Zanne wasn’t sure which chief of staff had been the first to meet with Ted by phone—and honestly, the distance between the two receivers was so short you could join them with tin cans and some string—but for as long as she’d been here, this was how it had been done. She called him now.

“Just give me a minute,” Ted said when he answered the line. Zanne listened to him breathe while he finished up whatever it was he’d been working on. She put her hand over the mouthpiece of her phone so he would not also have to listen to her breathe.

“Okay,” he said a moment later.

Zanne cleared her throat to begin. “As soon as we’re done here, you have a call with Stu in the New York office. He emailed you his talking points last night, and I’m forwarding them to you now.”

“Fine.”

“At ten o’clock, you’re interviewing Gabriela Paxton for the executive assistant team, in your office. At 10:30, you have a deal proposal call with Marty, your office. Then at 11:15, you’ll go up to the house to see Flynn before he leaves.”

“Okay. I have the calendar here. Let me just look at the rest of the day and see if I have any questions.”

“Absolutely.”

Zanne scanned the calendar too, trying to digest the information presented there as if for the first time, as Ted would, and to anticipate what he might balk at. More calls, lunch at 1:30 in the screening room, another call, and after that, the gym. A standard day for him—boring, really, if it weren’t for the litany of details to be foreseen and coordinated. How hard was it to screw up boring anyway? Not hard at all, as it turned out. You could tell him he had a meeting when he actually had a call. You could give him Wednesday’s lunch on Tuesday. You could cue up the wrong cut of film in the screening room, not because you were mixed up but because you hadn’t triple-checked with the editors to make sure they weren’t. You could overestimate traffic and get him to his dentist’s office fifteen minutes early, wasting precious minutes of his day. You could fail to remind him that Dr. Enright’s son was interning this summer at Stabler Studios and leave him vulnerable to a surprise attack of gratitude, two awkward minutes of being thanked profusely for something he had no notion of having done. Any mistake or oversight, any glitch in his day was a window for Ted into how the staff was handling his affairs. If you couldn’t get the small stuff right, how could he trust you with bigger responsibilities? His finances? His children? As mundane as the particulars might be, the calendar was a minefield of opportunities to get your head blown off.