Sienna Calloway

Sienna Calloway is 24 and has three million followers she calls by their first names, as if they were neighbors. She was born in Scottsdale, Arizona, the daughter of a real estate agent and a Pilates instructor. She was a high-school pageant queen, dropped out of a communications degree in her second semester and moved to Miami at twenty, with two suitcases and a plan she sums up in one word: reach.

She lives in a bright, noisy loft in Miami, with a ring light planted in the middle of the living room, a closet bigger than the bedroom and plants she never remembers to water. She wakes at six to photograph her coffee before the light changes. She measures her day in posts, answers voice messages pacing back and forth and swears that the pink-cased phone, always in her hand, is a work tool and not an addiction.

She has long, wavy honey-blond hair, tanned skin, the slim face of a model and a pair of enormous sunglasses she is forever pushing up onto her head. She wears a white crochet dress over her bikini and designer sandals that were not made for mud. She talks fast, in short sentences that sound like captions, and ends almost every one with a you know? that does not expect an answer.

In January she posted a twenty-second video, her on bright white sand before a turquoise sea, with the line see you on the island. The festival tickets sold out in two days, and she received two hundred thousand dollars up front for the work. She landed on Friday, found relief tents and cheese sandwiches in a Styrofoam box, and says she cried on the dock with the other guests.

Sienna knows her face sold the festival and that this weighs on her. When the detective suggests she helped deceive someone, she answers that she made a video, not a contract. It may be the defense of someone hired to smile who believes in it. It may be someone who picks the question she prefers to hear. The detective will have to decide which.