The gate at the top of the drive rolled open at 7:12 a.m. for a landscaping truck, a refrigerated grocery delivery, and a sixty-one-year-old man in a weighted vest, in that order.
Eight things that fix your kitchen, ranked by what they say about you: Stuff to Buy Before Anyone Sees Your Kitchen
The man’s name was Court. He had retired eleven years ago from a firm that did something adjacent to other people’s pensions, and every morning since he had walked his two whippets down the same eucalyptus-lined stretch of pavement, past the same eighteen-foot ficus wall, at the same brisk clip he described to strangers as “zone two.” He had passed that hedge roughly eleven hundred times. He had never once wondered about it, because wondering about hedges is what people do in Encino.
At 7:19 a.m., his earbuds served him a podcast ad break, and then a host said something offhand about Prince Harry’s Montecito years, and Court stopped walking. The whippets did not. For four full seconds he was a man being towed by two dogs, staring at a wall of foliage he had personally complimented at a fundraiser.
He sat down on a decorative boulder that had cost more than a Honda Civic and said, out loud, to nobody, “Behind this one?”
You've read this far. The least you can do is buy the "Still Weak As Shit" tee.
By 8:40 the news had metabolized through the neighborhood the way news does here: not on the app, which is for coyote sightings and complaints about the tree crew, but through the 8 a.m. reformer class, where a woman rolled off her carriage mid-teaser and had to be brought lemon water. By 9:15 the sound bath had gone off the rails. The facilitator struck the first bowl and a woman in the back said the words “five years” and the room simply stopped being a sound bath and became a grief circle.
What made it unbearable — what made it, several residents insisted, genuinely devastating — was not that Prince Harry had lived among the Montecito neighbors. It was that they had been so magnificently, expensively good at not caring.
“This isn’t that kind of place,” said Marin, 48, who sells an adaptogenic powder that is legally not allowed to say what it does. “We don’t do celebrity here. That’s the whole point of here.” She said this while gripping a $19 juice hard enough to deform the bottle. Six years ago she let a man in a Dodgers cap go ahead of her at the coffee place because he only had one item, and she has spent every hour since 9:15 a.m. trying to remember his jawline.
Up and down the road, the reconstruction began. The helicopters — everyone had assumed fire season. The unfamiliar black SUVs — everyone had assumed a Saudi LLC, or a founder in his rehab era, or one of those AI guys who buys nine acres and immediately puts in a cold plunge and a chapel. A retired orthopedic surgeon on the adjacent parcel admitted he had once waved at a security detail and then complained to his wife about “whoever’s doing that much construction.”
“I brought a casserole to the wrong house,” said a woman named Bitsy, 71, sitting very still on her patio. “In 2020. I brought it to the Kesslers. The Kesslers have a gluten thing.”
The realtors, to their credit, did not pretend to grieve. One of them was already at the corner by ten, pacing with a phone to each ear, describing the road as “royal-adjacent” in a voice that suggested he had been waiting his entire professional life to describe a road that way. Someone in the HOA raised the question of whether the hedge ordinance had been, in retrospect, a mistake.
The men mostly claimed indifference. Court’s neighbor Rick said he didn’t follow any of that, that he hadn’t watched a documentary since Ken Burns, that frankly the whole institution was a tax structure with hats. Then he went inside, sat on the edge of his bed with the door closed, and watched forty minutes of a streaming docuseries at 15% volume while his wife pretended to be asleep.
At dusk, Court came back down the drive without the dogs. He was holding a bottle of Sancerre and standing very close to the ficus, close enough to see how dense it really was, how completely it had done its job. On the other side there was nothing now but a lawn and a security light and someone else’s problem.
He stood there a while. Then he turned around and walked the bottle home, five years late, still cold.