CAUGHT HIM CHEATING, ENGAGED TO HIS ENEMY

My head is the first thing that tells me something is wrong. It's pounding like someone's using it as a drum kit, and when I try to open my eyes, the light coming through the window is so bright it feels personal. I squeeze them shut again and try to piece together where I am, and that's when the second wrong thing hits me. The sheets. They're too soft. Too expensive. My storage-room mattress at home doesn't have a thread count, it has a dent — the one my hip has worn into it over the past eight months. This is not that. I sit up too fast, and the room tilts. It's not a room. It's a penthouse. Floor-to-ceiling windows showing a skyline I don't recognize from this angle, furniture that looks like it costs more than everything I own combined, and me, in the middle of it, wearing a men's dress shirt that is absolutely not mine. Okay. Okay, Emma. Think. Last night comes back in pieces, and none of them are helping. Anastasia's birthday. The slap — God, the slap, my palm still remembers the sting of Brian's face. Walking out of that party in my one good dress while my own family watched me go and didn't say a word. A club. Too many drinks. A man. A man. My stomach drops somewhere south of my knees. I remember dancing. I remember a voice low enough that I had to lean in to hear it over the music, and I remember thinking, for the first time in months, that I felt good. Wanted. Not like the daughter nobody claimed for fifteen years. Not like the girl her own stepsister called a bully in front of two hundred people. I don't remember his name. I definitely don't remember whatever happened after that, though the ache in muscles I don't usually think about is filling in some uncomfortable blanks. That's when I see it. My left hand, resting on the sheets like it belongs to someone else. A ring. Not costume jewelry, not something you'd win at a carnival — a ring that catches the morning light and throws it back at me like it's daring me to look away. I don't look away. I can't. "You're awake." The voice comes from the doorway, and I nearly fall off the bed trying to locate it. He's leaning against the frame like he's been standing there a while, already dressed — not in yesterday's suit, but in a fresh one, like he's had time to shower, get ready, and watch me sleep, in that order. Dark hair, sharper jaw than should be legal, and eyes that are doing absolutely nothing to hide how amused he is by my panic. I know his face. Not from last night — from somewhere else. A magazine cover. A headline my brother James once mentioned at dinner with something between respect and fear in his voice. "Where's my phone," I say, because it's the only sentence I can manage that isn't a scream. He pushes off the doorframe, unhurried, and crosses the room like he owns it. Which, judging by the view, he probably does. "Good morning to you too," he says, and holds out my phone like he's been expecting the request. I snatch it. My hands are shaking, and it takes me three tries to get the passcode right. "Before you spiral," he says, watching me with an expression I can't read yet, one I will learn to hate over the coming weeks for how little it gives away, "you should probably see the video first." "What video." He doesn't answer. He just waits, arms crossed, while I open my messages and find seventeen unread texts from Juanita — no, wait, wrong name, wrong story — from my one actual friend, Priya, all sent in the last two hours, all variations of EMMA CALL ME and IS THIS REAL and one, sent at 6:47 a.m., that just says ???????? I tap the link. It's grainy footage, clearly shot on someone's phone, the kind of shaky vertical video that ends up online within the hour no matter what you do to stop it. It's the club. I recognize the neon behind the bar, the private booth where I definitely should not have been sitting with a stranger. And there I am. On one knee. In front of a table full of people I don't know, holding this same man's hand, saying words that make my stomach fold in on itself as I watch my own mouth move. "Marry me," drunk-me says, laughing, delighted with herself in a way sober-me has never once managed to be. "I'm serious. Marry me right now." And him — this stranger, this man currently standing three feet from me in a two-thousand-dollar suit — he doesn't laugh it off. He doesn't gently redirect the very drunk woman proposing to him in a nightclub, the way any normal person would. He says yes. On camera. Clearly. Calmly. Like it's the easiest thing he's said all week. The video ends. I look up at him, and for one wild second I actually think this might be some kind of elaborate joke, the kind rich people apparently think is funny, and any second now someone's going to jump out and tell me I'm on a hidden camera show I never agreed to be on. Nobody jumps out. "You said yes," I say. It comes out flatter than I mean it to. Flatter than the panic clawing up my throat should allow. "I did." "To a stranger. Proposing to you. While black-out drunk." "You weren't black-out," he says, and there's something almost clinical in the way he says it, like he's correcting a report. "You were coherent. Charming, actually. I don't say yes to things I don't mean, Ms. Lin." The sound of my own last name in his mouth stops me cold. "How do you know my name?" Something shifts behind his eyes — there and gone so fast I almost convince myself I imagined it. He doesn't answer that either. Instead, he reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out his own phone, unlocks it, and turns the screen toward me. It's not the video this time. It's a headline. Already live. Already spreading, if the number underneath it is anything to go by. REID GROUP HEIR ENGAGED — MICHAEL REID'S MYSTERY BRIDE REVEALED AS EMMA LIN, RETURNED DAUGHTER OF LIN FAMILY. Beneath it, a photo I don't remember anyone taking — me, laughing, his hand at my waist, both of us lit up gold under the club lights, looking for all the world like two people who chose each other on purpose.