“Sure, no hard feelings. I get it. He’s a tough man to get it slick for. We’ll grab Lou and cash you out. But let’s celebrate all your hard work first. To your perseverance,” I said, raising my glass. Ellen raised hers in return, but she set it back down without taking a sip. The juniper quieted my headache a little but not nearly enough. “You’ve been lovely, Ellen. Truly. Thank you for your service.”

I paused the tumbler of gin halfway to my lips before I set it back down on the desk, as though I’d just remembered something. Ka-thunk. A solid weight to these tumblers Lou had bought, I mused. In a pinch, you could use ’em to murder a pesky blonde.

“It’s too bad you won’t get a chance to say goodbye,” I said. “To Hy.”

Ellen flinched at the sound of his name—aha. “That’s—that’s fine . . . What do you mean?”

“I mean,” I said, trying not to enjoy it yet—there were so many ways it could still go wrong, “we’ll have to terminate your work on set. It’s in your contract, a small clause—we rarely have to use it, but it seems these are exceptional circumstances.”

“All right,” Ellen warbled. “That’s . . . all right.”

“And you understand the precautions we’ll have to take, of course. Calling the wife is never fun, but we have to be sure you don’t see him again. You get it.” I plucked my phone from the desk and held it out to her. Conspiratorial. Like we were girlfriends crank-calling local dreamboats at a sleepover.

Ellen blanched. “What? I’m not doing that!”

There was a near-dead part of me that admired her, clinging to the memory of her life before me, the time when I didn’t call the shots. I’d seen Klein up close. He was doughy without being fat, which was, somehow, worse, an inch of pale flab separating him from the younger version of himself, with the skin of an unpaved street. I had the image of her cradled between his splayed legs, and it made me shudder.

But had my first mark been any different, or worse? You didn’t do it to fuck men you liked.

“Lou’s policy,” I said, faux apologetic. “To make sure none of the girls run jobs with our marks on their own.” I shrugged. “What can I say, it works.”

“You want me to . . . to call her? You want me to tell his wife that we’re—that we’ve been—”

“I promise you, he’ll never bother you again after that,” I said. “Plus, I thought you were so eager to know what she’d say yesterday at the hotel, about the two of you together. I thought you’d enjoy the opportunity.” I held my breath, wondering if I’d tipped it too far.