Phoebe tucked her hair behind her ear and shrugged her shoulders. “Because Ted doesn’t have the capacity yet. I need a partner who can go big with this. The overseas market alone—come on, Jerry. What are you waiting for?”

Was it a betrayal to admit it, or just the plain truth?

One for me, one for you. It had been a toss-up whose film they’d shoot first, but then, the week they graduated, Ted had won the screenwriting prize for which they’d both applied.

“I can’t believe I won,” he’d said. “Yours is so good, Mols.” And Phoebe had thought, Better. You mean “yours is better.”

Even then Ted had worn his success lightly. Fifty thousand dollars and agent meetings with the Big Four, and still he’d walked around campus with the same shy grin he wore when you gave him the last bite of your hot dog. He was sweet and quiet and didn’t care about impressing anyone but her. He’d needed her—to push him to the front, to connect him with an audience. It had been her idea for him to apply for the screenwriting award. They were a team—Goose, the boy who’d laughed deep from his belly, that first night in her bed, over her tiny ears, small as a mole’s; and Mols, who sang “Can’t hear you!” as she pulled her hair forward to hide them, goading him on until he was practically honking—but it honestly hadn’t occurred to her that she wouldn’t win.

Six years later, she was a little queasy, as if she hadn’t had plenty of practice at this, as if she hadn’t already met with dozens of executives about Ted’s films. Phoebe tried to see herself as Jerry might. Did she look powerful? Or too sexy without the voluminous robe shielding her, like one of those longtime girls in the ads in the back of LA Weekly, call 1-800-Me So Horny? Or did she look like a simple immigrant who didn’t know the difference between evening and business attire and couldn’t be trusted with a million-dollar investment?