Fuck Ted for getting to move forward, onward, upward, attracting armies of people to do for him what she had once done. Theodore Stabler Jr. was more than a visionary, he was a brand. His name was on everything: hundreds of movies, dozens of TV shows, games, networks, scholarships, buildings, halls, stars on the Walk of Fame. No one could believe that one person could accomplish so much, and yet everybody did believe it. The press called Ted Stabler the hardest-working man in show business and the nicest man alive. They didn’t ask him to relive the most painful night of his life. They never got close enough to try.

But Phoebe would. Fuck him for leaving her with all the mess and the shame. Fuck him for thinking this day wouldn’t come, when she would get past the gatekeepers and he would have to look her in the eyes again and explain himself. Phoebe followed the signs, one after another, until she was standing before it, the Chairman’s Office, an uninhabited pile of rubble behind a chain-link fence with a sign on it saying, Pardon Our Mess. We’re Renovating!

9

Zanne

Zanne hurried across the terrace. It was eleven and, according to the calendar, Flynn Stabler was due to leave in thirty minutes for a weeklong fishing trip with the director Vic Henry, Vic’s son Cosmo, and two other boys from the Harvard-Westlake Upper School. She slipped into the main house, bound for an interrogation from Holly about the ditch bag, an elaborate piece of contingency planning for disasters at sea that had been Ted’s idea. Zanne was still buzzing from her meeting with Ted, the anticipatory rush of those extra dollars soon overflowing her bank account like shiny coins in a jackpot, but she forced herself to switch gears. It was time to focus, and what worked for one Stabler rarely worked for the other. Ted required unemotional precision, brisk replies to his probing. Holly often needed soothing and reassurance.

She walked through the great room to the circular foyer. As echoed in the towers, the motif of the original house was circles and arches, and the previous owner had obeyed this dictate with the extension, showcasing yet more arches and wide curves, but at every opportunity the Stablers had thwarted the theme. In the great room, the sofas were backless and the bookshelves pointy and bookless; the dining table had been forged from an airplane’s trapezoidal wing. You couldn’t pay Zanne to live here.

A pair of wrought-iron staircases led from the foyer to the second and third floors, one set of stairs oriented toward the front of the house and the other oriented toward the back, like in a department store. Zanne followed the audible tension up the two flights of stairs to Flynn’s bedroom on the third floor.

“Sweetie, where’s your green bathing suit, the one we got in Hawaii?” Holly asked.