1. Harper
HARPER
The job listings are mocking me.
I know that because I’ve refreshed the same three tabs four times in the last ten minutes and the results haven’t changed.
Hospitality coordinator, New York, minimum five years experience, salary negotiable: meaning they’ll offer whatever insults them least. Event manager, remote, must be willing to travel extensively, which is corporate speak for we’ll pay you like you’re part-time and expect you to live out of a suitcase.
Senior events director, Manhattan only, references required.
I close the laptop.
Then I open it again because closing it felt too much like giving up and I’m not giving up. I’m regrouping. There’s a difference. Regrouping is strategic. Regrouping is what competent adults do when the universe decides to throw everything at them in the same calendar month.
It’s been two weeks since I left New York.
Two weeks since I packed the important things into my car, handed my apartment keys back to my landlord, and drove fourteen hours south to Tampa because Sophia Thorne told me I needed to and I was too exhausted to argue with her.
Two weeks of job searching from the guest room of her penthouse apartment while she runs her boutique, Rosé, from the kitchen island in silk pajamas and makes it look effortless.
Two weeks of waking up in a bed that isn’t mine, in a city that isn’t mine, rebuilding a life that apparently needed to be rebuilt from scratch because Jason and Rebecca Miller decided that their daughter’s career was a reasonable casualty in their latest attempt to squeeze money out of anyone who’d stand still long enough.
My parents. I should say my parents. Though calling them that has always felt like a courtesy I’ve been extending on credit for about twenty-three years now.
The official story, the one I’ve been practicing saying without my voice doing that tight, careful thing it does when I’m trying not to fall apart, is that they showed up.
That’s it. That’s all it took. They found my office address somewhere, the way they always find things when they want something badly enough, and they showed up.
First at my apartment. Then at work. Then they started making noise about missing finances, about access to company accounts, about things that weren’t true but were said loudly enough and in the right ears that HR had to get involved regardless.
My employer believed me. That’s the part I keep having to remind myself of because it doesn’t feel like it when I replay it.
They believed me completely, sat me down, looked me in the eye, and then explained very gently and very professionally that they were going to classify it as a layoff so I could collect unemployment and get out of the situation cleanly without it becoming a larger liability for the company.
They were kind about it. Which somehow made it worse.
I built that career from absolutely nothing.
Scholarships and side jobs and internships and four years at NYU on a combination of financial aid and working thirty hours a week.
I was good at what I did. I was genuinely, measurably good at it and I had the performance reviews to prove it.
And then my parents walked into my office building like a pair of deeply personalized natural disasters and dismantled it in about seventy-two hours.
So here I am. Tampa. Sophia’s guest room. Laptop open to job listings that require three more years of experience than I have and a references list from a company I can’t exactly put on blast without making myself look like the problem.
I refresh the tab again.
Nothing new.
Regrouping.
I hear Sophia before I see her.
Heels on hardwood, quick and deliberate, the specific rhythm of a woman who has decided something and would like everyone else to catch up immediately.
The bedroom door swings open and Sophia Thorne fills the doorway in a white broderie sundress, strappy stiletto sandals that add four inches she doesn’t need, and a wide-brimmed floppy hat that somehow manages to look intentional rather than absurd.
She’s carrying an iced coffee in one hand and has the expression of someone who has been deeply patient for as long as they intend to be.
She looks at me.
Then she looks at the room.
I have been in the middle of packing for approximately two hours, which means the room currently looks like my suitcase exploded and then the explosion had a secondary explosion.
Dresses draped over the desk chair. Jeans in a pile by the window.
A stack of sundresses on the bed next to a stack of tops that I’ve folded and refolded three times without making any decisions.
My teal hardcover cases stand open against the wall, the large one gaping like a very judgmental mouth, because I’ve been adding things and removing things and adding them back for so long that I’ve essentially just been moving my clothes from one surface to another in a very elaborate loop.
Sophia looks back at me.
“Thorne Vineyard, here we…” She pauses. “Why the fuck aren’t you ready yet?”
I groan and close the laptop. “I shouldn’t be going. It’s a bad time.”
“A bad time.”
“I need to figure out how I’m going to cover my half of rent next month and I have approximately forty-seven tabs open with job listings and none of them are calling me back so the responsible thing to do is stay here and—”
“Blah blah.” She blows a raspberry. An actual raspberry, lips and everything, like a woman who did not come here to be reasonable. “I don’t want to hear it, Harper. The car will be here in three hours and you’re not even out of your pajamas yet.”
“I know, Soph, but—”
“Three hours.”
“After everything that’s happened I just think it’s best for me to focus on securing something stable. We said my staying here was going to be temporary but it’s been two weeks already and I haven’t—”
Sophia sets her iced coffee on the dresser with a click that suggests the conversation about this particular subject is over.
She picks up a silk wrap dress from the pile on the chair and starts folding it with the brisk, practiced efficiency of someone who has been packing her own luggage since she was fourteen.
“In this job market,” she says, smoothing the fabric with the flat of her hand, “even Hollywood is scraping the barrel for gigs. You’d have to be a Kardashian to get a job in only two weeks.”
I open my mouth to argue and then close it again.
She’s right. I hate that she’s right. The market is brutal right now in a way that feels almost personal, remote work flooding every major city with applicants who used to be priced out by geography, every other listing replaced with something that says AI-assisted coordination experience preferred, as if my entire profession hasn’t spent the last three years watching itself slowly get automated.
Luxury hospitality is still mostly human but the entry points are shrinking and the competition for them is not.
I watch her fold a club dress with the kind of focused care I could never replicate under pressure and feel the argument leave me in one slow exhale.
“You shouldn’t be able to fold things that fast.”
“Gift.” She reaches for a pair of linen trousers. “You’re a boss bitch with parasitic bio-donors who should go fuck themselves, which means now is the absolute best time to get away, lounge around, sweat out your blowout, and turn your entire demise into wine by coming with me to Bordeaux.”
She says this the way someone else might say let’s get brunch. Casual, settled, already decided.
And she isn’t wrong about that either. God, she’s annoyingly consistent at not being wrong.
I haven’t been to France since the summer after graduation.
Sophia and I did a whole European tour that June, two weeks, seven cities, the kind of trip you take when you’re twenty-two and invincible and convinced that real life starts later.
I’d known about her dad’s vineyard out in Bordeaux even then but Sophia had been allergic to anything resembling a family obligation that summer.
Amsterdam had been calling her name in neon lights and a vineyard in the south of France, however beautiful, had not stood a chance against that particular siren song.
So we’d kept moving. I don’t regret it. But I’ve always been a little curious about the place she’d skip entire countries to avoid feeling obligated to visit.
Sophia opens the large teal case and starts placing things inside with terrifying efficiency.
My vintage-style hardshell set has always been one of my better purchases, the kind of luggage that suggests I have my life together even when I absolutely do not, structured cases with brass hardware and a silhouette that belongs in an old black-and-white photograph of a woman boarding an ocean liner.
Sophia handles them like she’s personally offended by how long they’ve been sitting unpacked.
“You’re not listening to the part where I actually need you,” she says, flipping open the carry-on case and starting on my tops.
“This isn’t charity, Harper. I need help.
I need someone in that room with me who has actual industry instincts and enough tact not to let me blow up a business meeting because my dad said something infuriating and I forgot to use my indoor voice. ”
I sit up a little. “What business meeting?”
“I’m pitching Dad the flagship physical location for the boutique.
I want it at Thorne Estates. The vineyard already pulls the exact clientele I’m targeting and there’s space on the property that’s been sitting underutilized for two years and I have a whole presentation but you know how he gets and I need someone with me who can—” she pauses and tilts her head, “you know. Do the thing you do.”
“The thing I do.”
“The thing where you walk into a room and immediately know what everyone needs to hear and say it without it sounding like you practiced it. The thing that made you exceptional at your job before certain biological liabilities decided to torpedo it.”
I stare at her. She’s moving through my pile of sundresses with the focus of a woman on a deadline.
“Sophia. You don’t need my illuminating wit. You’re perfectly capable of making that pitch on your own.”
“Of course I am.” She doesn’t look up. “But I’m better with you there. And you need France. And France needs you. And the vineyard has a pool and an actual chef and approximately one thousand bottles of wine, and you have been sitting in my guest room in the same pajamas for four days.”
I look down at my pajamas. They are, in fact, the same ones I’ve been wearing since Tuesday.
“You don’t need my illuminating wit,” I say again, with less conviction. “You just need a human shield.”
Sophia grins without looking up. “Luggage ninja says what?”
She closes the large case with a firm click, spins the combination lock, and tips it upright in one motion.
I watch her move to the medium case, crack it open, and start on my shoes and casual pieces with the same zero-hesitation energy.
By the time I’ve registered that she’s already packed approximately sixty percent of my wardrobe, she’s zipping the second case shut.
I stand up.
I’m not even sure I made a decision. My body just apparently concluded that the argument was over and started moving toward the wardrobe on its own.
I grab the rest of what’s left on the bed and start loading the carry-on case.
Sophia picks up the large case and the medium one and starts rolling them toward the door.
“That’s what I thought,” she says over her shoulder.
“I’m doing this under protest.”
“Duly noted. Shower first, then help me move the rest to the foyer. Lorenzo and Raphael are picking us up.”
I pause. “Raphael?”
Sophia hesitates for exactly half a second, which is how I know the answer is coming with an agenda attached. “His best friend? You’ve met him. Thirty-five, very attractive, very single.”
There it is.
“Sophia.”
“Harper.”
“I’m not—”
“He’s driving us to the airport. That’s it.
No one is asking you to elope.” She gives me a look that suggests she would absolutely love it if I eloped.
“Just shower. Wear something that isn’t pajamas.
And maybe be vaguely human for the next three weeks.
” She disappears through the door with my luggage and I stand in the middle of the now mostly empty room feeling like I’ve been smoothly and professionally managed.
I grab the carry-on.
Fine. France. Three weeks. Whatever.
I haul the last of my cases to the foyer, where Sophia’s luggage is already stacked with the organized confidence of someone who has been packed since yesterday. I add mine to the collection and stand there for a moment looking at the assembled pile of our combined lives in transit.
Sophia’s voice carries from down the hall, warm and bright the way it gets when she’s on a call she actually wants to take.
“Hey, get dressed before the guys get here!” she calls. Then a pause, muffled, and her tone shifts into something looser. “Hey, Uncle Mad Max! Yeah, we’re just finishing up…”
Her voice trails off as her bedroom door clicks shut behind her.
I stand in the foyer surrounded by luggage.
Uncle Mad Max.
I turn that over for a second. Sophia has always referred to the men in her dad’s circle as uncles in the casual, non-biological way that people do when someone has been present their whole life without a cleaner word for it.
I’ve heard about them in the abstract. Killian’s people.
The ones who’ve been around since before Sophia was old enough to remember.
But Uncle Mad Max is a new one.
I head toward the bathroom to shower, already cataloguing what I know, which is essentially nothing, and feeling the specific low-level unease of walking toward something I haven’t had time to research.
Who the hell is Uncle Mad Max?