“You just stalked across the room to bring her water because you clocked her headache. That’s husband behavior. That’s ’married for fifteen years and you know exactly how she takes her tea’ behavior.”
“Give her the water, Mason.”
“You could give it to her yourself. She’s right there. I’ll even clear out so you can—”
“Mason.” My voice came out flatter than intended, saying something, given my baseline. “Give her the water. Don’t mention me. If you mention me, I will find creative applications for that bottle that will require medical intervention to reverse.”
He grinned — the full golden retriever, all teeth and unearned affection — and winked before turning back toward Sloane. “Hey, you look like you could use some hydration! The catering people said the AC in here is super dehydrating, so I grabbed this for you. Stay healthy, Queen!”
It was a terrible cover story. So obviously terrible that I needed to physically remove myself from the vicinity before Sloane’s eyes found mine across the room and identified me as the actual source of the unsolicited hydration delivery.
I turned away, and behind me heard her say “Thanks, Mason, that’s really thoughtful” in a voice that suggested she was too tired to question how a man who’d spent the past week demonstrating zero observational capacity had overnight developed an instinct for her headache schedule. Small victories.
I found him in the corner of the dining room, eating alone.
Tyler, maybe. Or Travis. One of those interchangeable names from the parade of contestants who’d arrived hoping for fame and were slowly realizing they were set decoration. Hewas at the small table by the emergency exit — bad angle for lens coverage, lighting that made everyone look like they were recovering from a blow — holding a sandwich he wasn’t eating and staring at his phone with the particular intensity of a person performing the choice to be alone rather than having been left to it.
I recognized that look. I’d worn it, eight years old, eating dinner at the kitchen counter of the Callahan estate while my father was in Chicago or Singapore or wherever the work had taken him that week. The housekeeper would leave a plate with microwave instructions, and I’d heat it up and eat standing because the dining room table was too big for one person and the silence there felt heavier — accusatory, like the empty chairs were keeping an itemized account of every meal he’d missed. I used to set a place for him anyway. Knife, fork, napkin folded as the housekeeper taught me. I stopped when I was nine, when I realized I was building a structure that would never be occupied — the architectural equivalent of a model home, beautiful from the outside, completely empty within.
He never got that bill. He never learned about the dinners at the counter, the homework done in front of the television because at least then there was noise, how I’d taught myself to prefer solitude because it was easier than wanting company that was never going to show up.
Tyler-or-Travis was staring at a blank screen and hoping nobody would see that he had no one to text.
I picked up my tray and walked past every strategically superior option in the room — the main table where Derek was still performing, the secondary table where Julian was conducting his salad autopsy, the window seat where Mason had apparently adopted Sloane’s hydration as a personal cause. And set it down across from the forgettable contestant who was oneelimination from going home and pretending none of this had happened.
Tyler-or-Travis looked up, his expression cycling through surprise, confusion, and wariness. “Um. Hi?”
“This seat taken?”
“I— no? But there’s like, way better tables—”
“I’m aware.” I sat down and started eating with focused determination and no intention of explaining myself.
The silence lasted about two minutes before he picked up his own sandwich. We ate without talking, — in the context of a mansion where every conversation was a performance and every silence was suspicious — the closest thing to honesty either of us had experienced all week. At some point he stopped hunching his shoulders. At some point I stopped pretending the sandwich was interesting. We were just two men eating lunch in bad lighting, and that was enough.
Across the room, Derek’s eyes were logging this interaction for later analysis, probably calculating what angle I was playing. Let him. The truth — that I’d sat down because the sight of someone eating alone had triggered a twenty-two-year-old ache that I’d spent my entire adult life pretending didn’t exist — was not information I planned to share with anyone.
The garden was supposed to be my escape.
The production team had called it a “romantic outdoor space” with “minimal camera coverage” — which in practice meant the natural acoustics made it useless for footage, so the crew avoided it unless a contestant was having a dramatically lit breakdown the editors could use for next week’s preview.
I’d been coming here every night since day three. To breathe, for ten or fifteen minutes, in a space where cameras couldn’t follow and edited into whatever narrative the producers had constructed around my refusal to cooperate. The jasminewas in bloom along the eastern terrace, filling the air with a sweetness that should have been cloying but wasn’t, and the stars were visible as they never are in the city, where light pollution turns the sky into permanent orange haze. A production intern had strung fairy lights along the garden wall in an attempt at romance that was actually, reluctantly, effective — the amber glow catching the old limestone in a way that even I had to admit was competent design, and I did not use that phrase lightly.
I was assessing the terrace railing — wrought iron, decorative, poorly anchored to its limestone base, a structure that would go unrepaired until someone actually leaned on it — when I heard footsteps behind me. I didn’t turn. I already knew who it was from the rhythm alone, the slight hesitation before each step like she was second-guessing her decision to be here.
“Stalking is frowned upon,” I said, still facing the deficient railing. “Even on reality television.”
“I’m not stalking.” Her voice was closer than expected, low and carrying the particular edge of a woman too tired to maintain defenses. “I’m collecting my prize.”
I turned.
She was standing six feet away, wrapped in an oversized knit — sweater or repurposed blanket, hard to tell in the dark. Hair loose around her shoulders for the first time since I’d arrived, unpinned from the architecture of camera-readiness, and without the professional styling she looked younger. More real. Like the woman behind the title had been granted a few minutes of unsupervised existence. The jasmine caught the breeze behind her, and for one disorienting second the night smelled like her perfume and flowers and a note I couldn’t name that made my lungs contract inadvisably.
“Your prize,” I said flatly.
“The Attention Test. I never gave you a reward for winning.” She stepped closer, and I tracked it like you’d track a crack forming in a foundation wall — with growing alarm. The moonlight caught the green in her eyes, and her mouth had arranged into an expression I hadn’t classified yet, neither Camera 2 nor Defense. “Everyone else got elimination immunity or date cards. You got nothing.”
“I got to leave a room full of men comparing notes about your grandmother’s cat. That was reward enough.”
