The party is the kind where the food is decorative and no one actually eats it. I know this because I have been watching the canapé trays for forty minutes, waiting for the right moment. I'm a pastry chef without a kitchen, a tenant two months behind on rent, and a daughter with a mother whose hospital bills have started arriving in envelopes so thick they feel like accusations. I crashed this rooftop event for the food. That's the whole plan. When the lights dim for whatever toast is happening near the bar, I move. I grab a handful of small pastries from an unattended tray in the dark corner near the back wall. My elbow catches something solid — a person, standing completely still where no one should be standing. I stumble. My free hand grabs a lapel to keep from falling, and before my brain catches up with my body, I do the thing that will ruin my life. I kiss him. It lasts one full second before he stops me. Not immediately. One full second, and in that second he doesn't move away. He's very warm, and he smells expensive, and his hand comes up — I feel it near my waist, not touching, hovering — and then it's gone. He pulls back. Just a breath of separation, enough to break contact. The lights come up. The man I kissed is tall and severe in a way that costs money. Dark suit cut like it was made specifically for his shoulders. A jaw sharp enough to be architectural. His eyes are a pale, colorless gray, the kind that doesn't warm when it looks at you, and right now they are looking at me with an expression I cannot read because it is entirely without surprise. He looks like he was expecting this. "I thought you were someone else," I say. It is both true and the most useless sentence I have ever spoken. Two security guards appear at my shoulders before I can back up. I still have the pastries in my hand. One of them is already crumbling. "Sir." One guard reaches for my arm. "Wait." The man says it quietly. The guards go still. He looks at me for a long moment — not at my dress, which is wrong for this party, or the food in my hand, which is proof of exactly what I am. He looks at my face. Like he is confirming something he already knew. "Don't let her leave," he says, and walks away. Roman Ashford, I will learn in approximately four minutes, is the man who owns this building. And he is looking at me like he already knows exactly who I am.