Steve looked down at me and into the top two open buttons on my shirt. “Didn’t I buy you dinner recently? We weren’t alone— maybe I bought dinner for all the writers, but you were there.”

“I am not thirty-six. Not yet.” He was unbelievable.

“Don’t get so uptight. I like you better when you’re the Cosmopolitan-magazine-Dani.” He laughed. “I don’t need the NPR Dani.”

“Thanks for that, Steve. Why don’t you crawl back in your hole and I’ll pull up the scene and try to figure something out. Maybe we can try to shoot it differently, off a reflection in a mirror, or pushing in through a window, something that can help filter out the melting face.”

“Okay, great. Thanks, Dani.”

He was the boss and this was his problem, which meant it had now become my problem. I turned back to the scene on my computer screen. It was good to be distracted briefly from my Yellow Alert.

Soon I felt much calmer. I tinkered with the scene a bit, but then I pulled a Steve and decided to make it Mick, the show director’s, problem. I went over to the soundstage, talked to him, and watched as he got creative, shooting through reflections from the metal gurneys and playing a lot of the scene just through Haley’s eyes. Her eyeballs glistened and glowed with emotion; there wouldn’t have been much movement in the rest of her face anyway, and I didn’t know if it was going to be good enough for an Emmy Nom, but at least the kid cried only on cue.

I was picking through a salad at my desk when Dave called to check in. “Hey, baby. How’s it going—are you feeling better?”

“Yeah, I’m okay. Just shit at work, ya know.”

“I know how that goes. I wanted to see if you could come by set tomorrow.”

“Are you kidding? When? Where?” I was thrilled and instantly high. He never asked me to come to set. This whole Yellow Alert must have been in my head. For him to want to see me when he was working showed that, even though he was so busy shooting, he wanted to make time for me.

That night as I got into bed, I was still giddy with the invite.

The Yellow Alert had been nothing. Nothing was wrong, let it go.

Finally, I slept.

In the morning, I dressed with a little more care than I usually put into my work wardrobe. I wore my new jeans from Fred Segal and a camisole that peeked out from beneath my oxford button-down shirt. In front of the bedroom mirror, putting on mascara, another anomaly, I unbuttoned an extra button. Just because.