The word lingers.
Romantic.
I close my eyes briefly, swallowing past the emotion rising in my throat.
Whitney’s excitement hums through every line, bright and unfiltered, her anticipation so genuine it almost feels untouched by what I know comes next. And her read on me—on how I felt going into that night—is painfully accurate.
I wasn’t excited.
I was uneasy in a way I didn’t have the language for then.
What’s strange is how little I remember of it now. Thedetails blur at the edges, as if my mind has softened them deliberately, worn them down over time in an effort to make them less sharp. Less dangerous.
But the feeling remains.
That’s what never leaves.
It’s almost surreal, thinking about how differently we walked into that night—Whitney hopeful, energized, ready to play along with the illusion, and me already half-withdrawn, already sensing something I couldn’t name. And yet, by the time it ended, we were the same.
Aligned in one unspoken truth.
We would never talk about it again.
I think, now, that silence was its own kind of agreement. Not avoidance, not denial—but something heavier. Whitney carried guilt for pushing me to go, I know she did, even if she never said it out loud. But I never blamed her. She wasn’t like the others. She never belonged to that world any more than I did, and the idea of her facing it alone feels almost cruel in hindsight.
In the beginning, it wasn’t all bad.
That’s the part that unsettles me most.
There were moments—brief, flickering ones—where everything felt almost normal. The dresses, the lights, the careful choreography of it all. It worked, in the way illusions are designed to work.
Until it didn’t.
Until something shifted.
And once it did, there was no putting it back.
Even now, years later, driving past The Pierre is enough to make my stomach knot, the memory rising before I can stop it, sharp and immediate. Time hasn’t dulled it. Distance hasn’t softened it.
Some things don’t fade.
Some things stay exactly as they were—waiting.
And no matter how much I’ve tried to bury it, to reshape it into something less threatening, the truth remains.
I remember enough to know that I will never forget.
Chapter Fourteen
“Hi,” I say the moment the door swings open, forcing my voice into something steady. “I’ve been thinking…”
Phillip just stares at me, his icy blue eyes widening slightly—not with warmth, not even with curiosity, but with something sharper. Surprise, maybe. Or annoyance. He waits, saying nothing, as if silence alone might be enough to make me leave.
“We should have a memorial for Whitney.”
The words hang there, fragile and exposed between us.
He frowns, the expression slow and deliberate, his gaze hardening as it settles fully on me. “Should we?”
