Chapter 1

Elena's POV

Three days before I was supposed to marry him, Nathan asked me to spend one last night with someone else.

He didn’t put it that plainly, not in front of everyone. He stood at the front of the private room at Marchetti’s with a drink in his hand, retelling our engagement story wrong for the third time that night, and nobody corrected him because nobody wanted to slow him down. That was Nathan. People let him keep going.

Marchetti’s had done the room up the way they did every party like this, string lights along the exposed brick, a long table of appetizers nobody had touched yet, a playlist someone’s cousin had put together that skewed a little too much toward songs from three years ago. It was the kind of room built for photographs. Everyone in it looked like they were already imagining how the pictures would turn out.

The room was full of people who’d known us for years and people who’d known us for months, blurred together by candlelight and an open bar. Sienna was there too, technically as a mutual friend from Nathan’s office, the kind of guest nobody questions on a list that size. I’d stopped questioning it months ago myself, which in hindsight was its own kind of answer.

I sat between my sister and a friend from work, watching him work the room the way he always did, easy and warm, the kind of charm that made strangers feel like old friends inside of five minutes. My sister leaned in.

“You’re doing the thing again.”

“What thing?”

“Watching him like you’re waiting for something.”

I didn’t answer her. I wasn’t sure what I would have said.

Across the room, Adrian Wolfe leaned against the windows with a glass of whiskey he hadn’t touched. Nathan’s business partner had never been comfortable being the loudest person in a room, which was probably why the partnership worked as well as it did. Nathan needed someone steady standing behind him. Adrian had been playing that role for years, at dinners, at holidays, at every event where Nathan needed a room to like him.

Nathan tapped his glass with a fork, and the room quieted around him.

“Before this week gets away from us, I want to propose something.”

Someone whistled. Someone said *here we go*, already laughing at whatever was coming.

“We’re getting married Saturday. Which means tonight’s the last night either of us is single. So let’s treat it like one. One last night, no rules, no jealousy. Each of us picks someone in the room and we go our separate ways for a few hours. No harm done. Saturday we start clean.”

The room laughed. A groomsman clapped him on the back. A ripple of it followed, the kind of laughter that doesn’t quite reach every corner of a room, the kind that happens when people are a little too aware of the bride sitting right there.

Nathan wasn’t looking at the room anymore.

He was looking at Sienna.

She caught his eye from across the room and smiled. Small. Familiar. The kind of smile people shared when they already knew what the other was thinking.

Nathan smiled back before he remembered where he was.

None of it, alone, would have meant anything. Not the smile, not the way his eyes had found her before he’d even finished his toast. Together they told me everything I needed to know.

My hands moved before I told them to, setting the glass down, pushing back from the table. I wasn’t thinking about who. I was thinking that I couldn’t sit there and watch him do this in front of a room full of people who thought they knew us.

“Adrian.” My voice came out steadier than I felt. “Would you be my one last night?”

The laughter didn’t stop all at once. It went out in pieces, one cluster of people at a time catching up to what had just been said, so that for a few seconds half the room was still mid-laugh while the other half had already gone quiet, and the mismatch of it was worse than silence would have been.

My sister’s hand froze halfway to her glass. Someone near the bar said “wait, what,” too loud, and someone else shushed them.

Across the room, Sienna’s smile had already disappeared, replaced by something that looked like something she didn’t want the answer to.

Nathan turned from Sienna to look at me. Whatever was on his face wasn’t composed. His mouth opened like he meant to say something and hadn’t landed on it yet.

Adrian didn’t laugh. He set his glass down on the windowsill behind him, slow, like he had all the time in the room even though nobody else did.

He looked at Nathan.

Then back at me.

“If you mean it,” he said quietly, “I’ll go with you.”

The room forgot how to breathe.