Now that she’d checked in, Phoebe felt too leaden for any of that. Her search for Ted had been a dead end, and she’d been too afraid of running into the reporter again, so she’d skipped the rest of the conference, ordered a car, and lugged her bags through the parking lot to wait, sweaty and listless, out on the curb. Traffic whisked by her, so many cars that cost more than she made in a year or even two. She’d sat in the back seat of the Lyft on the way to Santa Monica, wondering, What the hell am I doing in this place?

On the plane this morning she’d been full of hope, but she knew now she’d been kidding herself. She had no plan, no party invitation, just this preposterously big dress. Phoebe hung the hanbok from the top of the bathroom door and stood back to look at it.

Taffeta. The most important moment of her professional life and she’d chosen taffeta? Practically fuchsia, a pink so bright it made her bowels ache, and a gigantic skirt that made her look like a life-size wedding cake topper. But there was also something undeniably lovely about it. She imagined, briefly, flickers of flash over her skin, the sound of photographers calling her name, the way she would look through the press and smile mysteriously, as if a smoldering sunset awaited her alone. Directors didn’t do this. Directors didn’t place themselves in the center of the frame, didn’t beg the viewer to draw the parallel between the woman in front of the lens and the one behind it. Phoebe knew what she was expected to wear to the parties tonight: all black, a blazer over jeans, a bulge in the front of those jeans for her massive dick and one in back for her fat wallet, a shaggy beard that lent her young face gravitas. But there wasn’t a script to follow when you weren’t a young lion, when you were a forty-eight-year-old woman debuting your first film.

She had to get into the party at Ted’s tonight, but how? Would she crash it? Sneak in—in this dress? Yet another problem Ted wouldn’t understand or would think she’d created for herself. Just as he hadn’t seen why she needed to meet with Jerry Silver either, all those years ago. She’d cashed in every chip she had to get that meeting—knowing it would change her life, though not exactly how—and Ted had been against it from the start.