She’d been going back and forth on it all night. If she took them out, she shortchanged earnings potential, but if she left them in, it would be a blinking red light reminding everyone that she was Korean, Korean, Korean. And she didn’t want to spend the entire presentation wordlessly combatting whatever the hell free associations a room full of white men would make—that she was meek, exotic, a modern-day comfort woman if she didn’t project enough confidence or a ruthless ballbuster if she did. She wanted Jerry Silver and his VP of development to see her talent, to see how big Warrior Bride could be.

Ted pantomimed looking behind himself. “Oh, sorry, are you asking me for advice?”

“You know what, I’ll leave them in.”

“Please, let me help. One for me, one for you. Remember?”

She looked up. One for me, one for you. The promise they’d made to take turns making each other’s films. Except that promise had gone out the window three years ago, when Ted’s first film turned out to be a gigantic hit and they rode that wave of excitement into production on the sequel.

Phoebe scrolled back through the financials. “I think it’s better that they see how big the receipts could be. I know it’s not going to open as big as yours, but it’s still action and it’s gonna translate well overseas.”

“You don’t need to do this,” Ted said for the umpteenth time. “You don’t have to go to that jerk with your hat in hand.”

She sank into her shoulders. “Yes, I do. You know why I do.”

She’d explained it to him before. If she let Ted produce, no one would believe that Warrior Bride was her vision, her baby, a story she’d been dreaming up since she was a little girl listening to Umma’s bedtime stories. In her teens, she’d watched her mother inhale the K-dramas she brought home from the store, the ones they rented out fifteen or twenty to a bag. So much of those stories went over Phoebe’s head, with only her passing amount of Korean to guide her, but that left her free to reconstruct them, mentally swapping out the soft-focus lens and the arranged marriage plots with a fierce heroine who would save herself with her own (digitally added) magical powers. From seed to script to storyboard, Warrior Bride was hers. Sure, she’d turned to Ted for feedback with the third or fourth draft, but only after she was sure the fundamentals would hold. And they did. So to let him back her now? She shook her head, knowing how quickly the world would erase her name for his, how surely the focus would shift from “A Film by Phoebe Lee” to “A Theodore Stabler Production.”