“Holly wants to look over the ditch bag before they leave. Eleven o’clock?”

“Yep, I’ll bring it up,” Zanne said.

“What’s that?” Gaby asked. She pointed out the window to Ted’s office.

“That’s where we’re going next.”

5

Phoebe

Phoebe needed air. She snuck out the back of the room before the keynote breakfast ended. Holly Stabler had prattled on unremarkably, then another video had played, extolling the importance of the producer in the Hollywood ecosystem while one white face after another, some of them long dead, filled the screen. This wasn’t what Phoebe had pictured when she’d typed her credit card number into the conference’s registration page four months ago, telling herself a thousand dollars wasn’t too much money to bet on yourself. For a thousand dollars, she was supposed to be inspired, fired up to make connections and change the industry; instead she felt as out of place as ever. It was 2019 but tokenism was still alive and well. Hadn’t anyone heard of intersectionality, or is that what the still shot of Oprah had been for?

Phoebe walked down a long corridor with a wall of windows on her left. Outside, a grid of paths branched off through the well-manicured but drought-resistant grounds toward the other authentique-looking buildings where Ted’s projects were incubated. Inside was a grouping of chairs and love seats and, off that lounge, the bathrooms. Phoebe went into the ladies.

“You gonna be okay down there?” Malcolm had asked this morning before she left for the airport. She’d found him in the garage, up early again to work on one of his lawn jockeys, the plaster figures he’d been reimagining all spring and which he’d given himself the summer to conjure into existence. He sat on a stool at his worktable, painting the form in light, careful strokes. Phoebe crept up behind him and carefully slipped her arms around his waist. He lifted his hand away from the figure and she leaned in, pressing her cheek against the back of his neck. She tickled her eyelashes against his fade, and he laughed under his breath. She felt a small headache coming on—the paint smell—so she hid her nose in that tender spot behind Malcolm’s ear until she found his scent again, leather and lemongrass.

“Yeah, sure,” she said, making her voice light for him, so he wouldn’t worry. “Of course, I will.”

“Got an appointment to see that studio today,” he said. “A thousand square feet. There’s room for a kiln for me and plenty of space to put in an editing setup for you. We could hang some shelves for all your equipment, finally get rid of your storage unit.”