Once everyone had left for the day, Lauren and Trip put the room back together, moving bits of stand-in rehearsal scenery back to their assigned spots in the room. Though the rehearsal studio belonged entirely to The McAllister, so no production except for Starry Nights would use it, it was important to keep the room in top condition for when they arrived back to work on Monday. “Hey, I’ve got the rehearsal report pretty much ready to send. Can you update our end times and projected daily for Monday?”

“On it,” Trip said. “You going to Pete’s? Carly’s throwing another bash. Say yes. She’s a lot of fun.”

“That’s what TMZ says.”

“Don’t be uptight, Lala. You can have fun, too. There’s no law. I checked.”

She sighed. “Fine. Nine tonight, right?” She was trying to come up with some way to get out of this thing. Court TV was back, and they likely had a killer to put on the witness stand. She wouldn’t want to miss crucial testimony from a killer. She mentally winced at her own line of thinking. God, she’d become boring. A lonely little shut-in.

“She says nine, but no one will be there until ten.”

“Ten? Is she trying to kill me?” she squeaked. “I’m a grandmotherly thing.”

“You’re thirty-one, Lala, and no one’s nanny. Carly Daniel is a girl who knows how to turn it up, and you could use a little of that in your life.” He sat on top of the table and did the gesture he did with his hands that said she had to hear this. “You should have been there Friday night. She literally danced on the bar. It was all over Instagram, and then Perez Hilton jumped on the bandwagon and ran a story with the photos. Not your typical McAllister kind of coverage.”

“Wait. She danced on the bar at Put Upon Pete’s?” Lauren wasn’t sure she’d ever seen anyone dance on the bar at Pete’s. “It’s not really that type of place.”

“It is now. Lala, you should have seen it. She had half our people up there with her in thirty seconds flat. Everyone was in sync and working it. I felt like I’d stumbled upon the middle of a performance of Rent. It was epic.”

“Sounds epic,” Lauren said blandly. Inside, she scoffed. She knew how to have fun, but it had been a while since she’d kept show-people hours. She turned in when the theater folk headed out because she was Lauren. Maybe she missed it a little bit, though. The old days. She could admit that.