I had spent my twenties learning that being wealthy is its own kind of loneliness — that you can never quite tell whether a person is smiling at you or at the number behind you.

Flynn seemed different.

He teased me instead of flattering me.

He paid for things, insisted on it, waved my card away.

He asked about my mother’s health and remembered the answer.

He built, patiently and expertly, exactly the man I’d have designed if I’d been asked to draw the husband I wanted — and I understand now that this was not luck but research.

He’d studied me the way an angler studies a particular stretch of river, and every charming thing about him had been chosen and cast for effect.

I hadn’t fallen in love with a man.

I’d fallen in love with a lure.

Chapter 2 — The Staircase

I don’t know what woke me.

Some animal part of the brain, the part that keeps watch while the rest of you sleeps, had decided that the fog I was living in was not safe, and it hauled me up out of it against my will.

The suite was empty.

Flynn was gone.