Maddy took a high-backed wooden chair. Bridget went to the chair behind Steven’s desk. She wore a big silver-and-opal vertical ring on the pointer of her right hand and stroked it periodically.

Steven cleared his throat. “I wish you didn’t have to deal with any of this, Maddy, but unfortunately, it affects both of us. We were just discussing that we’ll be hiring a temporary security team to deal with the situation outside the door. We’ll also be getting bodyguards, and if need be, we’ll relocate temporarily.”

“Relocate? What are you talking about?”

“You may not have to move,” Flora said, “but there are safe houses. Places you can go to get away from them. If they’re following you around all the time, it’s dangerous for you to drive. What you’ve experienced in your marriage is only a taste of how bad it can be.”

“How can this be happening?” Maddy said, conscious of the chamber music playing in the background. “I thought you were threatening a lawsuit, Edward.”

“I released my cease-and-desist today,” Edward said. “We’re saying it’s defamatory and recklessly untrue and seeking a full retraction from this, this”—he looked down at a sheet of paper—“Christian Bernard.”

“The problem,” Bridget said, “is the Tommy Hall press tour. Steven was supposed to be on that plane to New York tomorrow. The studio doesn’t feel it’s advisable at this point. To expose him in this way.”

“But it’s not true. Shouldn’t he be going on with business as usual, to show everyone it’s baseless?”

“They want the focus to be on the role,” Bridget said. “The franchise. This is a massive distraction. It’s not responsible to put him out there in front of the press when he’s so vulnerable. Any appearance he makes, he’ll have to address this. Even the soft outlets. They still have a marginal obligation to what they consider newsworthiness. The studio is putting a lot of money on the line for him, and it’s up to them, not us. Flora agrees.”

Flora nodded. “I can’t feed him to the wolves. The studio’s doing the right thing. You type in Steven’s name on the Internet right now, and this is all you get.”

“When do you expect the retraction to come in?” Maddy asked Edward.

“We’re having trouble locating the guy,” Bridget said.

Edward said, “We’ll get him. I’m working with a PI, and it’s going to happen. This is no rocket scientist. If he were, he wouldn’t have done this. But it may take a couple of days.”

The meeting went on, with more and more news. Flora and Edward were running a campaign to discredit Bernard; they had done their homework and found out he had a criminal record (attempted assault in a bar fight, marijuana possession, reckless driving). The stories would come out, and he would be known as an unreliable, unstable money-grubber. Steven looked miserable even as they rattled off the details of how they were “countering.”

A half hour later, Edward left and an enormous, muscled security guy came. He, Flora, Bridget, and Steven got into a detailed talk about cars, and schedules, and avoiding paparazzi. Maddy got so tired that she went upstairs and lay on top of the bed.

She could hear them strategizing downstairs. She wanted to be in control, wanted to do the right thing, but her curiosity overcame her. It was a masochistic curiosity in which the horror and the rush that the horror gave her were synonymous. She went into her study and opened her computer. Her first search was for the Weekly Report story. The headline was: “STEVEN WELLER CAUGHT IN GAY SEX SCANDAL.” Alongside was a photo of Christian Bernard, and the first thing that struck her was how devilishly handsome he was, in his mid-twenties, brawny, in a gray T-shirt, with thick, defined arched eyebrows and lips that pouted. She started to read the story but got only a paragraph in before the words on the page jumped out at her: “cocaine,” “poppers,” “wrestling,” “wanted to make a sex tape.” These words had nothing to do with the Steven she knew, who didn’t even like ibuprofen. What was the point of reading all this, why do it to herself? She was helping the enemies by giving them one more hit, driving traffic to their website. She could read it no longer, she had to stop. Only a woman who hated herself would keep reading.

When Steven finally came into the bedroom a few hours later, he looked twenty pounds lighter. “Come here,” she said. She pulled him toward her. His gaze was so open that she knew he was scared. “We’re going to get through this,” she said. She hugged him tightly. She had to be the grounded one, the low-key one. If they both lost it, there was no way they could make it. As she held him in her arms, she could feel his heart beating desperately against her own.


Their routine the next few days was like nothing she had encountered in the marriage. A bodyguard had to get her to a private car, where a driver took her to the studio lot and straight home at the end of the day. There were no public appearances, no dinners out. Bridget, Flora, Edward, or all three were in the house almost every night, strategizing. She didn’t want to know the nitty-gritty, though she understood that Steven’s Eddie Coyle director was upset with him: There had been a Vanity Fair writer on the Coyle set doing a profile on Steven, but Flora had Steven pull out, and now the reporter was planning a nasty write-around.

Neil Finneran, the CEO of Apollo, had been spotted lunching with Billy Peck, and there were rumors that Billy would replace Steven as Tommy Hall. Steven had hundreds of thousands of supporters, too. There were hashtags on social-media sites like #letStevenWork, and #teamWeller. But Jerome Roundhouse had given a blog interview saying that if the Weekly Report story were true, he would boycott the movie because Steven was unsuitable for the role. The anti-Steven hashtags included #WellersDockworker and #tommyhallcruises. Though he had scheduled a handful of lunches and meetings with executives and directors to discuss other roles in the days following the Tommy Hall announcement, Steven was getting cancellations left and right. Suddenly, everyone was away. Meanwhile, Edward’s PI could not find Christian Bernard.

After a strategy session at Flora’s firm, it was decided that in the absence of a retraction letter, Steven and Maddy should do some well-placed counter-press. Flora arranged for them to dine at a sushi restaurant on Robertson Boulevard to look romantic and show the marriage was stable.

The restaurant, where they had never been, was chosen for its outdoor patio, easily accessible to zoom lenses. Flora’s people alerted the paparazzi. When they got out of the car, Steven put his arm around Maddy. They kept their heads down and took a prearranged table on the patio. The entire time, they talked about the miserable past week, but they did so while smiling and tilting their foreheads together, as Flora had instructed.

That night in bed, Maddy listened to the sound of his breathing. It was shallow and came at odd intervals. She took his hand in the dark, thinking about the security guard stationed outside the front door and the other one in the dark car parked around the corner. “This is going to end soon,” she said. “I don’t want you to be so afraid. When Edward tracks down the guy and he says he made it all up, no one’s going to remember this. They won’t fire you.”

“I just hate that it has to be like this,” he said. “I chose my career, but I didn’t choose this part of it.”

She rubbed his arm, but he was still and robotic. Something dawned on her. She had been feeling trapped the past week, pained by watching her husband become so demoralized, so frightened. She sat up in bed in the dark. “I want to help you,” she said.

“What can you do?”

She turned on the light next to the bed and looked down at him. His arm was cast over his eyes. “I can go out there and tell them who you are.”

“It wouldn’t matter. The studio can terminate me even if they have to pay my salary. The franchise is way more important to them than I am.”

“It would matter. Flora wouldn’t have asked us to go to dinner tonight if she didn’t think that kind of thing could help. You can’t do press right now, but I can. If I go out there and—”

“Go out where?”

The more she thought about it, the more excited she got. “On a tour, to tell everyone about the man I married. I mean, it’s got to make some difference. Wouldn’t it? It drives me crazy that there are people out there who want to ruin you. I want to help you. I want to tell them about the man I know.” She felt the way she did when she booked a new role and began to mark up the script. She could—what was the phrase?—change the conversation. Neil Finneran would feel better about the deal, and if they tracked down the dockworker after her appearances, maybe Steven could do a belated press tour for The Hall Fixation and turn everything around.

“I’m going to call Flora first thing tomorrow,” Maddy said. “She’ll know where I should go.” She clasped his hand. “Edward and Bridget and Flora, they’re your team, but I’m your team, too.”

“Okay,” he said, nodding.

She wanted to believe she was giving him confidence. She wanted him to be strong and happy, to be Steven. “Can you sit up?” she asked. He slid up in the bed so their backs were against the gray headboard. “It’s just us here in this room now. No one else. I am going to throw myself behind you. I’ll be everything you need me to be. But this isn’t just your life. It’s ours, and I have to be clear. Did you sleep with this man?”

He was still and didn’t touch her, as though he knew that anything he did would make her wonder. He stared at her, his gaze direct and strong, and said, “No.”