He’d memorized the number, even though he’d never used it. For the past year, he had been searching for every excuse in the world to dial that number and get patched through to Panacea, hoping for another chance to dip his toe back into that secret world, fantasizing that the person who picked up on the other end would be Sydney.
Laughable, of course. Why would they ever need him again? He was nothing but an entertainer. The mission he’d been sent on had been an unusual, once-in-a-blue-moon kind of situation. He would probably never see Sydney again. Panacea would never contact him again. That was just the way it would be, and the sooner he accepted that, the better.
By the time they arrived at the hotel, the sun had lowered enough to touch the water, and the entire sky was a rainbow of setting colors against gathering clouds, foreshadowing warm rains later in the night. Winter could feel himself crashing, his emotions turning ever inward.
“I’ll have some tea sent to your room,” Claire said as the elevator stopped on his floor. “Jasmine, decaf, no sugar, two kettles of water. You just get some rest, okay?”
Winter nodded as the elevator doors slid open. He stepped out.
“Good night, Claire,” he said over his shoulder.
“Good night, Winter,” she answered, already back on her phone.
He walked down the hall toward his suite. After the chaos at the beach, he should have been happier about being left alone—but as he went, he felt the empty air close in around him, thick and suffocating. He couldn’t muster the energy to hang out with Dameon right now, and yet he didn’t know where to put the anxiety that now thrummed within him.
Sure, Dameon and Claire could listen to his woes, could sympathize, but no one could truly understand the strange path he walked, or feel the same fears that now swirled inside him.
Wasn’t all this what he wanted? Wasn’t he so lucky? Hadn’t he oncebeen poor and forgotten, hungering for affection every day of his life? A hunger so deep that even a stadium filled with fans couldn’t sate it? Didn’t he crave the attention?
No, it wasn’t the attention he needed. It was the love. He just wanted to create something and know that it mattered to someone, thathemattered. That maybe someone, somewhere was listening to his work, nodding along to the words, feeling something real. He just wanted to make things that made people happier, wanted to close his eyes in a stadium and hear the voices of fifty thousand souls all singing along. But he didn’t know how to get that without also getting this—the salacious rumors, the invasive questions, the cruel articles full of false information, the microphones shoved in his face.
No one knew what it was like to keep an entire life bottled up for fear of it getting out to the public, what it was like to sit on the floor of a hotel room and hesitate to call his own mother, just in case she might leak his words to the press.
No, that wasn’t entirely true. Sydney knew. Sydney would understand that.
When she was in his life, he’d felt like, finally, someone understood the most misunderstood parts of him, without him ever saying any of it aloud. Someone had been with him and seen him for who he truly was. And then she had vanished without a trace.
Maybe it was for the best. While he was here, doing trivial interviews about nothingness, she was out saving the world, without a single person applauding her. Maybe he didn’t deserve her, anyway.
His mind was still on Sydney when he turned the corner and saw a girl standing outside the door to his penthouse suite.
His heart jumped.
Sydney? Could it be?
But then the silhouette turned, and he recognized the figure with a sinking feeling. How didsheget up here past the security?
She must have just come from a party—under her trench coat glittereda silver dress that winked at him as she moved. Her hair was pinned up in pretty brown waves, a loose tendril grazing the side of her face. And those eyes—just like how he remembered them. She looked as lovely as she had the final time he put his arms around her waist and she whispered his name the way only she knew how.
That was before their tumultuous breakup. Before she broke his heart for the dozenth time.
She was the last person he needed to see right now.
At the sight of him standing there, frozen, she smiled, pushed away from the wall, and sauntered over to him.
“Well, Winter,” said Gavi Ginsburg. “You’ve certainly looked better.”
2The Calm Before the Reunion
Sydney Cossette was the kind of girl nobody noticed.
She could enter a room without a single glance turning her way. A stranger would strike up a conversation with her only until they spotted someone more interesting. She supposed that she was pretty, with dark blue eyes and blond hair chopped in messy waves to her chin—but unremarkably so. She could meet the same person over and over and they would never remember her name. She could drift from place to place without anyone realizing she was there, flitting along the periphery as a tolerable presence but never the center of attention.
Niall, her mentor, told her that it was her natural talent. When people don’t notice you, they tend to entrust to you their secrets, sharing weaknesses and vices, failing to recall that they’d ever given them away. Sydney saved those crumbs in her vast memory, as Panacea had trained her to do, archiving them until they became useful. When she needed them again, she’d lay them all out in a neat row. Confessions. Fears. Sins.
Or, in this case, confirmation of the location of Winter Young’s rehearsal studio.
Sydney leaned against the driver’s window of the parked white van,adjusted her earpiece, and pretended to be bored as a pair of security guards outside Winter’s hotel argued within earshot.
