She set the phone down on the table. She looked at him. Her voice was very even.

"You got her number."

He looked at the phone. He looked at Miranda. He looked back at Lauren.

"We were talking," he said. "Two minutes ago. It's not-"

"You saved it," Lauren said. "You took thirty seconds to save it."

"Lauren, this is not-"

"You never change," she said.

She hit him.

Not hard enough to knock him sideways - it wasn't that kind of blow - but hard enough to be real, hard enough to turn heads at the three nearest tables, hard enough that the sound of it cut through the Vivaldi and the conversation and the delicate ambient noise of two hundred people pretending to celebrate. Her palm caught his left cheek and his head turned and for a moment the tent was very still.

Lauren was already walking away.

He sat with his hand pressed to his cheek and did not watch her go, because turning to watch her go would be worse than sitting still, and he had learned in twenty-four years that the cruelest thing he could do to himself in a moment like this was to look.

The older woman with the phone had gone very deliberately back to her phone. Miranda was looking at the tablecloth with the focused attention of someone wishing she could be elsewhere. The navy-suit men at the far end of the table had found something important to discuss with the floral centerpiece.

Ethan put his hand down. He straightened his jacket. He looked at the girl.

She was watching him. The large eyes were completely unreadable.

He picked up his champagne glass. Set it down without drinking. Picked it up again.

"That was you," he said. He kept his voice low, even, no particular inflection.

She didn't answer.

"She came back from the bar," he said. "And she went straight to you. And then she took my phone." He thought about it. "You told her. You saw me-" He almost said save the number, which would have been a mistake, so he stopped. "You saw something. And you told her."

The girl was very still.

"That was clever," he said. "Genuinely. I mean that."

Something moved across her face - not pride, exactly. Relief, maybe. That he wasn't going to shout.

He leaned forward slightly. He kept his voice at the register of a private conversation, because fifty people were definitely watching him and eleven-year-olds were protected by a social contract that twenty-four-year-olds were not, and he understood, with cold clarity, the exact nature of his current position.

"Let me tell you something," he said. "Kid."

She met his eyes.

"Whoever you fall in love with - when you grow up, when that happens - he's not going to love you back." He let a silence sit. "I promise you that."

He watched her face.

It moved. She couldn't stop it from moving - it wasn't quite a flinch but it was close, something that changed the angle of her chin and opened her expression for one unguarded second, something that made her look exactly as young as she was. Stung. He had meant to sting, had identified, in the brief calibration of the moment, the precise thing that would land.

It landed.

He felt immediately, unreservedly terrible.

She stood up. She had to push the chair back to do it, and when she did she was barely five feet tall, in the faded brown sundress, and her face had closed back up to something neutral and careful and she looked at him for exactly one second.

Then she kicked him in the shin.

It was not a glancing blow. It was a full, deliberate, point-of-shoe-to-bone kick that sent a hot lance of pain up his leg and caused him to pull in a sharp breath that he barely managed to keep quiet, and when he looked up from grabbing the edge of the table she was already moving - sliding between two chairs, past the older woman with the phone, into the crowd of cocktail-hour guests with the particular fluid economy of someone who had thought about exits.

He was on his feet before he fully decided to stand.

In retrospect, he would not be able to explain this to himself in satisfying terms. He had been hit, humiliated, witnessed in humiliation, and was now experiencing significant shin pain, and the rational response to all of this was to sit back down, get something from the bar that wasn't champagne, and wait for the heat to leave his face. He was twenty-four years old. He had a Wharton MBA. He was not going to chase an eleven-year-old through a Hamptons wedding reception.

He was absolutely going to chase an eleven-year-old through a Hamptons wedding reception.

She was fast. That was the first thing. She was fast and she moved with a kind of spatial intelligence that kept her from being an obvious disruption - she didn't run, exactly, she just found the spaces between people and slid through them, and from behind she was just a dark-haired girl in a brown dress, unremarkable. He was six feet tall and wearing a suit and every person he had to navigate around knew he was navigating around them.

He tracked her through the far side of the tent, past the cocktail station where a bartender was constructing elaborate gin drinks with basil, past a cluster of women in pastel, around the edge of a table where two men were talking and one of them grabbed Ethan's arm to say something enthusiastic about the business section of Monday's Times and he had to pause for a full, agonizing twenty seconds smiling and nodding and not looking at the brown dress disappearing toward the main house.

He extracted himself. He crossed the slate patio. He went through the open French doors into the main reception room of the Whitmore house, which was cool and dim after the July afternoon, and he stopped.

The room was large. White walls, dark floors, a fireplace that didn't need to work in July but was flanked by flower arrangements that cost more than most people's monthly rent. Coat check near the far entrance. A woman in a blue blazer managing it with the expression of someone who'd given up on small talk.

He turned slowly.

A pillar, near the center of the room. The girl was behind it. He could see approximately three inches of brown sundress.