Ted followed Phoebe in and shut the door. She turned involuntarily at the sound of the latch. Her heart began to sprint. No closed doors; that was her rule. Not the bedroom door, even when Malcolm stayed up late while she slept; not the door to her classroom, although it meant the administration had a free ticket to observe her teaching any time they wanted it; not the bathroom door this afternoon when she’d showered.

Her eyes darted around, looking for another way out. A wall of windows that didn’t appear to open. Phoebe felt her breaths coming in quick little bursts. No closed doors! But she couldn’t ask Ted to leave the door ajar. They couldn’t have an audience for this conversation, and Zanne was sitting just outside.

Ted walked over to his desk. There was a little bald spot at the back of his head. Phoebe focused on it. She went back to her meditation techniques. She tried to breathe from her belly and experience the bald spot. It looked like a whorl of blond and gray, with an erasure in the middle; a storm of curls and the calm at the eye. He’d gotten older. So had she. They weren’t Goose and Mols anymore.

Ted had never frightened Phoebe. He didn’t now. It was just her brain playing tricks on her again. I am a bird, she told herself, holding her breath for a four-count. I can leave anytime. I can fly away.

Beyond Ted, brush carpeted the hills outside, so close that the outdoors might as well have been indoors. He sat at his desk with his back to the view. Phoebe lingered at the door. To her right, trophies and photographs filled the bookshelves. Academy Awards, Golden Globes, the Palme d’Or.

The phone rang—Zanne, offering to get them drinks. Ted declined for them both.

“Are these your children?” Phoebe asked, looking at Flynn and Zoe and Holly, in front of the Christmas tree, at a ballet recital, with the last president and Muhammad Ali.

“Yes,” he said.

She used to wonder what sort of children they’d make together—dark hair, fair skin, her long face and heart-shaped mouth, his broad forehead and deep-set eyes. She hadn’t let herself dream that way when Malcolm came along. By then she knew for sure she didn’t want children, didn’t want her heart walking outside her body. The loss of these children, dreamed and undreamed of, hit her now in the throat.

“Lovely,” she said.

“And that’s their mother,” Ted said. “My wife.”

“Holly. Yes. I met her this morning, at the Producers Guild.”

“You did?” he said with a squeak.

So Holly had not run home to spill the beans, had not nagged him for details of his ex or shared a laugh with him to forget. Phoebe had gotten under Holly’s skin, then.

“Briefly,” Phoebe said. “She gave a good speech.”