“That you’re not taking me to the C. Thomas Howell Film Festival?” Shawn said. “That in fact you never intended to take me to the C. Thomas Howell Film Festival and instead have duped me in some cruel and manipulative manner?”

“Yes.”

“Since you went out to get the tickets a week ago,” Shawn said. “And when you came back to the office and I asked to see them, you said you’d dropped them off at your apartment. If you’d wanted to make this halfway believable, you could have at least bought a couple of tickets.”

“If we’d had tickets, you would have found a way to use them,” Gus said. “I had to make sure you thought we had seats until the thing sold out.”

“And in case hell didn’t freeze over, what were you planning on doing then?”

“I’m doing it.” Gus pressed his foot on the gas, and the car zipped past the Bijoux, where either a small crowd had gathered to salute their favorite actor or the number three bus was going to stop soon.

“At least you could tell me where we’re going,” Shawn said after a few silent blocks. “You owe me that.”

“You mean I could tell you where we’re going again?” Gus said.

Shawn looked confused. “Why, did we already go there?”

“Go where?” Gus said.

“I don’t know,” Shawn said. “That’s why I’m asking.”

It took Gus a moment to run through the conversation and figure out where they had gone off track. “When I said ‘again,’ I was using it to modify the first half of the sentence, not the second.”

“Can you say that in English?” Shawn said.

“That was English,” Gus said. “In fact, it was more than English. It was specifically a point of English grammar, so you don’t get much more English than that.”

“What about Gwyneth Paltrow?” Shawn said. “She got pretty English. Madonna, too, although I think Guy Ritchie took the accent back in the divorce settlement.”

Gus slowed for a yellow light and stopped with his front bumper precisely above the limit line. “What I meant was not that we were going someplace we’d already been, but that this was not the first time tonight’s destination had come up in conversation, and that in previous discussions I had told you where I wanted to go, asked if you wanted to come along, and been denied.”