Accommodations booked.
It was the kind of invitation people waited years for.
It was also the kind of invitation that didn’t justhappen.
My pulse thudded. I scrolled. Read it again.
Hudson Summit.
Upstate New York.
I had a connection there—one I hadn’t thought about in years.
My mother’s sister, Aunt Mabel, still lived outside Saratoga, in a house that always smelled like cedar and old books. I’d spent childhood summers there, running through snowbanks that made Charleston winter feel like a joke. I’d gone to college in New York for a year before transferring south. I’d learned how to walk fast in cold cities and how to keep my face blank when men looked at you like they owned your time.
I’d always told myself I didn’t miss it.
But something about seeing New York on the screen made my chest tighten with the strange familiarity of returning to a place that once made you someone else.
My phone buzzed again.
Unknown number.
You’ll accept.
My mouth went dry.
Wear something warm. I like you in ivory.
I stared at that last line so long my vision blurred.
Because it wasn’t just control.
It wasn’t just logistics.
It was intimacy through distance.
The unsettling certainty of a man who had been paying attention—close enough to know what I wore, close enough to imagine me in it.
Close enough to want me in it.
My fingers hovered over the keyboard.
All I had to do was delete the email.
Pretend none of this was real.
Return to the safety of my controlled life.
But the truth pressed up inside me, hot and undeniable:
I had written the letter because I wanted consequences.
Not in theory.
In my body.
In my bones.
