Attendants in shirtsleeves and vests directed cars to the left to park in the distant reaches of the Stabler Studios parking lot or straight ahead to the circular driveway outside the main entrance, where people surrendered their Porsches and BMWs to the valet. Phoebe’s Lyft driver pulled forward and dropped her off under the porte cochere. It was a world away from the welcome she and her Honda received at West Oakland High. It had taken her seven years of street parking to inherit a spot in the teachers’ lot, and she’d had her radio stolen twice.

Phoebe took her bags from the trunk. She should have stopped at the motel first, but there hadn’t been time.

“Excuse me, is there a place I can put these?” she asked a black-suited woman standing on the curb with a clipboard and a headset. The woman’s expression grew doubtful, irritated.

“Like a closet or a locker or something?” Phoebe said with an embarrassed smile, but the woman’s head lifted, alert, like a greyhound catching sight of a deer. Phoebe turned around and watched three valets swarm a Tesla Model X. Someone more important had arrived, and Phoebe, too, felt her curiosity spike like a fever. The woman in the headset rushed to greet the passenger inside. The valets scrambled back as the gullwing doors opened, and out stepped the prize, Holly Stabler.

Petite. Pretty. Porcelain skin and the long, bouncy, strawberry-blond hair that was the envy of women everywhere. So, this was Ted’s wife. She was smaller than Phoebe had expected, but she was somehow also unremarkable for all the fuss her arrival was generating.

The driver of the SUV got out, too, so that Holly now had five people dedicated to helping her walk the twenty feet from the car to the front door. Would she get lost? Trip and fall? Cure cancer and win a Nobel?

Phoebe looked closer at the driver. She recognized him. James Washington, the first employee Ted had hired with his Starfighter money, not because he hated driving but because he’d already figured out that his time was more valuable than money, and he was throwing it away navigating traffic. Phoebe backed up, putting a large plant between her and James. What was he doing still working for Ted?

In a moment, Holly was whisked inside and Phoebe slid around the plant so James wouldn’t see her as he returned to the SUV and pulled out of the driveway.

“Shit,” Phoebe muttered, realizing that if the keynote speaker was here already, that meant she was late. She looked down at her bags, which she still needed to stow. She wouldn’t make the same mistake twice, petitioning for help rather than expecting it. She found another person with a headset, a kid not much older than the ones she taught. Probably an intern hoping for a promotion, waiting for the chance to run errands on set.