About a month after Stabler Studios agreed to provide the backing for Vic to finish his film, The Bag Man, which had been funded by Silvertown until the Hollywood Reporter exposé came out, a recording surfaced of the movie’s lead actor, handpicked by Jerry, humiliating his female costar, Caitlyn Alvarez, on set. Stabler pulled out of the project—Zanne had been helpful there, making a difficult phone call afterward so Ted and Holly wouldn’t have to deal with the fallout—and Vic felt abandoned, a “Vic-tim of #metoo” as the Los Angeles Times put it.

After the exposé, everything Jerry Silver had touched turned to ash. His pilots weren’t picked up, his series were canceled. Even actresses who hadn’t been coerced by Jerry had apologized for working with him and some vowed never to do so again. Six months after the article’s publication, Jerry was finally arrested on rape charges, and that same day the board of Silvertown voted him out. Still, it felt like a thousand reporters lurked—at Gelson’s, the Brentwood Flower Mart, Cedars-Sinai—eager to break stories about all the other Jerrys out there, and Vic’s lead actor had evidently been next. It was touch and go there for a while for Vic, too.

“I thought you and I could go for lunch together,” Holly said to Ted. “Afterward.”

“Oh. It’s not in the calendar,” he said.

“I know. I’m just...inviting you to lunch. I’m so tired of making speeches. I don’t know how you do it. I can’t say no, because it’s such an important issue, but there’s always an opportunist lurking around, trying to talk to me. But with the children away...well, it’s just us this week. It might be nice. We could go to Paradise Cove, stick our toes in the waves.”

“Paradise Cove?” he said, as if she’d invited him to someplace equally improbable, like Saturn. “I’m reviewing these new riders right now. But... Oh,” he said again, caught between the wife who needed him and the work he felt drawn to, genuinely at a loss.

They’re just contracts, Zanne wanted to say. Have a date with your wife. Instead, she looked at the floor, afraid to make eye contact with Erin, who must have been cringing inside, too. Erin uncapped her Chapstick and swept it over her lips quickly, as if it had the power to erase her.

“We’ll go another day,” Holly said. “I’ll talk to Zanne. I know you don’t like the beach as much as I do, anyway.” Zanne could hear the lilt in Holly’s voice, the way she went up on her vowels in an effort to seem buoyant. Sometimes when she did this, she went up on tiptoe, too, presenting Ted with a version of herself who was taller, kissable.