Chapter 2 Friday, 12 June 2026
Ten years later
Until yesterday, Hannah Miller had planned to give the Lenox Club and her alma mater’s anniversary gala a wide berth.
She’d kept in touch with precisely zero members of her graduating class, save for Oliver Morgan, who she could grab a coffee with anytime.
They both lived downtown, they both worked in media – Hannah was a writer for Culture Vault, a well-known politics and culture site, and Oliver was doing well for himself as a YouTuber with a channel focused on luxury real estate and personal brand building.
Hannah didn’t entirely get what her old friend was doing half the time, but he’d made a real name for himself in the lifestyle space, and she was happy for him.
But then yesterday morning, a text from her boss:
She had tried to weasel out of it, to no avail.
Culture Vault had already purchased her exorbitantly priced ticket and RSVP’d in her name.
The ‘ultra-rich piece’ had dropped three weeks ago, on the same day that Madison DuPont’s husband, Henry Alcott Winslow, a New Yorker as ultra-rich as they came, had announced his bid for mayor.
The brief article, a thinly veiled indictment of Hannah’s former classmates, had gone viral – and had inadvertently thrown a hailstorm of negative attention at Winslow’s mayoral campaign.
She was none too keen for a night of mixing and mingling among the very classmates she’d just royally pissed off.
But her boss didn’t give a flying fuck about Hannah’s pride, and so here she was on East 73rd Street, approaching the Lenox Club’s discreet front door for the first time in a decade.
She tugged at the waist of her black gown and gritted her teeth.
The door swung open and she was greeted by the club’s butler, an older gentleman in a tux who extended his hand for Hannah’s ticket.
While he checked her name off the RSVP list, she peered around him, past the reception desk, and into the club.
The night was young, but the Lenox Club was already warm with the heat of sixty or so bodies pressed into the first-floor lounge, dining room and wood-panelled library.
Among them, she spotted a few familiar faces from her Prescott days: Alex DuPont and Beatrice Whitmore were chatting by the fireplace, and Ms Caldwell gave Hannah a polite wave from her seat at one of the small marble-topped tables in the lounge.
Hannah plastered on a wide smile and returned the gesture. No going back now.
Just then, the butler cleared his throat and gestured to a large, black velvet bag hanging from a hook by the door. She blinked.
‘Your phone, Ms Miller. It will be returned at the close of the evening.’
She scowled. She’d forgotten about the club’s no-devices policy and would have to take notes by hand. With a sigh, she dropped her phone into the bag, then stepped past the butler and into the lounge.
Within minutes, Hannah was transported back ten years, to Prescott Academy.
She looked the part in a way she never had back then – her hair expensively cut and styled, her gown a Vera Wang (from Rent the Runway, but still), her makeup fresh.
But inside, she felt exactly like scrawny Hannah Miller, the scholarship student who took the subway to school while her friends were dropped off by private chauffeurs straight from their penthouses.
If they’d ever been her friends at all.
The club smelled like old money, exactly as it had ten years ago.
As Hannah made her way to the bar, she inhaled the subtle scents of wood polish, fresh-cut flowers and good scotch.
The walls of the lounge were panelled in the same dark oak, and framed black-and-white photographs of old New York – Central Park in winter, Fifth Avenue circa the ’20s – still hung at regular intervals.
The décor wasn’t the only thing that remained unchanged.
At the opposite end of the lounge, near the library doors, Theo Fitzgerald stood at a small round cocktail table in an ash grey Ralph Lauren tux and pink silk tie, chatting with two boys from their year.
Men. They were all in their late twenties now, but she couldn’t help feeling like the last decade had somehow slipped from her grasp the moment she’d stepped through the club’s doors.
‘A glass of white,’ she said to the woman in a tailored black vest and silk tie, stationed behind the dark mahogany bar. ‘Whatever’s open.’
The bartender frowned. ‘Tonight, the Lenox Club has partnered with Belvedere on a selection of signature cocktails.’ She slid a menu printed on LC monogrammed stationery to Hannah. Lenox Martini, Velvet Hour, Empire Mule.
‘Martini’s fine.’ She made a mental note to cut herself off after two. Vodka was not historically her friend.
While the bartender got to work, Hannah took out her notebook and jotted down a few observations about the lounge for her story.
The bar was a curved, mahogany structure with a brass footrail and deep green leather stools.
Behind it, top shelf spirits and several bottles of the club’s own private-label bourbon were displayed on tiered glass shelves, their backs reflected in an antique mirror spackled with age.
Above the mirror hung a large round clock with heavy black hands, which looked original to the club’s 1896 founding. Summery jazz played at a low volume.
The lighting was warm and low – brass wall sconces, small table lamps and tasteful amber fixtures overhead.
In the main seating area, guests were gathered around marble cocktail tables, each topped with a brass vase of lilies.
A Steinway baby grand piano sat in the corner, waiting for someone to sit down and play.
On the wall facing the street, a fire burned low in a brick fireplace despite the warmth of the June night; the subtle scent of warm embers drifted across the room to Hannah.
Half a dozen gala guests were seated in deep wingback chairs and on a rich brown leather sofa surrounding the hearth, catching up and sipping signature cocktails.
Beyond the lounge, and visible through a wide archway, was the dining room.
From her position at the bar, Hannah could see the tables had been dressed with crisp, layered linens: a charcoal undercloth, a white linen topper and oxblood-banded napkins.
At the centre of each table, small candles had been set afloat in Murano-glass bowls.
Above it all swung a grand chandelier. Dangling from its soft gold arms were blown-glass droplets in the same rich blues as the centrepieces.
‘Your drink.’ The bartender’s low voice drew Hannah back. Her martini sat before her on an LC monogrammed napkin, so thick it practically looked like cloth. She returned her notebook and pen to her clutch.
‘We do have wine, you know,’ said a voice after Hannah had already tipped her martini glass to her lips. She turned. Oh fuck. Bash Beaumont was standing beside her in a crisp Armani tux with a forest green ascot, surely selected to match the club’s décor.
‘How long have you been standing there?’ Hannah accused.
He replied with a smirk. In her heels, Hannah had about an inch on him, and she was surprised to find Bash on the shorter side, a fact that had barely registered in high school when she’d worn only flats – and he’d loomed so large.
He was as fit as ever, though, his jacket expertly tailored to the contours of his biceps and chest; clearly he’d kept up with his trainer.
‘Belvedere is Madison’s latest brand partner,’ he said. ‘We appreciate their sponsorship, but don’t let my bar staff bully you.’
She snorted. That was rich, coming from one of Prescott’s biggest bullies.
‘I was surprised to be invited.’
Bash cocked his head to one side. ‘The events of senior year didn’t have much to do with you and me, did they?’
‘I suppose not,’ she conceded. ‘Though I imagine you read my article?’
Bash laughed, a loud, throaty sound. ‘Personally, I thought it was brilliant. You may not believe me, but I’m not the same boy I was at Prescott. I’ve reformed.’
Hannah’s eyebrows arched. He was right – she did not believe him one little bit. But rehashing a litany of bad behaviour with her host was a sure way to get tossed onto the street, and tragically, she needed to see the night through.
‘Where’s your co-host?’ she asked instead.
Bash’s gaze rose to the round face of the clock above the bar.
‘Madison is fashionably late, nothing new. Henry had a campaign event this afternoon. I imagine they’ll arrive together, with minutes to spare before the welcome address.
’ His eyes trailed from the wall clock to the Rolex Oyster Perpetual on his wrist, an upgrade from the vintage timepiece he’d worn in high school.
As if it might offer a different answer.
‘Which we are set to give together, in fifteen minutes.’
‘Henry Alcott Winslow will be here?’
When Hannah had published ‘New York’s Billionaires: Let Them Eat Dirt’, she’d anticipated a flurry of vitriol from her former classmates – which had arrived right on cue, but she hadn’t cared.
They hadn’t run in the same circles for years.
But what she hadn’t intended was to shine the spotlight on Madison DuPont on the very day her billionaire husband announced his run for mayor.
Not that she had any affection for Henry Alcott Winslow and his chickenshit centre-right platform, but Winslow was a known supporter of several news organisations in New York, and she hadn’t been trying to piss off a major sponsor of the very magazine she wrote for.
Fortunately, he hadn’t pulled his funding yet, but his presence tonight could be a complication for her follow-up article.
The angle would be exclusionary establishments and multi-generational wealth, but for all she knew, Winslow was a member of the Lenox Club.
She’d need to tread carefully, and decorum wasn’t what her boss had in mind.