Lilian I did not want to be here. The party stretched across the top floor of a glass building that overlooked the city, all soft gold light and clinking glasses, and every single person in the room looked like they belonged on a magazine cover. I stood near the window with a drink I had not touched, wearing a dress Anne had forced on me an hour ago, tugging at the hem every few minutes because it felt one size too small for the version of me that existed these days. I felt like an intruder in my own skin. "You look like you are about to bolt," Anne said, appearing beside me with two glasses of something pink and sparkling. "I am about to bolt." "You are not. You promised me one hour." She pressed a glass into my hand and studied my face the way she had been studying it for three weeks now, careful, watching for cracks. "One hour of pretending you are a person who goes outside and has fun." I almost laughed. Almost. Three weeks ago my ex had stood in the middle of the music hall, in front of half my program, and told everyone exactly why he had cheated on me, loud enough that even the professors heard every word. I had not fully recovered from the humiliation, and Anne knew it, which was why she had dragged me here instead of letting me spend another Friday night alone with my violin and the curtains drawn. "Fine," I said. "One hour. Then I am going home to practice." "You are always going home to practice." She looped her arm through mine anyway, smiling like she had already won. "One day I will get you to actually enjoy yourself." "Tonight is definitely that day." "That is the spirit." She laughed and then her gaze slid past my shoulder, and her whole face changed. "Oh. Oh, look who just walked in." I turned before I could stop myself. A wave moved through the crowd the way it does when someone important enters a room, heads turning, voices dropping, phones lifting halfway before people remembered to look casual about it. And there he was. Drake. I knew the name before I ever cared to learn it, because it was plastered across billboards and the side of race cars and the mouths of every sports commentator in the country. He walked in like the room already belonged to him, sponsors trailing at his shoulders, a woman from some network trying to get a word in edgeways, cameras flashing at the edges of the crowd. He was not smiling. He looked bored, almost annoyed, like the whole party was an obligation he intended to survive rather than enjoy. And then he looked at me. I don't know why. There were at least two hundred people in that room and somehow his eyes landed on me and stayed there, across the whole width of the floor, long enough that my skin started to prickle. I expected him to look away first. People like him always looked away first, once they had confirmed you were not worth the attention. He did not. "Lilian." Anne's voice came from very far away. "Lilian, he is staring at you." "I noticed," I muttered, and finally broke the stare myself, turning back toward the window like the city view had suddenly become the most interesting thing in the world. "Do you know who that is?" "Everyone knows who that is." "He never looks at anyone like that." Anne leaned closer, lowering her voice like she was sharing a secret. "I have been to three of these things with Michael and Drake barely says two words to a single person who is not on his team. But he was looking at you like you had said something insulting to him and he was still trying to decide if he should be offended." "Maybe I have that effect on arrogant men," I said. "It is a gift." She laughed, and for a moment I let myself believe the night might actually be survivable. It was not. An hour later, weaving through the crowd toward the bathroom, I had my head down, texting Anne to tell her I was ready to leave, when I walked straight into a wall of a man and felt cold liquid soak through the front of my dress. "Watch where you are going," a low voice said, more irritated than apologetic. I looked up and my stomach dropped. It was him. Drake. This close, he was worse: a sharper jaw, colder eyes, the kind of face that made you angry just for being that good-looking without even trying. "Me?" I said, snatching a napkin off a nearby table and pressing it against the ruined fabric. "You are the one who was not looking where you were going." "I was standing still. You walked into me." "I was walking in a straight line. You are the one who does not know how to give people space." Something flickered across his face, surprise maybe, like nobody had spoken to him that way in a long time. His jaw tightened. "You should be more careful," he said, his voice flat and final, like he was ending a conversation with an employee rather than a person. That flatness did something to me. It cracked something open that had already been cracked three weeks ago in front of a room full of people who had laughed at me. My throat tightened and I hated it, hated that his indifference could reach the same bruise my ex had left there. "You should try being less of yourself," I snapped, "for even five minutes. It might do the world some good." He did not answer right away, and for a second I thought I saw something shift behind his eyes, but I did not wait to find out what it was. I turned and walked away, weaving through the crowd with my ruined dress and my burning face, and I did not look back once. I found Anne by the elevators and told her I was leaving, and she did not argue, she just grabbed her coat and followed me out without a single question. We were almost at the doors when I saw him. Not Drake. Someone else. A guy near the far wall, sketchbook tucked under one arm even here, dark curls falling over his forehead as he laughed at something one of his friends said. Noah. I had spent an entire semester finding excuses to walk past the art studio just to catch a glimpse of him bent over a canvas, I had memorized the exact way he held a pencil between two fingers, had never once worked up the nerve to say more than three words to him. He did not look up as I passed. He did not know I existed, not really, not the way I existed for him in my head every single day. I pushed through the doors into the cool night air and did not stop walking until we reached the car. Anne slid into the passenger seat beside me, quiet for a moment, and then she glanced back toward the building through the window. "Lilian," she said slowly. "Drake just walked outside. He is standing by the entrance and he is watching you get into this car right now."

Lilian. I did not think about him. That was what I told myself the next morning, standing in the practice room with my violin under my chin, the sheet music for my recital piece propped in front of me. I did not think about broad shoulders or cold eyes or a voice flat enough to cut glass. I thought about Bach. I thought about the third movement, the one I still had not gotten quite right, and nothing else. I played the first phrase and stopped. Played it again and stopped again. On the third try I realized I had been staring at the same four bars for almost ten minutes without actually hearing a single note in my head. "This is ridiculous," I muttered, setting the bow down. My phone buzzed on the stand. Anne. "Lunch? I need details." I did not want to give her details, mostly because I did not have any that made sense, but I also did not trust myself alone in a practice room with my brain circling the same square inch of memory over and over, so I grabbed my coat and met her at the small café across from the conservatory twenty minutes later. "So," Anne said, sliding into the booth across from me, "he watched you leave. He stood outside in the cold and watched your car pull away. That is not nothing, Lilian." "It is nothing. He was probably annoyed I spilled his drink on myself and wanted to make sure I was actually leaving." "You spilled nothing on yourself. He spilled on you." "Details." Anne gave me a look over the top of her menu, the kind that said she was not buying a single word of it. "I asked Michael about him last night." My stomach did something unpleasant and small. "I did not ask you to do that." "I know you did not ask. I did it anyway, because that is what best friends are for." She set the menu down, clearly pleased with herself. "Michael said Drake does not come to those parties. Ever. He shows up for the mandatory sponsor stuff and leaves within the hour. Last night he stayed almost two hours." "That means nothing." "He also said Drake does not talk to people at those things. Not really. He stands in a corner with his team and answers questions in one sentence and leaves. He does not linger. He definitely does not follow anyone outside." I picked at the edge of my napkin, tearing a small strip off the corner without meaning to. "Maybe he was having an off night." "Or maybe," Anne said, leaning forward, "you made an impression." "I made him spill a drink on me and then insulted him in front of half the room. That is not the kind of impression people usually chase after." "You clearly do not know men like Drake." She stole a fry from my plate, entirely unrepentant. "Men like that get told yes their entire lives. You told him no without even trying. That is rare currency." I did not answer, because I did not have a good answer, and because some small, traitorous part of me was still thinking about the way his jaw had tightened right before I walked away, like I had actually managed to get under all that expensive, polished indifference. I hated that part of me a little. We finished lunch and I walked back to the conservatory alone, determined to lose myself back in the third movement and forget the entire conversation had happened. I made it as far as the front hallway before I noticed the crowd gathered near the announcement board, students clustered together, whispering. "What is going on?" I asked, edging closer. A girl from my ensemble class turned around, practically vibrating with excitement. "They are renovating the west wing. New practice rooms, new recital hall, state-of-the-art everything. It is fully funded." "Funded by who?" She pointed at the flyer pinned to the board, and I felt the floor tilt slightly under my feet before I even read the name printed at the bottom in bold, confident letters. Apex Racing. Drake's team. Of course. Of course, the one place I went to escape from everything, the one space that had always belonged entirely to me and my music, now had his name stitched into its foundation. I stood there staring at the flyer until someone bumped my shoulder apologizing, and I mumbled something back and walked away without really seeing where I was going. "It does not mean anything," I told myself out loud, alone in the elevator. "It is a business decision. It has nothing to do with me." I almost believed it. For the rest of the week I threw myself into practice with a kind of ferocity I had not managed since before the breakup, arriving early, leaving late, running the same passages until my fingers ached and my mind finally, blessedly, went quiet. I did not think about him. I told Anne so at least three times a day, and she stopped arguing with me out loud, though the look on her face said everything her mouth did not. It almost worked. Then on Thursday evening, my phone buzzed while I was packing up my violin case, an email notification lighting up the screen. I almost ignored it, assuming it was another mass announcement about the renovation, but something made me open it. The sender line read Apex Racing, Executive Office. My hands went still on the clasp of my case. I opened the email and read it twice, then a third time, because the words did not fully register the first two attempts. It was short. It did not ask. It informed me that a representative from the conservatory board had recommended me, along with two other students, to perform at a private fundraising event for Apex Racing's new wing, and that Drake himself had personally requested my inclusion, along with a date, a time, and a line at the bottom that made my stomach twist tight. "I look forward to hearing you play." No question mark. No option to decline built into the wording at all. It read less like an invitation and more like something already decided, something I was simply being informed of rather than asked about, and I sat there staring at his name signed neatly beneath those final words with my heart hammering somewhere up near my throat, with absolutely no idea how I was supposed to say no to a man who clearly did not expect anyone to try.

Drake. The garage smelled like burnt rubber and hot metal, the way it always did after a test session, and I stood with my arms crossed while my engineer ran through the telemetry from the last set of laps. Numbers scrolled across the screen. Tire degradation. Downforce readings. Sector times shaved down to the thousandth of a second. This was the part of racing nobody saw on television, the endless hours of data and adjustment that happened between the roar of the engines and the checkered flag, and normally I could sit through it for hours without losing focus. Today I lost focus twice in ten minutes. "You are half a second slower through turn four than yesterday," my engineer said, tapping the screen. "Same setup. Same conditions. What changed?" "Nothing changed," I said, though that was not entirely true. What had changed was that I kept seeing a pair of dark eyes narrowing at me across a party, I kept hearing a voice telling me to try being less of myself for five minutes, and none of that belonged anywhere near a garage or a telemetry sheet or a championship I was supposed to be defending in four months. "Boss." Elliot, my best friend and the man who had been my race engineer for three seasons, leaned against the car with his arms folded. "You have said maybe six words all morning. That is unusual, even for you." "I am thinking about the setup." "You are thinking about someone. I have known you long enough to tell the difference." I did not answer him. Elliot had earned the right to push a little, given everything we had been through together, but there were limits, and I intended to hold that line even with him. We wrapped the debrief and I walked out to the paddock, where the noise of a hundred conversations and rolling equipment carts filled the air, sponsors in polo shirts talking into headsets, mechanics wheeling tire sets between garages, the whole traveling circus that followed us from country to country every other week of the season. This was my world. I had grown up in it, moved through junior categories before I could legally drive on a public road, clawed my way onto this grid at nineteen and became team captain by twenty-one because I refused to accept anything less than the top of the timing sheet. People who did not follow the sport thought it was only about driving fast, but it was about control, about squeezing every possible advantage out of a machine and a body and a mind until there was nothing left to give, and I had built my entire identity around being the one who gave the most. Two ladies from a sponsor's marketing team fell into step beside me near the hospitality unit, both of them laughing a little too loud at something one of them said, angling themselves so I could not avoid noticing the effort they had put into their appearance. "Drake, we were hoping you might join us for the sponsor dinner tonight," the taller one said, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. "I have plans," I said, and kept walking. It was not entirely a lie. My plan was to sit alone in my hotel room and stare at strategy notes I had already memorized, which sounded significantly less interesting than whatever they had in mind, but it was still true, and it was still preferable. My younger brother caught up with me near the motorhome entrance, twenty years old and still young enough to find the whole circus endlessly entertaining rather than exhausting. "You just walked away from two very attractive women," Caleb said, falling into step beside me. "That is new. Usually you at least pretend to be polite for thirty seconds before you disappear." "I was polite." "You said three words and left." "That is three more than they needed." Caleb laughed, but he was watching me with the same careful attention Elliot had used earlier, like he was trying to solve a puzzle I had not agreed to hand him. "Something happened at that party the other night. You have been off since then." "Nothing happened." "You stood outside in the cold for ten minutes watching a car drive away. Michael told me. He said you did not say a single word the entire time, you just stood there until the taillights disappeared." I did not answer that either, because there was nothing safe to say. The truth was I had thought about very little else since that night. Not the championship standings, not the upcoming race weekend, not the sponsors circling for my attention like they always did. Her. The way she had looked at me like I was an inconvenience rather than an opportunity, the sharp edge in her voice when she told me to try being less of myself, the way she had turned and walked away without looking back even once, as if I had already stopped mattering the second the words left her mouth. Nobody walked away from me like that. Nobody dismissed me and did not immediately regret it. That was what I told myself the reason was. A challenge. An itch I needed to scratch so I could move on and get back to focusing on the only thing that actually mattered, which was winning. It had nothing to do with the shade of her eyes or the stubborn set of her jaw when she had snapped at me, nothing at all. I did not believe in love. I had decided that a long time ago, back when I was twelve years old and sat on the stairs listening to my parents scream things at each other that could never be unsaid, back when my mother packed two suitcases and left in the middle of the night without waking either of us to say goodbye, and my father spent the following decade proving that a man could build an empire out of anger and call it strength. I had watched what love did to two people who once promised each other forever, watched it curdle into something that left permanent damage, and I had promised myself I would never hand anyone that kind of power over me. Attraction was fine. Attraction was simple, transactional, easily managed. Love was a liability I refused to carry. So whatever this was, whatever kept pulling my thoughts back to a girl I had met exactly once, it was not that. It could not be that. That night, alone in my hotel room, I opened my laptop under the excuse of reviewing sponsor commitments and found myself instead pulling up the details of the conservatory renovation my team had funded months ago, before any of this happened, before I had any reason to care about a list of student names attached to the project. I told myself I was simply confirming logistics. I told myself the same thing when I found her name on the list of recommended performers for the fundraiser and added a note requesting her inclusion specifically, my assistant's confused reply arrived within the hour asking if I wanted to specify a reason. I did not give her one. Three days later, I stood at the back of the conservatory's main hall, unannounced, having told no one on my team where I was going or why. The room smelled like polished wood and old paper, students moving between practice rooms with instrument cases slung over their shoulders, sunlight cutting through tall windows in long pale strips across the floor. I found the room I was looking for at the end of the hall, the door propped halfway open, and through the gap I could see her standing with her violin raised, eyes closed, completely lost in whatever she was playing, unaware that anyone was watching her at all. I stood there in the hallway and did not move.