I tossed and turned all night, getting practically no sleep. In the morning, to help diffuse the puffiness, I resorted to putting a bag of frozen berries across my eyes. Brushing my teeth, I winced at my reflection in the bathroom mirror. At my age, a night with little sleep could make me look like one of those crazy celebrity mug shots found on smokinggun.com

I was barely in my office before the first crisis hit. Steve rapped on my open door. “Have you seen Haley this morning?”

Placing my bag and Peet’s Coffee cup down on my desk, I didn’t even sit. “No, I haven’t been over to the stage yet. What’s up?”

“She’s done something to her face,” Steve said dryly.

“More Botox?” I asked. “Pretty soon she’s going to look more like a corpse than the extras we hire to play dead.”

“I don’t think it’s Botox. It’s something different. It looks like she’s melting a little bit, like she stood too close to the heat, and the area by the sides of her mouth has started to stream down.”

“Restylane,” I said with authority. “So it really is that bad?”

“We’re shooting a scene where she tells the family that the teenager’s body is their daughter. The mother in the scene is holding a three-year-old kid, who’s supposed to cry on cue at the news. So, the kid is afraid of Haley’s melting face—we can’t get her to stop wailing and pointing at Haley’s mouth. Her face is literally freaking the kid out.”

“Can we lose it? The scene?” I powered on my computer and clicked through the folders to bring up the episode, silently grateful that we had finished shooting last week with Haley for the Marilyn show. Her funny-looking face would be all over Evil Janet’s child abduction episode, which was starting to film today.

Steve crossed behind me to read over my shoulder. “Haley’s been asking for a dramatic scene like this—she wants to make a run for an Emmy this year, so this was supposed to be her big emotional episode that she could submit for consideration.”

“So I guess we can’t have her do the scene with her autopsy mask covering her face, right?” I joked.

“Right.” He sighed. “I have no idea why you women do stuff like this to yourselves. It’s mutilation.”

“C’mon, Steve. I doubt you even remember what real breasts feel like. You wonder why we do it? We do it because guys like you are dating twenty-year-olds who look like porn stars. Haley’s like what, thirty-six? When’s the last time you bought a thirty-six-year-old dinner?”