“Have fun, sweetheart,” Ted said, folding his son into an embrace.

“See ya,” Flynn said, climbing in the back. The boy flicked his hair over his eyes, as if bangs granted invisibility.

“Ugh, now I’m nervous to see Vic, too,” Holly said. “Should I be?”

“Just keep it light,” Ted said. “Talk about the kids.”

They really were allergic to confrontation. Ted and Holly should have known they had nothing to worry about from Vic Henry. As upset as he was about the last deal going south, he would never risk a permanent estrangement from Stabler Studios. If anything, he probably looked at the boys’ friendship and this fishing trip as an opportunity to get back on solid ground with Ted. Vic Henry was a Hollywood player, and at the end of the day he would play the Hollywood game. It was the people who didn’t play the game who Ted and Holly had real reason to fear, and yet they probably couldn’t even remember their names, like Caitlyn Alvarez, who was now just that difficult actress they didn’t want to mix with.

“I’ll probably get stuck talking to Samantha anyway,” Holly said. “I liked Vic’s last wife better.”

“Good luck,” Ted said, kissing Holly on the cheek. She was still wearing the jumpsuit she’d worn to the conference, but she’d dressed it down with a necklace Zoe had made out of giant wooden beads. Her hair was held back with sunglasses. She got in the car.

James backed the SUV out of the garage and, in a moment, they were gone. Erin disappeared inside, but Mark stepped forward.

“If you have a couple minutes, Ted,” he said, “I’d love to show you the new pillows we found for the master bedroom.”

Ted was an insomniac, a fact that was sometimes pathologized by Holly and his doctors and varyingly attributed to lower back pain, insufficient vitamin K, stress, too much time in the edit bay, too much television before bed and, the latest, poor postural alignment during sleep. Ted had asked Mark’s team a month ago to look into solutions, and they were due to present their findings next week. This move of Mark’s was a common tactic, leveraging your physical proximity to Ted to bump up your tasks on his agenda. Sometimes Zanne rolled with it, but not today, with Ted—who’d clearly forgotten all about this project, because he liked the calm of the dark hours of morning and was fine living on four or five hours of sleep—now giving Zanne his best save me look.

“Ted has some calls to return,” Zanne said, feeling like his professional rescuer, on call for any emergency. “You and I can talk later, Mark, about the best time to get his input on that.”