The Verrier's lobby smelled like white flowers and other people's money, and Avery Lockwood had been standing in it for eleven minutes while a very young, very apologetic man named Théo explained, for the third time, that her room did not exist.

"It's not that it doesn't exist," Théo said. "It's that it exists differently than you expect."

"A room either exists or it doesn't, Théo. That's the whole nature of rooms."

"There has been," he said, choosing each word like it might detonate, "a merge."

Avery set her carry-on down with the careful precision of a woman who did not want to give anyone the satisfaction of watching her lose her composure over luggage. She had flown into this for one reason: three days, one closing runway show, and — if her thirty pages of prep were worth anything — the piece that finally forced Juno Pierce to stop calling her "the reliable one" like it was a compliment and start calling her Senior Critic. She had color-coded her notes by designer. She had a folder labeled CONTINGENCIES that did not, as it turned out, contain a contingency for this.

"Define merge."

Théo's eyes did the thing eyes do right before someone says a sentence they've rehearsed. "The system experienced an issue with duplicate surnames during a database consolidation, and your reservation was — absorbed. Into a suite already assigned. We are fully booked, Ms. Lockwood. Every room. There is a wedding party from Doha, four size zero sample collections in cold storage, four hundred RSVPs, and not one cot left in this city that I am aware of."

"So absorbed into whose suite."

Théo looked at his screen like it might have changed its mind since the last time he checked it. It had not.

"Cupid's Penthouse," he said. "Currently under the name Calloway."

Avery had been a working critic for nine years. She had learned, in that time, to recognize the particular chemical drop of a story turning against her before she had all the facts — a compression behind the sternum, a narrowing of the available exits. She felt it now, fully, before she'd even processed why.

"Hayes Calloway."

"You know him?"

"I know of him the way you know of a norovirus outbreak."

A woman in a fur-trimmed coat two feet away turned to look, clearly delighted, and Avery revised her volume down by half without acknowledging that she'd needed to. This was the thing about the Verrier lobby that no one warned you about — it was not actually a lobby, not in the sense of a place things happened privately. It was a stage with excellent lighting and four hundred people who worked in an industry built entirely on knowing things about each other first.

"Is there anything else you can offer," Avery asked Théo, with the dangerous calm she reserved for people who were about to disappoint her. "A cot. A closet. I have slept on worse for a story before and I will do it again."

"I admire the commitment," Théo said, and meant it, which almost made the rest of the sentence bearable, "but I have personally checked. There is a linen closet on fourteen, a staff break room that locks from the outside for reasons I won't get into, and the Presidential Suite, which is currently housing a member of a royal family who does not know he is a member of a royal family yet, pending a very complicated inheritance case, and who absolutely cannot be disturbed."

"So my options are the honeymoon suite or the man who might, legally, be a prince."

"Those are, at this time, your only two options, yes."

Avery closed her eyes for exactly one second, did the math on eleven months of emails and thirty pages of color-coded prep and the unbearable image of Priya Chandrasekaran getting handed the Senior Critic byline while Avery explained to Juno that she'd gone home rather than share a room, and opened her eyes again already resigned.

"Take me to Cupid's Penthouse," she said, "before I change my mind about the prince."

---

She found him on the fourteenth floor, propped against the doorframe of Cupid's Penthouse like he'd been expecting her, which — she would come to learn — was simply the resting posture of a man who assumed every hallway existed to eventually deliver him an audience.

"Lockwood," he said, delighted, the way you'd greet a plot twist you'd already guessed. "Tell me they didn't."

"They did."

"Tell me it's not the honeymoon suite."

"It has a jacuzzi with a view. I checked. It is, structurally, a compliment to marriage."

Hayes Calloway pushed off the doorframe and stepped back to let her look, and the thing about the room — the thing Avery would spend the next several minutes trying and failing to metabolize — was that it was worse than either of them could have imagined and somehow also worse than that. Rose petals, actual rose petals, scattered across actual carpet in the shape of, she assumed, a heart, though eleven minutes of foot traffic had rearranged it into something closer to a Rorschach test. A glass-walled jacuzzi glowed faintly gold in the corner like it had its own agenda. And in the center of it all, one bed. Enormous. Singular. Dressed in crisp ivory linen, the kind a hotel chooses without ever considering the possibility of two people who could not stand each other needing to occupy it.

"There's one bed," Avery said, in case saying it aloud made it less true.

"I noticed."

"There is one bed, Hayes."

"I've got eyes, Lockwood, I clocked the bed situation approximately four seconds after Théo clocked it for me, and I want you to know I've already made my peace with it, because I am, if nothing else, an adaptable man."

"You're a tabloid stringer with a verified checkmark."

"I'm a senior correspondent," he said, hand to chest, wounded with the theatrical precision of someone who did not actually feel wounded. "For an outlet that clears forty million monthly readers, several of whom are, statistically, people whose opinions you respect."

"None of whose opinions I respect."

"Statistically."

Avery walked past him into the room because staying in the hallway meant staying in a conversation, and stepped directly onto a rose petal, which slid a half-inch under her heel like the universe wanted her on the floor. She caught the doorframe instead. Hayes did not laugh, which she noted, and filed away, suspicious of the restraint.

"I have three days," she said, mostly to the room, because the room at least had the decency not to argue back yet. "Three days, one show, and a piece that has to land exactly right, and I am doing all of that from a honeymoon suite with—" she gestured at him, encompassing, she felt, the whole unfortunate fact of him "—this."

"This has a name. This is called Hayes."

"I'm aware of the name. I've been avoiding the name at four separate industry parties."

"Five," he said. "You just don't remember the one in Milan because you left before dessert, which, incidentally, was a genuinely excellent tiramisu, tragic that you missed it, very on-brand."

Avery turned to look at him properly for the first time since the hallway — really look, the way she looked at a runway, cataloguing construction before allowing herself an opinion — and found exactly what she expected and, infuriatingly, one degree more. The easy shoulders. The blazer that had clearly been expensive and was now, three time zones later, rumpled in a way that read as deliberate on him and would have read as sloppy on anyone else. The eyes that did the crinkling thing when he was pleased with himself, which appeared to be always.

"There has to be another room," she said.

"There is not another room. I asked. I offered Théo money. I offered Théo my watch. Théo, and I say this with respect, could not be moved."

"Then I'll go home."

"You could." He said it easily, no pressure in it, which was somehow worse than if he'd pushed. "Fly home, skip the show, let whoever Vantage sends instead take the byline you've apparently been building a folder system around for God knows how long. Sounds great. Very rational. Very you."

"You don't know anything about me."

"I know you color-code," he said, nodding at the tab visible at the edge of her bag, "and I know you didn't deny the folder system, which means there's a folder system, and I know that you would rather share a bed with your own personal nemesis than go home without the story. Which, for the record, is the single most relatable thing I've ever learned about you."

Avery opened her mouth to correct him — on principle, on reflex, the way she corrected everyone — and found, for one unhelpful second, that she had nothing to correct. That was the problem with Hayes Calloway, she would come to understand over the next three days. He had an infuriating habit of being right about the parts of her she'd worked hardest to keep off the record.

"There will be rules," she said instead.

Behind her, faint but unmistakable, she heard him smile.

"Lockwood," he said, "I would expect nothing less."

She unzipped her suitcase on the one available luggage rack — there was, of course, only one, positioned with cheerful cruelty directly beside the jacuzzi — and began unpacking with the brisk, joyless efficiency of a woman reclaiming territory. Blazers on the left. Notes in the center console, organized by designer, by year, by whether she'd already forgiven them for last season. She was aware, the whole time, of Hayes watching her from the balcony doorway with the rapt fascination of a man watching a nature documentary about a species he hadn't expected to find charming.

"You're doing the thing again," he said.

"What thing."

"The thing where you make unpacking look like evidence processing."

"It is evidence processing. I am establishing a system so that in three days, when this is over, I can leave exactly as organized as I arrived, having touched as little of your chaos as humanly possible."

"Bold strategy for a woman who just agreed to share a bed with the chaos in question."

Avery did not have a response for that fast enough, which she noted, filed, and resolved never to think about again before the lights went out.

She lay awake longer than she wanted to admit that first night, staring at the absurd gilded ceiling molding, listening to Hayes's breathing even out on the far side of the tape, and ran the numbers on her situation with the same clinical precision she brought to everything: eleven months of emails, thirty pages of prep, one closing show, one impossible roommate, and no version of the next three days that didn't require her to be considerably braver, or considerably more foolish, than she'd planned on being when she packed her carefully color-coded suitcase.

It's three days, she told herself, the way she told herself most difficult things — briskly, like a memo. You have survived worse assignments in worse company. You will survive this one, write the piece, and never think about Hayes Calloway again.

She almost believed it. She had, after all, an excellent track record of believing exactly the things that were most convenient for her to believe, right up until the moment they turned out not to be true.