“I thought I dropped my earring,” said Ivy.

At five to nine, there came a loud knock on the door and Sylvia’s voice came calling from the bathroom, where she was applying her makeup, asking Ivy if she could get that.

Ivy smoothed down her hair, fixed a smile on her face, and opened the door with an exuberant Hello! A crowd of people streamed past her in a flurry of noise and laughter. A quick sweep revealed Gideon wasn’t among them. Ivy Lin, she said over and over, squeezing limp fingers, kissing velveteen cheeks. The guests all seemed to know each other in some capacity, although not always by name. Someone changed the classical symphony piece to a rock record. The noise swelled. Sylvia floated out of the kitchen with a platter of olives and cheese. Everyone made the rounds greeting their hostess; Ivy joined in as if she’d also just arrived. A man in a bowler hat handed her a tall-stemmed glass. She gulped the wine thirstily. The arrival of so many people seemed to raise the temperature in the room; sweat sprang along her hairline. She poured herself another glass and squeezed herself down on an empty square of sofa beside a Frenchman named Mathéo. From over Mathéo’s shoulder, she had a clear view of the front door. Each time the door swung open, her heart would leap, then sink again, when a stranger entered. She both feared and anticipated Gideon’s arrival. Fear and excitement—were they not two sides of the same coin?

When Gideon finally arrived, he let himself in without knocking and headed directly to find Sylvia. Ivy only caught the back of his head as he disappeared into the crowd, but she knew with certainty that she’d just seen Gideon Speyer for the first time in twelve years.

She turned to Mathéo and looked upon him with soft, shimmering eyes. The shift was instantaneous. Mathéo realized that he was talking with a beautiful girl. Ivy shook her head to move the strands of hair curled around her chin and neck; she kept tapping her bottom lip, drawing attention to her carefully outlined Cupid’s bow. She spoke quickly, with lively gestures, leaning in to form an upside-down V with Mathéo’s body. Someone tapped Ivy on the shoulder. She looked up in the middle of a sentence, her lips still formed in a half smile at something Mathéo had said.

“Sorry to interrupt. Do you remember me, Ivy?”

She held the expression for a puzzled second before letting the recognition sweep across her face. “Of course I remember you! You’ve gotten so tall, Gideon!” She stood up and they exchanged warm hugs. When he pulled back and she looked full into his face, she experienced an almost painful pleasure of seeing how much he was the same, yet better than she remembered. The same mischievous smile, the intelligent eyes on a firm, thoughtful face, the straight nose, the slight hollow of his cheekbones. She’d been horribly intimidated by what she imagined to be a successful young man who’d perhaps let his successes go to his head, but this flesh-and-blood version made it impossible for her to think he had turned cold or snobby. If anything, he seemed softer.

She remained standing to talk to him; a disgruntled Mathéo was forced to turn his attention to the couple to the right of him.

“It’s been what—since middle school?”

“You’re right,” said Ivy, steering them toward the corner of the room where they wouldn’t be interrupted.

“Sylvia says you’re Arabella’s teacher?”

“Yes! What a small world!”

She and Gideon quickly established the rest of their mutual acquaintances: Arabella’s parents, Gideon’s parents, Sylvia, of course (Ivy recounted the surprising encounter with Sylvia, only she made it seem as if the recognition were mutual), and they reminisced lightly about their Grove days before entering more recent years. Ivy dropped the name of her college and Gideon said in surprise, “You were so close! I was a stone’s throw away at Harvard—”

“Really? I can’t believe I didn’t see you at any house parties—”

“Which ones?”

“Oh—mostly Currier—”

“I was in Eliot—”

“Eliot had terrible parties.”

“The most terrible—I threw some of them.”

“What about you?” she asked after their chuckles died down. “Where have your adventures taken you?”

In an unpretentious tone, Gideon told her he’d spent two years working for the Clinton Health Access Initiative before going back for his master’s degree in California; now he was working on creating a smart thermometer to track how diseases spread. Ivy already knew all of this. After running into Sylvia, she’d looked up everything on the Speyers—family trees, graduation photos, wedding invitations, the article about the Whitaker newspaper conglomerate of which Poppy Caroline Whitaker Speyer was a 0.43 percent shareholder, Ted Speyer’s retirement from office, and even an invitation for a christening party some distant Speyer had uploaded on a Word document. That’s how she knew the details Gideon wasn’t supplying—he got his master’s at Stanford, he’d been named one of Forbes 30 under 30 two years in a row.

“I’ve always wanted to live in California,” she said, careful not to mention Stanford.

“Oh, you should, it’s certainly relaxed there.” His tone hinted he wasn’t necessarily a fan of relaxed. “But I’m glad to be back. The old crowd’s mostly stuck around. We’re all huge Celtics fans so we catch the home games together whenever we have time.”

Ivy thought he would now invite her to hang out with “the old crowd,” but instead his eyes flickered across the room and then his hand was on her shoulder; he was excusing himself to go say hello to a friend. She barely had time to call out “Right—see you later” before he was gone, talking to an older-looking brunette in a moss-green dress.

The important thing, Ivy felt, was not to take his departure personally. Unlike Daniel, men like Gideon preferred their women unruffled, mysterious, independent from themselves; he and his girlfriend would be like two planets orbiting around a common sun, which was work. Daniel hadn’t been ambitious at all, she reflected.

At dinner, she chose a seat on the opposite end of the table from Gideon. The man in the bowler hat sat beside her. He said his name was Nicolas. He was a photographer. When she asked of what, his sneer was so condescending she wondered how his ego managed to fit inside his hat. “Of life,” he said. Then, perhaps realizing they would have to make conversation for the rest of the meal, he softened his tone.

“How do you know Sylvia?” he asked.

“I just met her,” said Ivy.

He nodded. “Me too.”

The salmon-pink place mats were set, the ivory linen perfectly ironed, the candles lit, the music lowered. The bread basket made its way down the table. Ivy tore into a poppy seed roll. She felt her stomach gurgling as the warm yeast slid down her throat; she realized she was more than halfway to drunk.

Sylvia served a white fish cooked in some lemony sauce with potatoes and tiny sprigs of parsley; the lamb came next, a perfect medium rare, the pink juices seeping into the fluffy couscous. The dinner conversation flowed without direction or context, like a whirlpool into which random stories and name-dropping were tossed and churned and spit out into an altogether different story, the more obscure, the better. Every gathering deals in its own social currency, and in this particular crowd, it was one’s capacity to be interesting. By the time the chocolate mousse and coffee were served, Ivy was so full she could feel the acid rise up in the back of her throat.

All this time, Gideon didn’t look at her.

Just before midnight, they all squeezed onto the balcony. Ivy tried to push toward Gideon, to at least make eye contact, but his back was to her. They counted down to the new year. Booms erupted across the city, a simultaneous explosion of fireworks so bright it lit the night sky a sapphire blue. They passed around a joint, then another. Gideon, Ivy noticed, did not partake.