Chapter One #2
He put the hot pink ones in the bag.
He put the Gianvito Rossis on the bed.
I opened my mouth. I closed it. I wasn’t going to say anything about that. I genuinely had no idea what I would say about that.
He closed the bag.
We left at eleven forty-three — I know because I checked his watch when he held the lobby door, since I was operating without my usual infrastructure.
The lobby of the Grant Beverly Hills was marble and fresh lilies, the smell of them hitting the moment the elevator opened, and I crossed it in the Zimmermann and my Louboutins because at least I still had those.
Armando at the front desk watched me go and clucked his tongue, just once, in what I chose to interpret as solidarity.
Outside, a crew cab sat at the curb — not a town car, not a black Escalade, just a dark truck with actual road dirt on the undercarriage and the look of something that had been everywhere twice.
At the top of the steps I glanced back once — forty floors of windows, my ring light still burning somewhere in the upper third — then turned to face the truck.
“You can’t possibly expect me to arrive anywhere in that,” I said.
“We’re not arriving anywhere yet,” he said, and held the passenger door.
I got in.
HE PULLED OFF THE FREEWAY in East LA, which was not the direction of Napa. I read the hand-painted sign in the window and turned to him.
“Why,” I said, “are we at a thrift store?”
“You need different clothes.”
“I have a curated selection, already edited by you personally, currently sitting in a bag in the truck bed.” I gestured behind us. “The truck bed you are walking away from.”
He was already at the door.
I followed him inside because the alternative was sitting alone in a parking lot in East LA in a Zimmermann dress and Louboutins, which was its own kind of problem.
The store smelled like industrial detergent and the previous owners of too many things, and I walked through the door in what was rapidly becoming the most overqualified outfit in the zip code and thought: my glam squad is going to require a formal debrief. Possibly grief counseling.
He was already moving through the racks, pulling items with the focus of someone running a checklist only he could see. He held a pair of dark jeans against his forearm, checking the sizing.
“Those are going to be stiff,” I said.
He put them in the basket.
He found a plain navy sweatshirt two racks over — no logo, no text, the color of absolutely nothing — checked the tag, and added it without breaking stride.
“What kind of trip requires a sweatshirt?” I asked. “In May? In California?”
“The part above five thousand feet.”
I absorbed this. Five thousand feet was not a vineyard.
Five thousand feet was not a digital detox with a waiting list. What I’d packed — silk blouses, string bikinis, two pairs of heels — was wrong in ways that were becoming very clear very fast, and whatever was in this basket was beginning to add up to something I wasn’t going to enjoy.
He came back from the shoe aisle with hiking boots and crouched at my feet to check the sizing. I had spent forty-five minutes this morning preparing to charm a forgettable corporate handler. The man currently holding my foot in both hands was not the category I had prepared for.
“I’ve never hiked in my life,” I said. “I’m not certain I know what it is.”
“You’ll figure it out.”
Near the checkout, a shelving unit held a row of at-home hair dye kits. Rafe paused in front of it, studied my hair for approximately two seconds with the same expression he’d applied to every other logistical problem today, and pulled a box of Clairol Medium Brunette off the shelf.
I took it out of his hands.
“My colorist,” I said, “spent three hours on this. He toned my highlights individually, refreshed my base, and blow-dried each section with the precision of someone who has strong feelings about product distribution and charges accordingly for them. You cannot possibly be suggesting that I cover all of that with a box of—” I turned it over.
“Medium Brunette. This is a war crime. I want to be clear about that.”
“It washes out,” he said.
“That is not the point.” I held the box. “Why do I need to be brunette? Why does my hair matter?”
He held my gaze for a beat — long enough that I could tell he was deciding what to hand over. “Because London Grant is recognizable. And for the next few days, she needs not to be.”
I stood there with a box of drugstore hair dye under fluorescent lighting and let all of that land. The jeans. The sweatshirt and the hiking boots, above five thousand feet, and a face he’d just told me was recognizable to exactly the wrong people.
I put the box in the basket.
Then I picked up the jeans, the sweatshirt, and the boots. “Where are the fitting rooms?”
The woman at the register pointed without glancing up.
The dressing room was barely wider than my shoulders and had clearly hosted worse emergencies than mine.
I pulled on the jeans — stiff, exactly as I’d said they would be — and the sweatshirt and the boots, and when I came out Rafe was at the register, studying the card reader with the concentration of a man actively choosing not to have a reaction.
He paid, picked up the bag, and held the door without a word.
I decided to interpret this as a compliment.
Sebastian’s spirit wept somewhere in the distance.
Back in the truck, I did what I always did with silence: filled it.
“I want you to know this is a massive overreaction,” I said.
“My father has a very limited framework for how media ecosystems work. What reads to him as a PR crisis is engagement. People are interested. That’s the job.
His track record on this is not strong, and I could give you examples, but I am currently operating without my usual resources. ”
He kept his eyes on the road.
I watched his hands on the wheel — large, steady, completely certain of what they were doing — and told myself this was useful information about nothing.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“North.”
“North is a direction.”
“It’s also a destination.”
“That’s not how geography works.” I shifted in the seat. “I’m fairly certain there are laws about removing a person from their residence and driving north without providing further information.”
“You’re welcome to confirm that with your lawyer.”
“You have my phone.”
“I’m aware.”
The cab was more crowded than the outside had suggested. He took up a significant portion of it — the breadth of his shoulders, one hand on the wheel — and my hand went to my collarbone with no particular plan, which was not the kind of information I needed right now.
He glanced over — brief, a fraction of a second — and something moved at the corner of his mouth that didn’t quite become anything. Then his eyes were back on the road.
Every approach I’d tried had produced absolutely nothing, which should have been embarrassing for both of us and was apparently only embarrassing for one of us — which was, separately, annoying — and sometime between the bribery and the failed phone call I’d made the tactical error of actually looking at the angle of his jaw, which was not actionable intelligence.
“I’ll tell you what I can,” he said. “When I can.”
Six words. Most he’d offered since he’d walked through my door.
The city fell away behind us — downtown going small, the hills opening up, the sky getting bigger than LA ever let it be. I was heading north in a thrift store sweatshirt with a man my father had hired to babysit me, no heels, no Bree, and no leverage of any kind.
Something was going to crack eventually. It always did.
I just needed to make sure it was him and not me.