“I’m going to find him.”
“East terrace. Been staring at the stars for twenty minutes.” She paused. “Take a jacket. It’s cold and you make bad decisions when you’re shivering.”
I was halfway to the door before she finished the sentence. The night air would be cold and I had no jacket and I was probably about to do something inadvisable, which — based on the last forty-eight hours — was just my personality now.
CHAPTER 4
The Garden
“When he can’t hide it anymore — and follows her anyway”
RHYS
I have a problem.
The problem has auburn hair and a laugh that makes me forget why I’m supposed to be unimpressed. The problem is that I can tell you her coffee order, her nervous habits, and exactly when she’s faking it. That’s not indifference. That’s obsession wearing a trench coat, and I’ve spent the past week pretending I don’t recognize it in the mirror.
Halfway through week two, I had catalogued exactly three types of Sloane Mitchell smiles. The first was the Camera 2 smile — the one she deployed for the production crew, polished and professional, the kind that said I am the Queen and everything is under control while revealing nothing about whether anything was actually under control. It had the care of a parametric façade: impressive, mathematically optimized, designed to look organic from every angle while being calculated. I’d seen it so many times in seven days I’d stopped counting because the number was becoming embarrassing.
The second was the Defense smile, the one she deployed against Derek Hoffman whenever he got too close or said a truth that made her skin prickle. Sharp, that smile. Sharp like a warning sign in a language only predators were supposed to read. I’d logged fourteen instances in a week, and I’d also clocked — because my brain had decided Sloane was an anomalyrequiring constant surveillance — that her hand always drifted to her earring right before it appeared. A tell within a tell. A crack she didn’t know she had.
The third smile was the one I’d only seen once.
It had happened three days ago, during a break when she’d thought everyone was busy with the catering-table warfare over the last decent sandwiches. She’d been by the window, phone in hand, and a message on the screen had made her laugh — not any of the curated versions she deployed for the room, but the real thing. Quiet and surprised and genuine, like she’d forgotten anyone might be watching.
I’d been watching — and that smile, unguarded, unperformed, meant for no one but herself, had hit me somewhere behind my ribs with the force of a demolition charge. My coffee went cold in my hand. I stood there for six full seconds as if I’d forgotten how doorways worked before my brain rebooted and reminded me that I was here to deconstruct this televised disaster, not to memorize how a woman’s face looked when she thought no one could see her.
Six seconds. That’s how long it took for her to catch me staring, for her expression to rearrange itself back into Camera 2 composure, for the real smile to vanish like it had never existed.
I walked away before she could say anything. I’d been walking away a lot lately.
The problem with tracking someone is that you start to file away things you shouldn’t. Things that have nothing to do with strategic analysis or understanding the competition or whatever justification you’re constructing to explain why your attention has become a GPS signal locked on a single coordinate.
Her coffee order: oat milk, one raw sugar, never finished — she’d abandon the cup on whatever surface was nearest when her attention snagged on a more urgent signal. Her tells: thecrown-touch when nervous, the earring when the Defense smile was incoming, the inside of her cheek bitten raw when she was swallowing words she’d regret. And the thing I most wished I didn’t know — she forgot to drink water when she was stressed, so focused on managing everyone else that her own needs became background static she couldn’t hear over the noise.
These were not things an indifferent person would track. These were not things I should know.
And yet here I was, sitting in the mansion’s dining room during the week-two lunch break, filing away how she rubbed her left temple with the heel of her hand — a headache, dehydration-induced, quiet suffering she’d never admit to — while pretending to be interested in the sandwich I’d been methodically dismantling for fifteen minutes.
The room was the usual chaos: contestants performing casual for lenses that may or may not have been rolling, production assistants eavesdropping while pretending to be furniture, catering staff restocking the coffee station with the grim efficiency of a FEMA team. The room itself was a disaster — some designer had tried for “old money estate” and landed on “Pottery Barn had a nervous breakdown,” with crown molding that didn’t match the baseboards and a chandelier that was probably three pounds over its junction box capacity. Derek held court at the main table, delivering a line that made two minor contestants laugh in a way that stopped at their teeth. Julian was eating his salad as he did everything — with joyless optimization, as if he’d calculated the ROI of each bite. Mason was — where was Mason?
I scanned the room and found him by the window, talking to Sloane with the animated gestures of someone recounting a story much funnier in his head than in reality. She was giving him the Camera 2 smile — not the real one. But she wasalso rubbing her temple again, and Mason was too busy being enthusiastic to clock that she was thirty minutes from a stress migraine.
I stood up before the thought had fully formed, a problem because Rhys Callahan did not do impulsive. He made spreadsheets before choosing restaurants. Rhys Callahan had once spent three weeks selecting a desk lamp, had returned a couch twice for insufficient lumbar support, and had a color-coded filing system for his color-coded filing systems. Rhys Callahan did not cross crowded rooms on instinct. Rhys Callahan had systems.
And he was now abandoning every single one of them to fetch water for a woman who had an entire production team, a best friend who doubled as her producer, and ten men theoretically competing for her attention. Any one of whom could have handled this, if any of them had been paying attention to anything beyond their own reflections in the conservatory windows.
I was already at the beverage station, pulling a bottle from the ice bucket, before my brain finished drafting its objection memo.
Mason was still talking when I intercepted, positioning myself with casual care I usually reserved for avoiding small talk at AIA galas.
“Here.” I pressed the water bottle into his hand. “Give this to her. Say it’s from you.”
Mason blinked at me. Then at the bottle. Then back at me. His face cycled through confusion, dawning comprehension, an expression that looked irritatingly like delight, and finally the smug satisfaction of a golden retriever who’d just watched you hide a treat and was letting you know he saw the whole thing.
“Dude,” he said, dropping to a stage whisper that could have been heard in adjacent zip codes. “You’re so cooked.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
