*Chapter One

The city hummed beneath a gauze of smog and starlight, a place where reputations were currency and nobody lived more than thirty minutes from anybody who mattered. She lived in the hills, he lived on the flats, and between them, the boulevards stretched like fraying ribbons of possibility. His reputation was good—almost too good, the kind that made you suspicious and hopeful in equal measure. She found herself hoping they had more in common than just a zip code and a mutual agent.

She imagined telling him to drop it all. The meetings, the calls, the careful choreography of a life built on optics. Just call me, she’d think, staring at her phone as if she could will it to ring. And when it did—when his voice came through, low and a little hesitant—she pictured him saying he wanted to meet her family. Not the glossy, red-carpet version, but the real one: the Sunday dinners, the noisy cousins, the father who still called her by her childhood nickname. The thought tightened something in her chest.

What are you doing to me now?

She could hear him talking about his dad—the way his voice would drop, how he'd describe the old anger that rattled through their house like a trapped animal. He’d scare you and your brother, she knew, until you felt you needed saving. And she would let him in, too, on all her bad decisions—the ones she’d never told anyone, the ones that kept her awake at 3 a.m. with a sour taste in her mouth. She knew, somehow, that he would make them feel less terrible the second he listened. Just by listening.

What are you doing to me now?

Guest came out of the blue like that—no warning, no slow build, just a sudden gravitational pull she hadn’t been prepared for. She never could have seen him coming. And that was the terrifying, thrilling part: he was everything she’d wanted, even when she didn’t know she’d been wanting anything at all.

She wondered if he knew. If he could tell she was losing—not her mind, not her grip, but some careful version of herself she’d spent years constructing. She was going down without a fight, and she didn’t know how he did it. How he made her feel seen and undone in the same breath. He said they shared a brain, apologized for it like it was a burden, but she took it as a compliment. It made her really nervous.

What are you doing to me now?

He’d send her every song that kept him up from sleeping, and she’d play them on repeat until the lyrics were etched into her bones. She bet she could recite them all, note for note, word for word. She wouldn’t forget the feeling of staying up with him, despite the space between them—the miles, the time zones, the noise of their separate lives. She’d never felt this close to anyone. What if he was her weakness?

What if he was everything?

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What are you doing to me now?

She whispered it into the dark of her bedroom, the city flickering below like a thousand tiny promises. He came out of the blue like that—and she never could have seen him coming.

She thought he might be everything she’d wanted.

And that was the scariest part of all.*