First preview of the week, and I want to be clear that I did not go looking for trouble. Trouble, in this instance, found me at the raw bar wearing a backless emerald dress and calling me "Calloway" like it was a pet name she'd invented herself.

"There he is," Isla Fontaine said, materializing the way she always does, like the room simply rearranged itself around her arrival. "The Hayes Calloway. I heard you were here covering the Voss show. I heard a lot of things, actually."

For anyone who doesn't follow the industry gossip circuit as closely as I'm contractually obligated to: Isla Fontaine is the kind of famous where she doesn't do anything specific anymore, she just attends things extremely well and gets paid enormous sums to be photographed doing it. I profiled her two years ago for a piece that did absurd numbers — "The Girl Who Turned Attending Parties Into a Career" — and she has treated me, ever since, like a slightly favored pet she keeps meaning to have neutered.

"Isla. You look like you're going to sue somebody's stylist for copyright."

"I am the copyright, darling, everyone else is infringing." She looped a hand through my arm like it belonged to her, which, to be fair, is just how Isla touches everyone, it isn't personal, except it always somehow feels personal when it's aimed at you. "Tell me everything. Who are you here destroying this week."

"Nobody, this week. I'm on a very boring, very civilian hotel-glitch situation that has nothing to do with you."

"Boring is not a word that's ever once applied to you, so either you're lying or something's about to get interesting." Her eyes drifted, with the radar she'd built her whole career on, across the room, and landed, with unerring precision, on Avery, who was mid-conversation with a shoe designer, laughing at something in the polite, professional register she used for people she hadn't decided about yet. "Who's that. I don't recognize her, and I recognize everyone, it's my whole personality."

"Avery Lockwood. Vantage."

"The critic? The one Priya Chandrasekaran's about to leapfrog for the chair everyone knows she actually deserves?" Isla's eyebrows went up, delighted, filing the information away in the vast, terrifying archive she keeps of every grievance in the industry. "I like her already, on principle. What's she to you."

"We got put in the same room by accident. It's a whole thing."

"Everything's a whole thing with you, that's why I keep you around." Isla squeezed my arm, leaned in, dropped her voice to the register she uses for things she wants overheard by exactly one other person in the room. "She keeps looking over here, you know. Not at me. At you. Very small, very controlled, the kind of look a woman gives something she's already decided not to want."

"She's not looking at anything, Isla, she's working."

"Sure she is." Isla said it with the delighted disbelief of a woman who has spent a career reading rooms for exactly this kind of tell, and didn't let go of my arm even as she said it, which I noticed, and which — across the room — Avery very clearly noticed too, her polite laugh at the shoe designer's joke going a half-second too long, a half-degree too bright.

"You're doing that thing," I said, "where you hold onto someone specifically because someone else is watching."

"I'm doing many things at once, darling, that's the job." She finally released my arm, delighted with herself, already scanning the room for her next target. "Go rescue your accidental roommate from that shoe designer, he's been telling the vegetable-tanned-leather story since 2019 and it does not improve with age. And Hayes — whatever's actually going on with the two of you, and something clearly is, don't waste it being cagey about it. Cagey is my whole brand. It's exhausting even for me."

She drifted off toward the next raw bar and the next unsuspecting subject, and I crossed the room toward Avery with no plan at all beyond wanting to be standing next to her instead of explaining myself to Isla Fontaine for one more second.

"You survived," Avery said, not looking at me, eyes on the shoe designer's retreating back with something like relief. "I was starting to wonder if I'd need to intervene."

"Isla's harmless. Mostly. She just likes testing whether people are interesting enough to be worth the effort of teasing."

"And are you."

"Apparently. She wanted to know what you were to me."

Something crossed Avery's face too fast to catalogue — there and gone, filed away before Hayes could name it. "What did you tell her."

"That we got put in the same room by accident. Which is true. It's just — getting less like the whole story every day, and I think we both know it."

Avery didn't answer that directly, which he was starting to understand was its own kind of answer, and instead nodded toward the runway being assembled at the far end of the room. "The show's about to start. Try not to embarrass either of our outlets."

The show itself was, by any professional measure, extraordinary — a deconstructed silhouette that kept collapsing into something structured and then falling apart again, a whole visual argument about control and its opposite that I clocked, watching Avery watch it, as exactly the kind of thing she'd write four hundred perfect words about by morning. She took no notes during the show itself. She never did, I was learning — she watched with her whole face, absorbing it, and only reached for the notebook afterward, in the quiet, when she could get the words exactly right the first time instead of chasing the moment while it was still happening.

"You don't take notes during," I said, after, low, as the applause wound down.

"Taking notes during means I'm writing about the show instead of watching it. I'd rather watch it properly and remember wrong than watch it badly and remember accurately."

"That's either the smartest or the most annoying thing anyone's ever said to me about their job."

"It's usually both," Avery said, and for the second time that night, something in her mouth almost, almost gave way into a real smile before she caught it, and I found myself, against every instinct I had, rooting for the day she'd stop catching it at all.

"Wouldn't dream of it," I said, and fell into step beside her, aware — for the first time that week, with real and specific dread — that some part of him had already stopped thinking of this as an assignment.