“Yes.” But it bore little resemblance to the script he’d read in college, back when she was young and golden and optimistic. The Warrior Bride Ted remembered was a straightforward action fantasy, a feel-good story about female self-determination. The film she’d actually made was darker, its heroine a beautiful monster.

“That’s...wow. Congratulations.”

“Thanks.”

“You always said it would be your first.”

“And now it’s going to be tainted.”

“How?”

“If Jerry gets mixed up in it.”

“Oh. Did he back it?”

Phoebe was famous at West Oakland High for her poker face, a pitiless glare that left everyone—unruly students, noisy teachers in the staff lounge, helicopter parents demanding an audience—wondering what they’d done wrong. But she couldn’t help herself now; her jaw dropped.

“What?” Ted said. “I’m just asking.”

She started to sit up, so badly did her body want to leave this room, but she gripped the chair’s arms and made herself stay. The leather creaked beneath her.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Phoebe said. “What? I’m just asking.”

The King of Hollywood blanched. “How is Jerry going to get mixed up in it then?” Ted asked.

“Because he always does. Because every time I have ever tried to take a step forward, on my own, without you, I get dragged back to that night.”

“You’re exaggerating. He was arrested. What can he do to you now?”

“I tried to make this film for years and couldn’t. I could feel him keeping tabs on me, and swooping in every time I got close. I thought I was losing my mind. But then the stories came out after the Hollywood Reporter thing, about the investigators he used and the lawyers. They were like Mob enforcers. For years, I thought I was paranoid—me and my crazy suspicions—but now it just seems like good sense. What else was happening that I wasn’t even aware of? I’ve kept my name out of the stories so far, but the press is insatiable. They’ll keep digging until they find me.”

“I didn’t tell you to go,” Ted said. “I never wanted you to go to him.”

“You know why I had to.”

“Everybody respected you. I wanted you to trust the work. You could have proven yourself to them.”

“This again.”

“What?”

For as many times as Ted had said some version of this during the six years they’d lived together in LA, she’d struggled to accept it as the truth. As if all the suits had cared about was the work, not her body or her skin color; as if she and Ted had ever been considered on the same terms. But the times had changed. Isn’t that what everyone said? The national conversation was shifting. The myth of postracialism was dead. And yet Ted still thought the world was color-blind? Merit based?