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this place, plus-sized, impeccably dressed, and mostly red and gold. Unlike the rest of this place, the lobby was as quiet as a library. And speaking of impeccably dressed, I looked great, thanks, for the most part, to the styling talents of Mr. James Perse. I was wearing his beach-blue, short linen shirt dress with drawstring waist. It was glorious, and I was glad to squeeze it in one more time before it got too cold to wear it or it took any more squeezing to get in it.
    Note to self: start taking the steps and stop eating the whole box of Pop Tarts for lunch.
    Over the dress, I wore a BCBG pale gray, jersey knit, cropped jacket that was as soft as a baby blanket. Below the great dress, I had on Michael Kors four-inch cork and leather sandals. Above it all, I was a blue-eyed medium-spice brunette.
    I followed discreet Mystery Shopper signs to the ballroom. I didn’t even know there was a ballroom. I stepped up to the desk to find out that No Hair had registered me, set me up in the hotel, but hadn’t paid the entry fee. Dammit.
    “Are you sure?”
    The lady sighed. “Yes. I’m sure.”
    “Can I pay it later?”
    “No. There’s an ATM right outside the door.”
    There were more ATMs than anything else at the Bellissimo. There were ATMs in the bathroom stalls. (Kidding. There weren’t.) I dug through my bag, a Gucci medium tote, and came up with nothing but my own bank card. I drained the money out of my account, paid the entry fee, drew a number out of a hat, seventy-six, and found a corner seat to watch for the little old lady who lived in a church while waiting for my turn to play.
    The ballroom had to be twenty-thousand square feet. The walls weren’t fabric covered so much as they were fabric upholstered, all the way up, in a gold fleur-de-lis patterned silk. The ceiling was a mile high, arched, and gold. Everything else was black: carpets, linens, staff. Bright lights from somewhere above were aimed at four long rows of slot machines in the middle of the room; everything else was backlit or candlelit. Clearly, the slot machines wanted to be the star of the show, but just then the brightest Bellissimo star appeared. The slot machines saw him, gave up, and powered down.
    (No, they didn’t.)
    Celebrity sightings weren’t all that unusual at the Bellissimo. They headlined the theater acts every weekend, other times they were simply VIP guests. Last year, the entire ensemble of a television real wives show piled in. They brought a camera crew, a production team, and a trailer load of ill will and Spanx. The next weekend, it was an MVP NBA forward, his latest wife, and his fourteen very tall children. Several months ago, there’d been a convention of governors . Forty-eight of them. In addition to the A-list musicians, politicians, comedians, authors, actors and athletes, we had our own internal celebrities, Richard and Bianca Casimiro Sanders at the top of that list. Bianca, especially (and I knew this first hand), didn’t go anywhere on the property where the crowd didn’t part and gasp, and when Mr. Sanders entered one of the restaurants, all forks dropped. (“It’s the president !”) They were pretty, the Sanders, both of them. They were often more of a presence than the real celebrities; the crowd loved nothing better than a good, up-close Sanders sighting.
    But no one, absolutely no one, at the Bellissimo had the star power of the man who’d just entered the ballroom. I was busy scanning the crowd for my little-old-lady mark when the air changed. I looked around to find the source, and it didn’t take long.
    Matthew Thatcher.
    The domed ceiling could have parted with Elvis descending on a fluffy cloud with wings, cherubs, and harps, and he wouldn’t have been given more than a glance, because everyone in the room was so completely smitten with Thatch. He was a real guy, one of us, and I’d heard that he, like me, was from next-door Alabama. And here he was. In the flesh. I’d certainly heard of