Okay, so here's a fun fact about masking tape: it does not, structurally, stop a woman from crossing a line. It just gives her something to step over while maintaining full eye contact, which — and I want to be clear I respect this — Avery Lockwood did roughly every eleven minutes for the entire first night.

Let me back up.

Rules, she said. There will be rules. And I said sure, love a rule, rules are just bits you haven't found the joke in yet, and then she produced an actual roll of masking tape from an actual bag, like a woman who travels prepared for hostage negotiations, and got down on her knees in a couture-adjacent blazer to lay a straight line down the center of Cupid's Penthouse.

"You brought tape," I said. "To a fashion gala."

"I bring tape everywhere. You'd be amazed what tape solves."

"Does it solve the one-bed situation?"

"The bed," she said, not looking up, laying the line with the focus of a woman defusing something, "gets a line too. Your side. My side. If any part of you crosses onto my side while unconscious, that's an involuntary tort and not my problem."

I want it on the record that I have interviewed senators. I have gotten a heavyweight boxer to cry on camera about his dad. I have talked my way past four separate hotel security details this calendar year alone. And somehow the most intimidated I've been in recent memory was watching a woman in four-hundred-dollar trousers tape a DMZ into a honeymoon suite with the seriousness of the Geneva Convention.

"What's the punishment," I asked, "for crossing the line."

"Public correction of your grammar in front of your editor."

"Brutal. Effective. I respect it."

She finished the tape, stood, brushed off her knees, and looked at the room like she was already writing the review of it. Which — fair, honestly. If I had her job I'd probably also be internally drafting six hundred words about the jacuzzi's poor thematic choices. I don't have her job. I have a job where I stand outside places and wait for the person who actually did something interesting to walk out of them, which is a skill, it is a real and marketable skill, but it does not come with a folder system, and it definitely doesn't come with someone taking me seriously enough to tape a line for.

Anyway. Rule two: no shared bathroom counter space. Rule three: room service orders get logged, no exceptions, she does not want to open a bill and find my "chaos snacks" — direct quote — itemized next to her seltzer. Rule four, and I want to flag this one specifically because it's the one that told me everything: no discussing the story. Either story. Hers, mine, whatever either of us was there to write. Because apparently if we talked about work, one of us might learn something true about the other one's process, and that, Avery Lockwood has decided, would be a security breach.

I took the balcony. Not because she assigned it — she'd have put me on the balcony out of spite even if I'd called it first — but because it turns out the balcony has cell signal and a view of absolutely everyone arriving for tomorrow's preview events, which means I got to spend two hours doing actual work while she sat at the desk inside doing whatever it is Vantage writers do, which from what I could see through the glass mostly involved rearranging index cards and glaring at them like they'd personally wronged her.

At some point I ordered a club sandwich. Logged it, per the rules, because I am, above all things, compliant with unreasonable systems imposed on me by furious women — ask my mother. The sandwich arrived. I ate half of it on the balcony narrating the arrivals for a voice memo I'll never actually use ("okay, that's either a Bulgari heiress or someone's very committed assistant, hard to say, both wear the scowl") and left the other half inside, on my side of the tape, because I am nothing if not respectful of boundaries I find hilarious.

There was also, and I want this on the record separately, a full-blown thermostat war brewing before the sandwich incident even happened. Avery likes the room at what I can only describe as morgue temperature — sixty-two degrees, aggressively, non-negotiably — on the stated grounds that she "thinks better cold," which I believe is a real thing she believes and also an extremely convenient excuse for a woman who runs an emotional operation at roughly the same setting. I like the room at a number that doesn't require a coat. We compromised, in the sense that neither of us compromised anything, and instead engaged in a silent, hours-long campaign of creeping the dial two degrees at a time whenever the other one went to the bathroom, like two rival nations testing a border fence.

At one point I caught her crouched in front of the thermostat at eleven p.m., thumb on the dial, looking for all the world like a woman defusing a bomb, and she straightened up so fast when she heard me that she nearly took out the reading lamp.

"I was checking the temperature."

"You were changing the temperature."

"I was checking it, and it happened to need changing, in the direction I prefer, which is a coincidence I'm not going to apologize for."

"It's sixty-two degrees in here, Lockwood, I can see my breath, I am reasonably sure there's a health code."

"There is no health code for cold. Cold is free. Cold is a lifestyle."

"Cold is a war crime, is what it is, and I'm telling you now, I will find that thermostat in the night and I will show it no mercy."

She looked, briefly, like she wanted to smile at that, caught herself, and instead said something crisp about circadian rhythm and sleep quality that I did not retain a single word of, because I was too busy watching her lose an argument she was still, technically, winning.

The other half of the sandwich was gone in the morning.

I checked. I checked twice. There is no version of events where I ate that sandwich, fell asleep, and forgot, because I remember everything I eat, it is one of my more embarrassing personality traits. Someone crossed a taped line in the dead of night to steal half a club sandwich out of pure principle, and when I turned to look at the desk, Avery Lockwood was very deliberately not looking at me, drinking her Earl Grey with the calm of a woman who has never once broken a rule she personally authored.

"You ate my sandwich."

"I don't know what you're referring to."

"There is a sandwich-shaped absence on my side of the tape."

"Tape doesn't have jurisdiction over food you left unattended on a public surface."

"It's not a public surface, Lockwood, it's a coffee table."

"A table you left food on overnight is, functionally, a buffet."

I laughed. I want to be clear this was not strategic. I did not mean to laugh, because laughing, historically, is a thing I do on purpose, as a tool, the way other people use a firm handshake. This one got out before I could deploy it. And for exactly one second — one full, unguarded second — Avery Lockwood's mouth did something at the corner that was not a smile, was aggressively not a smile, was in fact her actively overruling a smile in real time, and I thought: oh no.

Oh no, I thought. This is going to be a problem.

Then she picked up her folder, said, "The car for the first preview leaves in forty minutes, try not to embarrass either of our outlets," and walked into the bathroom to finish getting ready, and I sat there on my side of a piece of masking tape thinking about a sandwich and a smile she wouldn't let happen, already, somehow, on day one, in more trouble than any of my actual sources have ever managed to get me into.

I want to be clear that I did not, at that point, think anything real was happening. I filed it under "interesting," the way I file everything — a mental folder somewhere between "possible story" and "personal amusement," reserved for things I planned to think about later, on my own time, once the assignment was over and I could safely stop paying attention. I had done this with exactly four other women in the last three years, and every single time the folder had stayed exactly where I put it: closed, filed, forgotten by the time the story ran.

I did not yet understand that Avery Lockwood was not the kind of woman who stayed filed. I would understand it soon enough, and by then it would already be far too late to do anything about it except, eventually, be grateful.