The first thing I became aware of was the smell.
It wasn't mine. Clean, expensive, with a hint of something woody underneath — cedar, maybe, or sandalwood. Not the rose and vanilla cloud my own bedroom always carried. I blinked once, then twice, staring up at a ceiling that was definitively not the one I'd fallen asleep under for the past eight months. The light coming through the curtains was soft and gray, the kind that belonged to early morning, the kind that gave you no real indication of how late or how early it actually was, and for a brief, merciful second, my mind was completely blank.
Then the weight of last night started pressing itself back into my skull, piece by piece, like evidence being submitted in court.
The bar. The champagne I kept accepting because my glass kept bein
