Dara Kavinsky is a yes and so is Aster Wyatt.”

“Dara is the cellist,” Isabelle said. “And Aster did the invitations. He’s my graphic designer. Why is it the only people who are coming are the people on my payroll?”

As the days passed, Gavin found himself thinking more and more about Isabelle French. She was sexy, he decided, alluring, classy . . . and disillusioned. He was perhaps the only person in the office who realized that everyone Isabelle had personally invited to the gala had said no and sent a donation. It’s because of my divorce, Isabelle said. It’s like a disease: people are afraid they’ll catch it. I hate being single. Was this a clue for Gavin to ask her out? She had been so nice to him at the invitation stuffing. She had seated him next to her, she had touched the back of his hand in a way that sent a shiver up his arm—and at one point she had nudged him with her foot under the table. Gavin had ended up being the last to leave. There was a full moon, and Isabelle invited him to walk outside to see her moon garden. She had a circular plot planted with night-blooming white flowers—evening primrose, she said, and four-o’clocks—which were waxy and luminous in the moonlight. And she had a “moon fountain”—a sphere made of honey onyx, a little bigger than a bowling ball, that glowed from within as water trickled over it and made it spin. The moon garden was the kind of magical place that Gavin was hoping to discover in his travels. He was in awe; to his embarrassment, he’d teared up. Isabelle was holding his arm—she was wearing heels in the grass and they’d both had a lot to drink—and he wondered if he should kiss her. But in the end he’d been too intimidated. A woman with enough aesthetic imagination (and money) to create a moon garden (she’d designed the fountain herself, she said) was beyond him.

Now, of course, he regretted his cowardly decision, and he wondered if he would ever summon the balls to ask Isabelle out. He entertained a fantasy where he bedded Isabelle French. (At her house, because he could never in a million years take Isabelle to his parents’ house. Or maybe he could—before the first of August—and pretend it was his. Would she buy this?) He and Isabelle could become lovers; he would not need the duffel bag full of money because she would support him. But here his enthusiasm waned. Despite his lack of ambition, he did not want to be a kept man. And so he returned to the notion of grabbing a fistful of cash out of the duffel bag and taking Isabelle for a romantic dinner at the Chanticleer, then seducing her. Cut.

The escalating flirtation with Isabelle made the incessant ringing of the phone more palatable. But the calls were mostly from teenagers, asking how to get Max West tickets. In the beginning, Gavin took great pleasure in saying, “This isn’t Madison Square Garden, you know. It’s a charity benefit. The tickets are a thousand dollars apiece.”

Gasp. “A thousand dollars?”

“Yes,” Gavin said. “Would you like to buy a pair?”

Click.

Now, however, he had tired of that song and dance; it made him feel like Scrooge or the Grinch, announcing such an outlandish price, quashing hopes. Then there were calls from the tent people, the tables-and-chairs people, the underwriters (how much signage, where, for how long?), the production people (lights, speakers, ferry reservations, would the crew house have a grill?), and the caterer, Genevieve, whose purpose in calling, it seemed, was merely to double-triple-check that she still had the job. (Perhaps the rumors of Siobhan and Edward’s being together had made it farther afield.) Gavin was single-handedly piecing together the gala. He secured ferry reservations for the enormous truck that was bringing over the tent; he confirmed that there would be housing, meals—and a grill!—for the production crew; he got the alcohol permit from the town. He tried to talk Isabelle off the ledge.