She was clutching her chest.

Yumi was incredulous. “What happened?”

“This damn suit ripped open! What do you think happened?”

Her jumpsuit had torn along the left armhole seam and across her chest, and a gash had opened up along the nipple line.

“What did you do?” I exclaimed, staring at the rip.

“What could I do? I put one hand up to hide what I needed to and kept singing. The show must go on, right?”

“I’m going to kill whoever made these costumes,” Rose vowed.

“It’s like your boobs couldn’t be contained,” Yumi joked, “now or any other time.”

Merry set her jaw and glared at Yumi. “I can’t help what happened with that guy in Oklahoma. I could help not flashing all of New York if the costume person hadn’t made these suits so minuscule!”

Ian finally met us at the dressing room door. “What the hell?” he barked, looking straight at Merry.

She was indignant. “I can’t help it! The suit ripped! It was live! I couldn’t just leave!”

“But you—”

“This is humiliating! Can we just drop it?” She pushed into the room, her hands scrabbling at the zipper on the back of her neck, and I followed her in to help. Ian saw her starting to disrobe and turned to face the door.

As I helped to peel Merry out of the garment, Ian sighed and said, “They can’t air a topless pop star on morning television. Maybe they cut away in time.” But I knew from the murmurs and pointing in the audience that Merry’s wardrobe malfunction couldn’t be ignored, and I was sure that The Sunrise Show’s audience got more than they bargained for this morning. Merry knew it too. She wadded the suit up, threw it in the trash, and grabbed her original shirt from her dressing chair.

She angrily buttoned her top while glaring at Ian. “You tell Peter that I will not wear a stupid pleather, latex, whatever-the-fuck-that-was jumpsuit ever again!” Without waiting for an answer, she stormed off, bumping into a man in the hallway.

A man I recognized.

10.

Friday

Merry

I was on my third cup of coffee, even though my limit was supposed to be two. Dousing fires coming for my fourteen-year-old daughter required caffeine. Tons of it.

What possessed my sweet, lovable girl to post such a stupid, idiotic thing on her Instagram? Where were my parental controls? Why did I let her run amok? Even though it had been deleted for twelve hours already, the screenshots kept coming up with speculation and commentary. The internet always has receipts.

Then calls began coming in from gossip rags and TV shows. It was Friday and they needed fodder for the weekend, I supposed. The same questions that had come up over a decade ago that we had tamped down and buried—or so I thought.

I’d had to call my publicist for reinforcement. She worked steadily on her end, sending me texts every so often on the steps she had to take. When I’d called to tell her what Soleil had done, she huffed a long sigh into my ear. “Are you sure you don’t want her to just let her learn from her mistake?” she said wearily. “Sometimes teenagers just have to stick their foot in it.”

“I’m not asking you to scrub the entire internet. We just need to control this a little bit.” I chewed the inside of my cheek.

“The best thing you could do is tell her to apologize. A real apology, not something that shifts the blame on anyone else. I’m sorry you were offended, et cetera, doesn’t work here.”

“And what do I do? People are blaming me for this. I’ve said some shitty things in my lifetime, I’ll admit that, but I never could have seen this coming.”

A beat, like she was weighing what to say. “I’m aware.”

“I know you’re aware. You’ve cleaned up more than your fair share of my messes. But the chatter now is a smear campaign. I’ll be damned if this will hurt my bottom line.”

Justine sighed again. “Roger that. I’ll get to work.”

I slugged my coffee. Pawed through my calendar. Emily was fielding questions, adding meetings that were stacking up on Monday to calm the board, soothe investors. There was a setup at four on Tuesday that looked suspicious. I texted her. “What does FPZ want?”

“A meet. Looking for a new Sing It judge,” she typed back.

I paused. “FPZ? Sing It?”

“New network acquired rights. Rebooting show. Need celebrity judges.”

“Damn it, Emily,” I muttered under my breath. Didn’t she see what else I was dealing with? I didn’t want to be a part of some cheap reboot on a small network, which would take attention away from my businesses that actually made money. “Not interested,” I typed. “Cancel it.”

“I think they’re asking other Glossies too.”

Hmm. It would be interesting to see Yumi and Rose at each other’s throats for the job, but no. “Even more of a no,” I wrote.

“Okay.”

Raul popped into the kitchen, hair still wet from a postworkout shower. “Hello, my love,” he said.

Despite my attention being pulled in multiple directions like taffy, Raul could crystalize my focus like nothing else. I smiled up at him. “Hello.”

“Oh, you have that tired-but-caffeinated look.” He nodded at my mug. “What number is that?”

I slurped the last dregs from the cup. “I’m not telling.”

He leaned over the kitchen island and wiped foam from my lip with his thumb. “Try to behave yourself,” he whispered, the lines around his eyes crinkling.

Love in Hollywood is a strange beast. It feels two-faced and duplicitous when you’re trying to find someone; everyone has a star meter, where they judge how important you are in the industry, even if they don’t mean to. Some will say that they don’t care about your level of fame, but they really do. I’ve had boyfriends who couldn’t handle the demands of my schedule, asked me to slow my hustle. If I listened, it inevitably tanked the project I was working on: solo record, makeup collaboration with a well-known brand, a cookbook that I failed to promote hard enough. Or maybe my name just didn’t command enough attention anymore.

I had faced the inevitable: individually, we just weren’t that interesting to people. We needed to be the cohesive foursome.

We needed to be Gloss.

Eventually, I slowed down because of Sunny. She was getting old enough to realize when she was getting passed off to nannies and babysitters, and I didn’t like that at all. I wanted to raise my own child. It was just her and me in this world, and I was fine with it.

Meeting Raul was an accident. I was meeting with a consultant for a lipstick line and dating a B-list movie star at the time. What is it about B-list movie stars that make them so insufferably insecure? He was self-conscious and asked me to visit him on set that day, and texted me during my meeting. I irritatingly obliged. While merging onto the 5, he texted me again, and I took one second to glance over at the phone, a reflexive habit. I tapped the bumper of the car in front of me and when we’d settled to a stop to assess the damage, a beautiful, dark-haired man with dazzling white teeth emerged from the other car. He was pleasant as we swapped insurance information.