Chapter One: The Worst Morning

Layla’s POV

Hangovers are a bitch.

Now add a vicious housekeeper and you’ve got a hangover crafted by the devil himself.

I heard Mrs. Stavrakos before I saw her — the sharp click of her heels against the hallway floor, purposeful and unforgiving, the particular rhythm of a woman who had decided that my suffering was not her concern and my comfort was not her problem.

She came storming into my bedroom at what I can only describe as an ungodly hour of the morning. The curtains were yanked open with the enthusiasm of someone who had been waiting all night for the opportunity. Light — cruel, merciless, entirely unnecessary light — flooded the room and hit me directly in the face.

I groaned and pulled the pillow over my head.

It was removed immediately.

“Miss Layla.” Her voice carried the particular energy of a woman who had raised difficult people her entire career and had run out of patience for all of them. “Up. Now.”

“Mrs. Sk—”

“Now.”

I don’t know exactly how long it took her to get me from the bed to the bathroom. The timeline is blurry in the way that only very bad mornings can be — fragments of protest on my part, fragments of complete indifference on hers, and then the shock of cold air as she steered me through the bathroom door and deposited me directly into the shower.

Fully clothed.

The water hit me like a verdict.

“Figure the rest out yourself,” she said, and closed the bathroom door behind her.

I stood under the shower for a long moment, blinking water out of my eyes, still in last night’s dress, trying to remember exactly what series of decisions had led me here.

Hailey. Her birthday. The rooftop bar in Midtown with the signature cocktails that tasted like fruit juice and hit like a freight train. The dancing — there had been a lot of dancing. The driver taking us  home sometime around two in the morning, both of us singing something neither of us knew the words to.

Yesterday had been Friday. Hailey’s birthday came once a year. These were facts that I had used to justify many decisions over the course of the previous evening, and they were facts that were doing very little for me now.

I peeled off the wet dress and left it in the corner of the shower where it belonged, and then I stood under the hot water and let it do what hot water was designed to do — ease the tension from my muscles, wash the night away, fill the bathroom with the kind of steam that made the world feel slightly less brutal.

It’s only a successful shower if the water is hot enough to fog up every surface in the room. That is a personal standard and I stand by it.

By the time I stepped out, the bathroom was so full of steam I could barely see the mirror. I found this deeply satisfying.

I had just wrapped myself in a towel when I heard the knock.

I opened the bedroom door. One of the housemaids stood in the hallway, her hands clasped, her expression carefully neutral in the way of someone delivering news they had not asked to be responsible for.

“Good morning, Miss Layla.”

I nodded. The hangover was still sitting directly behind my eyes, making speech feel ambitious.

“Your grandfather is asking for you downstairs.”

Of course he was.

I nodded again and closed the door.

Mrs. Sk had told him. She always told him. This was the arrangement — she kept the house running and she kept Derick Thompson informed of everything that happened within its walls, including and especially the parts I would have preferred to keep private.

Grandpa had strong feelings about drinking. About clubbing. About young adults losing their inhibitions and their dignity in the same evening. He was a strict man, a religious man, the kind of man who had built an empire on discipline and expected the people around him to reflect that discipline back at him.

He was also the only family I had left in the world. Which was the main reason I was already moving toward the walk-in closet instead of getting back into bed.

I pulled on my brown Versace hoodie and matching trousers — comfort over presentation this morning, a decision I was making consciously and without apology. Grandpa didn’t like to be kept waiting. I had learned that at sixteen, the year I came to live with him, and I had not forgotten it since.

On the way out I spotted the painkillers on top of my watch drawer — a glass of water beside them, placed there with the precise care of someone who disapproved of everything that had made them necessary but was going to make sure I survived anyway.

Mrs. Sk.

I took the painkillers, drank the entire glass of water, and headed downstairs.

Grandpa’s study was exactly as it always was — immaculate, serious, smelling faintly of the leather-bound books that lined three walls from floor to ceiling. He sat behind his desk the way he sat behind everything — with the upright, unhurried authority of a man who had spent seventy years making decisions and had never once doubted that the right to make them belonged to him.

He looked up when I came in.

“You look a mess,” he said.

I said nothing. This was true and we both knew it and adding words to the situation was not going to improve it.

“Why did you get yourself drunk last night?”

“It was Hailey’s birthday, Grandpa.” I sat down in the chair across from his desk — the chair I had sat in a hundred times, for a hundred different versions of this conversation. “I’m sorry for drinking that much.”

He nodded once. The nod of a man who had registered the apology and filed it and was already moving on to the thing he actually wanted to discuss.

“I have something important to tell you,” he said.

His expression had shifted. Not softer — Grandpa did not do soft — but more deliberate. More careful. The expression of a man who had been carrying something for a long time and had decided that today was the day to set it down.

Something in my stomach tightened.

“Okay,” I said.

He folded his hands on the desk. “Years ago,” he began, “the company went through a serious crisis. The kind that could have ended everything. I needed help and I went to Alan Lawson for it.”

I knew the name. Everyone in New York knew the name. The Lawson family was the kind of institution that existed in the background of every major business conversation in the city — old money, enormous influence, the particular kind of power that didn’t need to announce itself.

“Alan helped me,” Grandpa continued. “But Alan Lawson has never done anything in his life without an agreement attached to it. He helped me on one condition.” He paused. His eyes stayed steady on my face. “Our families would be merged. Through marriage.”

The room was very quiet.

“His grandson,” Grandpa said. “And my granddaughter.”

I stared at him.

“We signed the contract when you were both teenagers,” he said. “The arrangement has always been in place. And now it is time to honour it.” He held my gaze without flinching, without apology, with the complete calm of a man who had made this decision a decade ago and had never once questioned it. “You are going to marry Ian Lawson, Layla. That is not a discussion. That is what is going to happen.”

The silence that followed was the loudest I had ever sat in.

My mouth opened.

One word came out.

“What.”

***

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— Ruthie ❤️