February in New York is the kind of cold that finds every gap in your coat, every inch of exposed skin, and punishes you for daring to venture outdoors. My breath fogs in front of my face as I stand on the sidewalk, trying to remember which direction leads home fastest.
The champagne is warm in my stomach, but it does nothing to touch the ice spreading through my chest.Engaged. She’s engaged.The words keep circling, vultures over roadkill.
A hundred thousand dollars by fall.
Real love stands through the fire.
Like my mom did.
I shove my hands in my pockets and start walking, no destination in mind. Just movement. The city blurs around me—headlights, storefronts, people rushing past with their collars turned up against the wind. Everyone going somewhere. Everyone with somewhere to be.
I stop at a crosswalk and pull out my phone.
The screen is too bright in the sudden darkness, the sun plummeting into the southern half of the skyline making five o’clock the new midnight in a brutal New York winter. I squint at it, thumbs hovering over the keyboard, and type out a message to my boss, Rina.
Me
I need more work ASAP…
I delete the message before sending it because she’ll have questions and I don’t have the energy to explain why I just promised a hundred thousand dollars to pay for a concert I never saw and a college I’ll never attend. All for a girl who I’ll never get back.
I pocket my phone and keep walking.
The wind picks up, sharp enough to make my eyes water. I tell myself that’s why I’m blinking so much. That’s why my vision is blurry, why my throat feels thick, why my chest aches like someone’s sitting on it.
Just the cold.
Just the wind.
Just another night in a city full of strangers, walking toward nothing in particular, trying to outrun a ghost that lives inside my own bones.
chapter 3
Charlie
The penthouse bed sprawls before me like a pristine white desert, king-sized multiplied by two, with its crisp Egyptian cotton sheets stretched taut over a mattress that barely registers my weight. Six people could lie star-shaped across it without touching fingers, which only amplifies the empty feeling in my chest as I sit here, a solitary island in an ocean of too much space.
I’m sitting cross-legged in the center of it, still in the overly fluffy hotel robe I put on two days ago, my phone lying on the duvet in front of me like a grenade with the pin pulled. The heavy blackout curtains are drawn tight against the Manhattan skyline, sealing out even the thinnest ribbon of light. Beyond that fabric barrier lies a sixty-story drop, glass-walled skyscrapers catching the sun like massive mirrors, and eight million people going about their day. It’s a breathtaking view all the way up here in the stratosphere of wealth, but I’ve been in this hotel for two weeks. Stalled. Unwilling to look at the city that watched me crumble under the spotlight, forty thousand phone cameras capturing every second of my public unraveling.
“…and honestly, Charlie, the response has been better than we expected.”
Sage’s voice floats up from the speakerphone, calm and measured. That’s what I pay her for—to be the steady hand when everything else is chaos. She’s been my publicist since I was nineteen, and she’s never once raised her voice at me, even when I’ve given her plenty of reasons to.
“The usual trolls are out of course,” she continues, “but the overall tone is concern. People are worried about you. That’s not a bad thing. It humanizes you.”
“Great.” My fingers find a thread escaping from the duvet’s edge, and I pinch it between thumb and forefinger, working it back into the fabric like I’m trying to erase evidence of imperfection. “Glad my public breakdown is good for my brand.”
“That’s not what I?—”
“I know.” I close my eyes. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”
Marcus interrupts, his voice sandpaper-rough from what I’m sure has been a marathon of damage-control calls since my meltdown. “The label’s been breathing down my neck, Charlie. I hate to ask, but I need to give them something right now. A timeline, a statement, something…anything. What do you want to do?”
“Marcus,” Sage scolds. “We called to check on her, not to talk shop.”
“Well, shop is my job,” he snaps back, exhaustion sullying his mood. “You take care of her, and I take care of her bank account.”
“I want to refund everyone,” I cut in before their bickering escalates.
