Chapter 3
First Impressions
“When he says nothing — but you feel like he heard everything”
SLOANE
I had one rule: don’t develop feelings for any of them.
By day two, I was already making a list of reasons to break it.
The morning had started promisingly enough — I’d woken up at 6 a.m. without an alarm, which I was choosing to attribute to adjustment rather than the forty-five minutes of pre-dawn insomnia I’d spent replaying how he’d said “We’ll see” — that low rumble that sounded like whiskey and bad decisions.
The production team had scheduled “Connection Sessions” for today — their euphemism for speed dates with a camera crew.
Five minutes per contestant, ten contestants total, fifty minutes of my life I would never get back while men tried to convince me they were capable of basic human decency.
The schedule had been slipped under my door on cream cardstock with embossed gold lettering, as if fancy stationery could disguise that this was essentially Hinge with better lighting and a craft services table.
I’d read through the list of names twice, telling myself I was memorizing them for professional reasons and not because I was looking for one name in particular. Rhys was scheduled last. Because of course he was.
Tessa found me in the Queen’s Suite forty minutes before filming, dressed in the navy wrap dress wardrobe had selected and spiraling — the catering (cucumber sandwiches for breakfast, as if we were at a funeral for joy), the exact shade of lipstick I was wearing (was “Ambitious Rose” trying too hard?
Definitely trying too hard). I’d also changed earrings twice and was considering a third swap, a behavior that in any true crime podcast would later be described as “the first sign that the balance was off.”
“You’re doing the thing.” Tessa settled onto the velvet settee with her tablet, perpetually amused, as if she’d seen far worse disasters. “The thing where you obsess over irrelevant details because you’re actually nervous about a different thing.”
“I’m not nervous.” I touched my lipstick in the mirror, then immediately regretted drawing attention to it. “I’m strategically concerned about color theory.”
“Mmm.” Tessa’s mmm could convey disbelief, amusement, and judgment in a single syllable — a feat most people needed a full discourse to accomplish.
“So it has nothing to do with the architect who refused to kneel last night and then stared at you like you were a physics problem he was trying to solve?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You’re blushing.”
“I’m not blushing. I’m flushed. From the— from the aggressive sunshine.”
Tessa smiled the smile of a woman filing this conversation away for future blackmail. “Connection Sessions start in thirty. Julian Pierce is first. Try not to fall asleep while he lists his accomplishments.”
Julian Pierce was exactly as advertised.
He sat across from me in the sunlit conservatory they’d converted into a speed-dating arena, all sharp cheekbones and practiced polish, and told me about his career in finance, his reading habits (“mostly non-fiction, I find fiction somewhat inefficient” — about books, but honestly it applied to his entire personality), his hobbies (golf, wine tasting, golf again), and his ideal relationship delivered with the cadence of someone reciting a LinkedIn bio out loud.
He was handsome as a luxury condo is architecturally impressive: clean lines, great lighting, zero soul.
Talking to Julian was like texting with ChatGPT — responsive, eerily smooth, and utterly missing whatever makes a person worth talking to at two in the morning.
He asked about my dreams. He nodded at appropriate intervals.
I found myself wondering what it would be like to kiss him and registered nothing — no spark, no curiosity, no heat — which at least saved me some time.
“I believe,” Julian leaned forward with calculated intimacy as our five minutes wound down, “that the key to any successful relationship is attention to detail. I pride myself on being an excellent listener.”
“What’s my favorite color?”
He blinked — the first genuine expression I’d seen on his face, a flicker of confusion disrupting the careful composition of his features. “I’m sorry?”
“My favorite color. I mentioned it yesterday during the introductions.”
The silence stretched between us — a rubber band about to snap. His eyes went slightly blank — a browser loading a page that no longer existed. “Blue.” A beat too late. “You seem like someone who appreciates blue.”
It was purple. The purple of twilight just before the stars come out, which I’d described in embarrassing detail while Mason spilled wine on the tablecloth and Derek watched me with that unsettling intensity of his. Julian had been three seats away, nodding along like he was absorbing every word.
“Close enough.” I meant the opposite. Julian nodded like he’d passed the test — confident he’d never considered the possibility of not having all the answers.
Behind him, through the conservatory windows, the garden was visible where I’d seen Rhys stare at the sky last night.
I wondered if he’d have gotten the color right. I already knew the answer.
Mason was a disaster.
He arrived six minutes late, apologizing before he’d even fully entered the room, his shirt untucked on one side and his hair staging a rebellion that suggested he’d either just woken up or survived a minor explosion.
He tripped over the threshold, caught himself on a decorative column, knocked over a vase of roses someone had placed there for aesthetic purposes, and spent the first ninety seconds of our five minutes reassembling the floral arrangement while simultaneously introducing himself.
“I am so sorry” — approximately the twelfth time — cramming roses back into the vase with the frantic energy of someone defusing a bomb.
“I swear I’m not usually this— I mean, I am usually this, but I’m better at hiding it?
And the alarm didn’t go off, or it did but I apparently sleep through alarms now, which is a development I’m going to need to discuss with my therapist—”
“Mason.”
“—and I couldn’t find my other shoe, which — shoes don’t just walk off on their own, that’s the whole point of shoes—”
“Mason.”
He looked up from the roses, equal parts mortified and hopeful. “Yeah?”
“Breathe.”
He breathed. Shaky, a little panicked, but it was breathing, a start. “Right. Breathing. I can do breathing. It’s basically my main skill.”
I laughed — a genuine, startled sound that had nothing to do with performance. Mason was so catastrophically human it was impossible not to find him endearing. He was just trying to survive the next three and a half minutes without additional property damage.
“Tell me a real thing.” I leaned back in my chair. “Not your job or your hobbies or your relationship goals. A real thing.”
Mason’s face went through several expressions before settling into a genuine grin.
“My mom calls me every Sunday at exactly 4 p.m. and asks the same three questions: have I eaten enough vegetables, have I called my grandmother, and have I met anyone nice. Every week I tell her yes, yes, and not yet. And every week she says ’Well, there’s always next Sunday.
’” He paused. “I really wanted to call her this Sunday with a different answer.”
My heart performed an inconvenient maneuver. “Mason—”
“Not like that,” he added quickly, cheeks flushing. “I mean, you’re great, obviously, but I’m pretty sure you’re not— I’m not— we’re not—” He gestured vaguely between us. “I just meant a nice person. In general. As a concept.”
I reached across and squeezed his hand. “You just did.”
His smile was like sunrise breaking through clouds. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. Call your mom.”
Derek Hoffman made my skin crawl.
On paper, he was perfect — attentive, charming, with dark good looks and a way of speaking that turned each sentence into a compliment designed for you.
He maintained eye contact that was just this side of intense without crossing into uncomfortable.
He was the human equivalent of a five-star Yelp review that you knew was fake but couldn’t quite prove — a guy your group chat would unanimously vote “hot but off.”
And yet.
“You’re different from what I expected.” Derek leaned in about three minutes into our session, close and intimate.
“The woman on TV seems so confident. Untouchable. But sitting here with you now…” He paused, scanning my face with what might have been admiration or might have been calculation.
“I can see the vulnerability underneath. The real you.”
It was exactly the observation a woman might melt over — the implication that he could see past the armor to the softness beneath.
Maybe if he’d said it differently, less smoothly, I would have believed him.
Instead, I felt like a mouse being watched by a cat who hadn’t decided yet whether to pounce.
“The real me,” I said carefully, “is exactly what you see on TV. I’m not hiding anything.”
“Everyone hides.” His smile widened, and for a beat I caught a flicker behind the charm — sharp, hungry, nothing to do with romance. “That’s what makes people worth studying.”
I made a mental note to tell Tessa that Derek needed watching — surveillance usually reserved for exes who still followed you on every platform and liked your photos at 2 a.m. Then I turned on my television face and counted down the remaining seconds.