“I have a different angle,” Rona said, quieter now, “about his friendship with Ted. I’ve never understood the relationship between Ted Stabler and Jerry Silver. Are they friends? Rivals? Enemies? Soul mates? When the charges against Jerry came out, I kept waiting for a statement from Ted. Some anodyne thing about the importance of finding out the truth. But he said nothing. Here’s his wife becoming the face of Genders United, and he says nothing about the biggest sexual assault story in the country? It struck me as odd. So I started looking into it.

“Your name has come up in my reporting. You were Ted’s right-hand woman. You were joined at the hip, some say more. Everyone thought Ted would go to Silvertown, and then you left town and Ted went solo. Were the two things related?”

Her name had come up? Who had Rona been talking to? The longer the woman spoke, the deeper Phoebe fell into the old grooves Jerry had worn into her. The fear of being discovered. The panic that told her to lift the needle, change the track, deflect attention, quick! The shame—the cruelest groove to live inside.

I am a bird, Phoebe thought again, but all she could picture was a hummingbird, stuck in place no matter how hard it beat its wings. Phoebe’s heart beat just as pointlessly.

“You were the driving force behind two $100 million productions. You should be running this place,” Rona continued. Shut up, shut up, shut up! Phoebe wanted to say, but it was as if her lips were sewn shut. Rona gestured around them, seeming to indicate not just the cater waiters and the woman on her phone and the rest of the conference-goers, all looking for a fairy godmother to transform them into successes, but the people and projects cooking on the other side of the staging tent. Stabler Studios, the entire proposition. “Instead, you’re teaching high school English.”

“Okay,” Phoebe said, finally mustering the words. “I’m done here.”

“Wait, Phoebe. I think you got the raw end of the deal. I’d like to help you tell your story. Here’s my card. If you want to talk, any time, give me a call.”

Rona put her card in Phoebe’s hand—and like that Phoebe was twenty-eight again, and it was Jerry Silver pressing his card into her hand the night of the Starfighter premiere. They were alone on the terrace of the Chateau Marmont. There’d been a flutter in the air when he arrived at the after-party, a visceral disturbance that rearranged everyone’s cells.

Could Rona feel how badly she was shaking now? Phoebe watched herself as if from a gust of wind hundreds of feet up, spying the poor, quaking figure far below, almost invisible except for the vulnerability that radiated off her like a heat signal.