“It doesn’t matter. If she writes about Jerry and me, then that’s all anyone will pay attention to and nothing I did with this film will matter. It will be like I never made it.”

“You want me to make her go away?”

Yes, her heart answered. She did. She wanted Ted to wield his power on her behalf—not to make her movie for her or even to give Warrior Bride his seal of approval, but to somehow undo what Jerry had done to her that night, to give back all that Jerry had taken from her in the twenty years since. She wanted Ted to wave his magic wand and make it all go away.

“I want you to deal with it,” Phoebe said. “I want you to do this one thing for me. I took care of everything for you. I want you to take care of this.”

She saw Ted searching for the words, but he didn’t have an answer for her, at least not the one she wanted, and the truth of that was like a trapdoor that kept giving way. She wanted the impossible. She’d known it all along.

“Listen, if I get involved... It’s a feeding frenzy right now. The press twists everything,” he said.

That floating feeling again. A hit of helium and she was weightless, her body buzzing. Ted wasn’t all-powerful. Her prediction had been correct. Standing outside the gate an hour ago, praying it would open, Phoebe had gambled that Ted’s vanity was the thing he would protect, not her. It was disappointing being right, but there was no need to grieve him twice.

“You have all these people working for you now,” Phoebe said. “Your little minions running around. You’ll figure something out. Or they’ll figure it out for you.”

19

Holly

“It’s 3:00 a.m. at the Chateau Marmont. Your husband doesn’t know you’re here, or maybe...he does.”

Holly did her best to smolder for Instagram.

Rio pouted. “Oh no,” he said. “You are too pretty to be this sad.”

Holly didn’t feel pretty. She felt like an old shoe. Holly and Rio were up on the third floor, in the long, dark hallway between the children’s bedrooms. Rio had never been up here before, but he’d dragged her around the house looking for the spot with the best light to take pictures and oohed when he saw the corridor. “It’s spooky like an old hotel up here,” he’d said, and he was right. She usually prowled this hallway in athleisure, following the sounds of Katy Perry or Gears of War toward her children. Tonight, the third floor was deserted, and she was wearing black vintage Halston, flat-ironed hair, a nude lip, two new smoky eyes. The dress’s hand embroidery itched under her arms.