Bernard and Kelly burst into laughter and Holly exhaled. She felt the valves of her heart working again, forcing her blood in whichever direction it was supposed to go. They weren’t talking about her or the job posting. She’d checked it again on the ride home from the marina. Erin had said the post went viral, but what did that really mean? Holly had looked at the number next to the little heart icon. Only 276, that didn’t seem so bad. Of course, she didn’t want hundreds of people LOLing at her aspirations to knit or at Ted’s requirement that the staff be able to judge the statistical significance of any data they pulled into their reports. But she’d been a Stabler long enough to have grown a slightly thicker skin. When you lived in the public sphere, people talked. Then she saw the K at the end of the number, raising it by a factor of one thousand—a quarter of a million people were talking and LOLing—and she turned off her phone completely.

In the beginning, she’d been fascinated by Ted’s life and a bit embarrassed as it encompassed her, too. She would try to guess which staff member handled each task, but it was all done so invisibly. And the sheer number of helpers they had! Someone new was always starting, someone else always leaving. She couldn’t keep the names straight. Most of the time she dealt with Barbara, the house manager at the Hollywood Hills house, which made things easier.