I walk through.
The second room is different. The mirrors here reflect not my face but images — surveillance photographs projected on the glass, the same shot over and over: a woman in a courtyard, laughing, unaware. The same photograph I've never been shown but somehow recognize, the way you recognize the negative space of something you've only seen from the wrong side.
She looks free. She has no idea what's coming.
She's laughing at something — a book, probably, or something she spotted in the courtyard, a private moment caught by a lens she doesn't know is there. Her hair is loose. She's wearing a sundress that has nothing to do with the gray plaid of St. Gabriel, and she looks like someone who is exactly where she chose to be.
I stand in the center of the room for a long moment.
This is where he started,I think.This is what I looked like before I knew he existed.
The surveillance image multiplied across every surface — a hundred versions of that woman, caught in the same moment from the same angle. He looked at this and he built a file. He built a plan. He engineered the mechanism that would bring her here, to this building, to this life.
I've been furious about it. I've been furious since the Met Gala when he said it clearly:I ensured the conditions were favorable.Eighteen months before I arrived. The gap year I thought was mine.
I look at the laughing woman on the glass and I feel — complicated. Not simple anger, not forgiveness, not the clean resolution of either. Something more like the specific feeling of understanding two things at once: that what he did was a kind of violation, and that what it became is something else, and both of those things are true simultaneously without one canceling the other.
The woman in the courtyard has no idea.
I walk through.
The third room is empty except for a single chair and a mirror on the far wall.
My reflection: the woman I am now.
Red gown because she chose it. Diamond choker she couldn't remove but chose to stop fighting. Swallow tattoo hidden under silk, still there, still hers, still meaning what she decided it would mean. Eyes that have spent three months learning to read a man who doesn't want to be read, and a room that doesn't want to be understood, and a contract that was written in blood.
She doesn't look like the woman in the courtyard.
She doesn't look like a prisoner either.
I try to name what she looks like. I look at my own reflection in the empty room for what might be a full minute. The word that keeps arriving isn't any of the ones I've been reaching for since October.
The word is:ready.
I'm still trying to work out what I'm ready for when the lights cut.
Total dark.
Not gradual — a switch, immediate and complete. The building breathes around me, climate control and emptiness, and I can't see my own hand in front of my face.
Footsteps. Someone takes my arm, not roughly — a guide, efficient and impersonal, the choreography of an old tradition. I'm led through a doorway, down a corridor, through another door. Then the guide stops and releases me.
Ahead: breath. Multiple people. The soft shift of fabric, of weight redistributed. The faint trace of cologne — three different kinds, expensive, overlapping.
I stop.
Find your House,the instructions said.
If you choose wrong, the man you touch gets to keep you for the hour.
I heard this beforehand, from one of the other women in the car — pale, composed, terrified. She'd been through this before, she said. Last year, her Heir found her first. This year she didn't know.
I stand in the dark and breathe.
I'm not afraid of the dark. I spent a year moving through cities alone, navigating things I didn't plan for, making decisions with incomplete information. The dark is just incomplete information with the lights off.
I breathe.
