The champagne is still hissing into the carpet when she walks in barefoot. I'm on my knees with a roll of industrial towels and a spray bottle of something that smells like a hospital, mopping up what three hundred rich people couldn't be bothered to set down before they fled. Eleven at night on the sixty-seventh floor of Vance Holdings. The intern shift no one wants. The shift you take when your mother's chemo bill is forty-one thousand dollars and the scholarship office calls your name like it's a charity. The conference room door clicks. I don't look up. Security sweeps come through every hour. Then I hear the soft slap of bare feet on marble. I lift my head and forget what I was about to say. Seraphina Vance is standing in the doorway with her Louboutins dangling from two fingers, mascara streaked down one cheek like she didn't bother to wipe it before the elevator. Her dress is the color of wet ink, slit to her thigh, and there's a wine stain blooming over her hip like a bruise. Her hair — that famous platinum slick you see on the cover of Forbes — has come loose on one side. She looks like a woman who has just lost a war and is still deciding whether to feel it. She's twenty-nine. CEO since twenty-six. The youngest woman ever to ring the bell at the NYSE. And she is, right now, the most devastatingly assembled person I have ever been in a room with — even falling apart. Especially falling apart. My hands shake. I press them flat against the wet carpet so she won't see. She doesn't notice me. She's looking at the skyline like she wants to throw something through it. Then she does see me. Her whole body locks. "Who let you in here?" "I'm — I'm cleaning. The party. There was a spill." She stares at me for a long second. Something behind her eyes recalibrates. "Lock the door," she says. "Ma'am?" "The door. Lock it." I stand up too fast. My knee cracks. I cross to the panel and key the bolt and the magnetic strip flashes red, sealed. When I turn around she is already at the sideboard, pouring scotch into two crystal glasses with a hand that isn't entirely steady. "Sit down," she says. "I need you to drink with me."