She toggled from the calendar to Dawn’s inbox to see if she’d missed any emails. Theoretically IT made sure that on the days Zanne was covering, every message addressed to Ted went simultaneously to Dawn and Zanne, but sometimes there were glitches. Once, Ted had used an old address to reach Flynn’s teacher; the bounce-back error message had shown up in Dawn’s inbox but not in Zanne’s, going undiscovered until the next morning. After that, Zanne had been given provisional access—good only on the days she sat first chair—to all the archived emails to which Dawn had daily access. This included not just Dawn’s entire email history, but also Ted’s and the archives of the previous chiefs of staff: Matthew, Anna, and Todd. But what about Phoebe?

There was no folder with Phoebe’s name on it, like the other archives, but in a way, that made sense. If Phoebe stopped working for Ted before he started the company, then her emails wouldn’t be archived. Stabler Studios’ twentieth anniversary was coming up this December, and Ted’s inbox was filled these days with plans for the celebration, the logo refresh, and the upcoming release of a collector’s edition of The Starfighter trilogy. Zanne brought up IMDb and looked at Phoebe’s credits. She had two credits as a producer, The Starfighter and The Starfighter 2. An auspicious start to her career in film and then nothing. What happened?

Zanne took the postcard from the notebook she’d tucked it inside, the one in which she jotted down Ted and Holly’s outlandish requests as well as...not stories, exactly, but the seeds of them, flashes of ideas that whispered in the back of her mind for days while she ran after the Stablers, too busy to finish a thought. She held the card in her hand. Why had it taken Phoebe twenty years to make Warrior Bride? Why had she left the Starfighter franchise? Zanne clicked into Todd’s archive, the oldest records saved in the chief of staff continuum, and entered Phoebe Lee in the search bar. Hundreds of results returned, far too many to search now. Here it was: Phoebe’s archive of emails swallowed whole by Todd’s. Zanne skimmed the subject lines and her eyes caught on something. She dropped the mouse like it was a hot coal her brain knew would scorch her, but the rest of her was confused. What was that she’d seen? Her heart started to gallop. She brushed the top of her mouse until she found what had startled her—the words Stabler-Lee Divorce. Phoebe and Ted were married?

Zanne looked up quickly, like the former shoplifter she was, to make sure the coast was clear. Then she glanced at the clock. Shit, she’d lost track of time.

Zanne toggled back to her own inbox. Then she dialed Ted’s line.

“Yep,” he said.