CHAPTER 1 I Should Have Checked the License Plate. That Was the Detail That Stayed With Me Afterward.

I should have checked the license plate. That was the detail that stayed with me afterward.

Not his face.

Not the smell of expensive leather or rain cooling on tinted glass.Not even the way he looked at me when I woke up in the back seat of his car, one hand pressed to my chest as if my heart were trying to claw its way out.

The license plate.That was where the truth had been sitting the whole time.Plain as prayer.

Plain as a wound.

But that night, I was too tired to read anything.

I had been awake for almost forty hours.

By eleven-thirty, the world had become a smear of streetlights and wet pavement. My uniform from the hotel gala was still clinging to my skin under a borrowed champagne dress that glittered like it belonged to someone with a cleaner life. The dress was not mine. Nothing beautiful ever was. It belonged to a catering agency that made poor girls look invisible inside rich rooms.I had spent six hours carrying silver trays past people who could have paid my tuition with the change in their coat pockets. Before that, I had worked the breakfast shift at the café. Before that, I had studied for a biology exam until the words blurred into gray scratches on the page.My Uber said “black sedan.”

There were three black sedans outside the hotel library entrance.

I chose the one with its back door unlocked.

That was the whole miracle and the whole mistake.

I slid inside, muttered, “Thank God,” and sank into the softest seat I had ever touched.The car smelled like cedar, rain, and a cologne so quiet and expensive it felt rude to breathe near it. Warm amber lights glowed along the doors. Outside, chandeliers from the hotel lobby trembled through the glass like small golden fires.