“I won’t.”
“—just knock on my door, or like, find me somewhere, or—”
I turned the corner and Mason faded into the ambient hum of the mansion’s expensive ventilation system. My footsteps echoed on the marble floor, steady and measured, the rhythm of a man married to certainty and confusion who had no idea why he’d just deviated from the plan.
Good guy. Mason was a good guy. Genuine, open, probably-says-thank-you-to-automatic-doors good — the sort I should probably find refreshing after years of working in an industry dominated by ego and ambition. A guy who belonged on this show, who would probably do well with the challenges and charm the production team and make it deep into the competition on pure likeability alone.
I hated that I’d helped him. I hated that I’d stopped at all. And I especially hated the small, traitorous part of my brain that had registered, in the three seconds it took to fix his door, that helping someone was better than walking away.
Declan would be so smug if he knew.
Back in my room, I stood at the window and watched the darkness beyond the glass.
The mansion’s grounds stretched out into the night, manicured lawns and strategic landscaping and probably some kind of romantic gazebo lurking out there for manufactured intimate moments. California expensive. California perfect. California — all of it — what I’d left behind ten years ago when I’d moved to the opposite coast and started building a life that had nothing to do with wine country or sunshine or my father’s particular brand of emotional distance.
Tears are for women, Rhys.
The memory surfaced without permission — a flash of his face, granite-carved and utterly unmoved, while I’d stood in front of him with tears streaming down my eight-year-old cheeks. The vet’s office had smelled like antiseptic and dog food. Captain had stopped breathing three hours earlier, his old golden body finally giving out after fourteen years of loyal companionship, and I’d been crying because that’s what children do when they lose the only creature who’d ever offered them unconditional love.
My father had gripped my shoulder hard enough to bruise. Looked me in the eye. Delivered those words — a verdict.
Callahan men don’t cry.
I’d stopped crying. Right there, in that office, with Captain’s body still warm in the other room. A switch had flipped in that instant — emotion was a liability. Showing it made you weak. The safest thing — the only safe thing — was to build walls so high and so thick that nothing could ever get through.
Twenty-two years of architecture. Twenty-two years of construction. And one woman had looked at me for ninety seconds and I’d felt the foundations shake.
The ceremony played back in my head whether I wanted it to or not.
I’d seen her on that throne, and my first thought had been: This is manageable. Pretty, sure. A pretty that usually came packaged with awareness of itself, all practiced smiles and calculated angles. I’d seen a hundred women like her at industry events, at gallery openings, at the kinds of social functions I attended as often as professional necessity demanded and not one second longer. I’d categorized her immediately — influencer, probably, content creator, definitely, a woman who’d built a career on being looked at and knew how to leverage that attention.
Manageable. Predictable. Easy to dismiss.
Then she’d looked at me.
Not at the camera, the production team, or even the sea of other men vying for her attention. At me. Specifically. As if she’d walked into that room hunting for a particular frequency and had found it broadcasting from the third pedestal on the left, wearing a borrowed tuxedo and an expression that I’d thought was carefully neutral but that she seemed to read — a book she’d memorized.
I’d felt it first — low, behind my ribs — a tightening, a constriction, wholly unrelated to the stiff fabric of the borrowed tuxedo and related to her eyes holding mine without flinching. Then lower, in my stomach, a swooping sensation I hadn’t experienced since Amanda Loring smiled at me in sophomore year right before I’d discovered that my brother had shown her my poetry. Then lower still, inappropriate and embarrassing and not a line of thought I was going to pursue while standing at this window replaying the worst decision of my adult life.
She was wearing champagne silk. Beadwork that caught the light. I noticed how it moved when she walked, the whisper of expensive fabric against skin I was determinedly ignoring. Auburn hair, pinned up with a complicated architecture thatmade me want to find the pins and pull them out one by one just to see what it looked like falling. I hated that I’d noticed that too. All of it. Every detail.
She had a freckle. Just one, visible from where I stood, on her left collarbone where the neckline of her dress dipped low enough to suggest without revealing. I’d counted to twelve before she broke eye contact with the first contestant. I’d registered the moment her smile shifted from performance to genuine — the fourth man, the golden retriever, when he’d tripped and she’d laughed in a way that hadn’t sounded rehearsed. I’d watched her touch her crown exactly six times in four minutes, a nervous habit she’d probably never noticed, and I’d wondered what it would feel like to be the reason she reached for it.
None of this was acceptable.
I’d come here to prove that this entire enterprise was manufactured nonsense, that dating shows were a monument to society’s declining standards, that no one actually found real connection under artificial conditions engineered for maximum drama. I’d come here to get eliminated quickly and get back to my real life, my drafting table, my buildings that followed the rules of physics and never surprised me and never made me feel like the ground was shifting under my feet.
I had not come here to stand on a pedestal like a decorative object and realize, with horrifying clarity, that I was looking at a woman who could take apart three decades of careful construction with a single look.
And then she’d asked us to kneel.
The others had gone down like dominoes. One after another, smooth and eager, dropping to one knee as if it meant nothing. And it probably meant nothing to them. A gesture. A performance. Part of the game. They’d kneel and smile and saywhatever they needed to say, and tomorrow they’d compete in whatever ridiculous challenge the producers had designed, and none of it would touch anything real inside them.
But I’d looked at Sloane Mitchell on that throne, waiting for me to bend, and I’d felt my father’s voice in my bones.
Callahan men don’t bend.
“I don’t kneel.” The words had left my mouth without permission, emerging from some deep defensive place I hadn’t accessed in years. “Not for anyone. Not for anything.”
