The lawyers kept stopping.
That was the thing Serena would remember most about that morning, not the gray sky pressing against the conference room windows, not the untouched glass of water sweating on the table in front of her, not even the way her stepsister Callie sat beside her with perfect posture and blood-red nails and absolutely dry eyes. What she would remember was the way the lawyers kept stopping. Mid-sentence. To consult the second folder. The thick one with the red tab that no one had explained.
The third time it happened, Serena understood. She just didn't let herself understand it fully yet. She was still in the part of the morning where she was holding herself together by sheer force of will, and falling apart would have to wait until she was somewhere the lawyers couldn't see her do it.
Mr. Albert, senior partner, the kind of man who had delivered bad news so many times it had stopped touching his face, set down his pen and folded his hands.
"Miss Holloway," he said. "I want to be sure you fully understand the scope of what we've outlined today."
"I understand it," Serena said.
"The liabilities are significant."
"I said I understand it."
She did. She had been sitting in this chair for forty-one minutes and she understood it perfectly.
Her father, Richard Holloway, founder of the Holloway Hotel Group and owner of seven properties across the East Coast, the man who had raised her along with his wife and her daughter after her mother died when Serena was fourteen, had died with debts that ate nearly everything he had built. Three years of quiet financial hemorrhaging that he had told no one about. Not his accountants. Not his board. Not his daughter.
Not her.
The flagship Manhattan property: mortgaged beyond recovery. The Boston hotel: seized by creditors six months before his death, though somehow she had not known that either. The Hamptons estate: gone. The investment accounts: liquidated, mostly, to service debt that kept growing anyway.
The accident on the I-95 had taken him and Callie's mother on a Sunday evening in November, and the reading of the will had delivered the second blow twelve days later, quiet and devastating, in a room that smelled like carpet cleaner and old coffee.
"What's left?" Serena asked, the same way she imagined soldiers asked questions after battles, not because they expected good news, but because they needed to know what they were working with.
Mr. Albert looked down at his papers. "The family home in the West Village. It's unencumbered; your father was meticulous about that one specifically." He paused, the way people pause when they are about to say something they know will land differently than the rest of it. "And the Sovereign Hotel."
Serena went still.
"It's a boutique property. Forty-two rooms, Midtown East. Your father maintained it completely debt-free." Mr. Albert's voice shifted almost imperceptibly, softer, like he was handling something breakable. "He named it after your mother."
The room was very quiet.
Serena had been fourteen years old when her mother died. She had started to forget her face; she couldn't remember her as much as she would like to; she could remember that her mom loved her a lot; she could remember how she used to read stories for her every night, she never missed it and funnily enough, she could still remember her mom's voice and she usually feels guilty for not remembering her as much as she deserved because she was a good mother. Thank God for the photographs of her mom that she had, which were helping her to remember her, but truth be told, she didn't remember her—not really, not in the way that counted. She had the secondhand stories that fathers tell daughters when they're trying to give them something to hold onto, and she had her mother's watch on her wrist right now, thin gold, always slightly too loose, which she wore the way other people carried lucky charms. But she had not known about the hotel. She had not known her father had taken her mother's name and built something around it and kept it safe even while everything else was burning.
She pressed her thumbnail into her palm under the table, hard, and did not cry.
"It's left to both of us?" Callie's voice. Smooth and warm in the way of things that are neither.
"Not for the hotel, but jointly for the family home," said Mr. Calloway. "Fifty percent each."
Callie smiled. Small. Not so satisfied, but satisfied. The kind of smile you make when things are going exactly as you hoped they would, and you are wise enough not to let it show completely.
Serena did not look at her.
-----
The West Village house was beautiful, the way things are beautiful when they are very old and have decided to keep going anyway. High ceilings. Floors that knew where you were walking. A back garden that had been winning a slow war against its own fence for as long as Serena could remember.
She sat at the kitchen table that night with her laptop open and her tea going cold and a document on the screen titled, with the particular bluntness of someone who had stopped pretending, 'What I Actually Know About Running A Hotel.'
The space beneath it was empty.
She stared at it for a while. Then she opened a new tab.
She had been 'not' thinking about one name all day. She had been very deliberate about not thinking about it, which meant it was the only thing she had actually been thinking about since Mr. Albert said the words "boutique property" and "forty-two rooms," and her brain had immediately, traitorously, made a connection she did not want to make.
She typed it into the search bar anyway.
Damien Price.
The internet gave her back what the internet always gives back when you search that name: a man who looked like God had been showing off. Dark eyes that photographed like they were always in the middle of deciding something. Suits that fit the way architecture fits: intentional, exact, and nothing accidental. Forbes covers. Architectural Digest covers. A profile in the Times that had called him "the most formidable figure in American luxury hospitality under forty," which was the kind of sentence that made it sound like a compliment when it was really a warning.
Thirty-two years old. Sole heir to the Price Group. Twenty-nine hotels and counting. Three were under construction in cities she recognized and two in cities she had to look up.