This morning, however, Frankie narrowed her crusty eyes and took stock. The room was dim, the shades still pulled, and low light filtered in. The bed was small, very small. True, she occasionally woke up in a shabby studio with an aspiring drummer or the like (Frankie did prefer drummers, as they knew what to do with their hands; guitarists were pretty all right, too), but as adults, nearly everyone had at least a decent-sized bed. Sometimes, yes, there were futons involved. She rarely even bothered to give those aspirings her number. Futon-guys were fun, but they were not on Frankie’s long-term radar. Laila would argue that Frankie didn’t have long-term radar, while April would urge Frankie to find her long-term radar. “It’s very fulfilling once you do,” she’d once said, while Frankie made groaning noises over the phone that she hoped April could interpret three thousand miles away.

Frankie pushed up to her elbows and glanced around. The furnishings were . . . She tried to place them. The furnishings were familiar but only in a vague, back-of-her-mind way. They were utilitarian, basic, standard-issue beige wood. Frankie squinted, her brain running in the way that it sometimes did before she either had a brilliant epiphany or needed to take an Ativan.

This did not seem right. This did not feel right, and if Frankie Harriman was good at anything, it was tapping into a feeling and riding that wave. That’s how she discovered Night Vixen in a dank club off Sunset and brought them from bickering post–high school naïfs to the A-lister girl band who currently had the number two record and five singles on the charts. No small thing for a girl band in the late ’90s, when— despite the success of, well, Frankie would just say it: ugh, the Spice Girls—girl bands still had to fight for both respect and airplay. It was how she’d navigated the boys’ club of her industry and landed on Hollywood Reporter’s 30 Under 30 at twenty-eight: by tapping into feelings about up-and-comers and massaging egos and wiping tears and sending ridiculously large bottles of champagne to front doors when a single got its first spin on 102.7 KISS FM.

This morning, with alarming and rapid acuity, Frankie realized that her feelings bleated, Something is not right.

Gingerly, she eased closer to the man beside her, craning her neck until she hovered just above his face.

She recognized him both too slowly and too quickly, in the way that you might when you slam on your brakes before you hit a biker who runs a light. How quickly you react determines everything that comes next. An adrenaline rush but nothing except tire marks in the street or a man dead in the crosswalk. Half a second makes all the difference.

Frankie Harriman, who was accustomed to finding herself in plenty of oncoming traffic, did not react well. She stared at the stubble and the chestnut hair and the long eyelashes and the straight nose, and she screamed.