WALK OF SHAME

(Rosa's POV)

The sunlight hit me like a punishment.

I squeezed my eyes shut, then opened them slowly. White ceiling. Floor-to-ceiling windows.

Silk sheets. The expensive kind. Black.

I sat up too fast and immediately regretted it. My head throbbed like something inside it was trying to get out. My body ached in ways that were specific and came with memories attached, warm hands, gray eyes.

I pressed both palms to my face.

The other side of the bed was empty. Cold. Like no one had been there for hours.

A knock at the door. It opened before I could say anything. A hotel maid in a neat uniform stepped in carrying fresh towels, saw me clutching a silk sheet to my chest, and didn't even blink.

"Good morning, Mrs. Gosling. Can I get you anything?"

I stared at her. "Mrs. Gosling?"

"Mr. Gosling left early for his flight back to New York." She set the towels down with the practiced ease of someone who had seen everything. "He said to tell you checkout is at noon."

My eyes went to the nightstand.

A folded piece of hotel stationery. My name wasn't on it. Nothing warm was on it. Just seven words in clean, precise handwriting that told me everything I needed to know about the man who wrote them.

Annulment papers will be couriered. – D. Gosling.

I read it twice. Then I set it back down very carefully, like if I was gentle enough with it, the humiliation would hurt less.

It didn't.

The maid lingered near the door. "You okay, honey?"

"I—" My voice cracked on the single syllable. I cleared my throat. "What's his first name? The man who stayed here."

Something shifted in her expression. Something gentle and a little sad. "Daniel Gosling. He owns this hotel." She paused. "And about a hundred others."

I grabbed my phone from the nightstand with hands that were not steady.

Daniel Gosling.

The search results loaded in under two seconds. Forbes cover. Another Forbes cover. Business articles with headlines like Gosling International Expands Into Asian Markets and The Coldest Man in Real Estate and Billionaire at 30: How Daniel Gosling Built an Empire.

The photos. Sharp gray eyes. Strong jaw. Black hair perfectly styled. Devastatingly handsome in a way that looked expensive and untouchable and absolutely nothing like a man who should have been sitting alone at a hotel bar at eleven o'clock on a Thursday.

Net worth: $8.7 billion.

"Oh my God."

I made it to the bathroom in time before I threw up everything in my stomach.

When I came back out, pale and shaking and deeply unhappy with every decision I had made in the last twenty-four hours, the maid handed me a glass of water without comment.

"Rough night?" she asked softly.

"I married him." The words fell out flat. "Last night. We were drunk and I didn't — I didn't know who he was. I didn't know anything about him."

Her eyes went wide. "Mija."

"He left me a note." I looked down at the glass in my hands. "About annulment papers. Like I'm a — a problem his legal team needs to process." I laughed, and it came out slightly broken. "I went to Las Vegas to prove I wasn't boring. This is what I got."

She put a hand on my arm. "The annulment will fix everything. Happens all the time here."

I nodded like I believed her.

But I could still feel the exact weight of his hand at the small of my back. The way he had kissed me against the elevator wall. The way he had held me afterward.

That hadn't felt like a mistake.

That had felt like the most real thing that had happened to me in years.

And he had left me a seven-word note and disappeared.

My wedding dress was crumpled on the floor where it had landed last night. My mother's dress. I picked it up carefully, shook it out, folded it as best I could with hands that wouldn't stop trembling.

The cheap wedding band caught the light when I reached for my phone. I grabbed it with my other hand and pulled.

It didn't move.

I pulled harder. My finger was swollen, tender, refusing to cooperate, and the ring just sat there like it had opinions about being removed. I twisted and yanked until the skin around it went red and then painful, and still nothing.

"Of course," I said to no one.

The maid helped me call a cab. She gave me a bottle of water for the road and squeezed my hand at the door. I walked out of Daniel Gosling's penthouse suite in a crumpled wedding dress, a borrowed jacket, and a wedding ring I couldn't remove, carrying exactly nothing except my phone and what remained of my pride.

Which was not much.

The cab to the airport cost forty dollars I didn't have. The flight to New York cost the last available credit on my last working card.

I called Sophie from the gate.

"I did something insane," I said the moment she picked up.

A beat of silence. "How insane?"

"Significantly."

I told her everything on the phone, my voice dropping low in the crowded terminal.

Sophie was quiet for a long moment after I finished.

"He just left you a note," she said.

"Seven words. Not even a full sentence, really."

"Rosa—"

"I know." My throat tightened. "I know. I was hurt and drunk and trying to prove something stupid and I made the worst decision of my life. I know that."

"You were human," Sophie said, firm and immediate. "You were in pain and you did something reckless. That's not a character flaw, that's just — that's being a person."

"I slept with a billionaire stranger who legally married me and then caught a 6 AM flight home." I pressed my fingers against my eyes. "That's not being a person, Sophie. That's being a cautionary tale."

"You're coming home. That's all that matters right now." Her voice softened. "The annulment will come. You'll sign it. You'll move forward. This is just a really bad chapter."

I looked down at the ring that wouldn't come off my finger.

This is just a really bad chapter.

I wanted to believe her. I did. But I kept thinking about the way Daniel's face had looked in the dark when he said I don't believe in regrets. Only consequences.

Like he'd already accepted that his life was something that happened to him rather than something he got to choose.

I understood that feeling more than I wanted to.

Sophie opened the bakery door before I even knocked.

She took one look at me and pulled me into a hug so hard I felt it in my spine.

"I'm a disaster," I said against her shoulder.

"You're human." She pulled me inside, sat me at the small kitchen table above the bakery, and put the kettle on without asking.

She set tea in front of me and sat down across the table, hands wrapped around her own mug. "The annulment papers will come. You'll sign them. This will all be over."

I turned the mug in a slow circle on the table. The steam rose between us.

"What if I'm pregnant?"

The words came out before I'd fully decided to say them. Like they'd been sitting at the back of my throat the whole flight home, waiting.

Sophie went completely still. The teacup paused halfway to her mouth.

"Did you use protection?" she asked carefully.

I shook my head. I couldn't quite meet her eyes.

The silence that followed was the specific kind that comes when two people are looking at the same terrifying possibility and neither one wants to be the first to name it out loud.

"One disaster at a time," Sophie said finally. Her voice was steady but her face had gone pale. "You're here. You're safe. We will figure this out together, whatever it is."