Frankie nodded, as if to say that she was, though she really was not. A competition that Frankie Harriman was not prepared to slit throats over? She did an internal temperature check to ensure she was still alive.

“Well, anyway,” Laila continued, “it was a hi and bye situation there—you were waiting by the front for Gregory to bring you an ice pack, and I guess he didn’t, so Ezra popped in and grabbed one, then told me he had it under control.” She winced. “Jesus. In hindsight, he was pretty wasted. Should I have stayed?” Her face fell, her voice growing serious. “Shit, Frankie, did something happen?”

Frankie remembered the time their junior year when Laila had been pinned against the back door at Lemonhead by a senior whose name she only recalled as Christopher. How he’d held both of her hands above her head and kissed her neck until Laila, squirming and terrified, raised a knee to his crotch, and then ran all the way back to the dorms. Laila didn’t report him because, well, she’d said, nothing really happened, and it was the late ’80s and this sort of shit just got glossed over, cast aside with, Maybe you shouldn’t have worn such a short dress or How many drinks did you have anyway?

Eleven years later, Frankie couldn’t say it was any better, at least not in her industry. But she did what she could. She gave her artists pepper spray. She gifted a few of them with martial arts lessons a few Christmases ago. She thought now about how exhausting that was: the constant sense that you were only one bad move, one laced drink, one stupid evening out away from danger. Certainly, there were men in her life, in the business, who would look out for her or her artists, but not enough. She could quit, she could walk away, but what would that do? Only leave her female artists more vulnerable. So she stood between them and danger like a shield.

She stared at Ezra now—he had refocused his attention back on Mimi—and was grateful that, even while blackout drunk last night, he’d looked out for her. She hadn’t known how much she’d needed this—not just last night, but maybe for decades—until this very moment. How much easier everything could be if you had someone acting as that shield, someone who always stood by your side. She’d always assumed that she hated being protected, that his paternalism was repulsive. Maybe what she had hated was that she was in danger—emotionally, mentally—in the first place, and when she was, no one had her best interests at heart.

“Really,” Laila was saying. “Did something happen? Do I need to go maim him?” She looked around for a utensil, finding only a discarded skewer on one of the cocktail tables. She picked it up anyway. “I can do a lot of damage with this. You don’t even know, like, you don’t even understand. You say the word, and I’m basically auditioning for The Matrix.”