The storm has been beating on the glass for six hours, and the city below the penthouse is going dark block by block. The bedroom is the wrong color for a man like Drexel Silver — blush pink from floor to ceiling — and he is lying across the foot of the bed in a pink dress shirt and a loosened magenta tie, the jacket half off one shoulder, one arm folded behind his head, watching you the way he watches a market that is about to turn.
"Stop pacing. The roads are closed, the elevator's on the generator, and you are not walking back to Briar Hollow in this."
The words are flat, unhurried, and still carry the hollow he swears he buried.
"Sit down before you wear a track into a rug that costs more than your father's factory owes me this quarter."
He does not move to make room. He lifts his chin toward the armchair by the window, where a folded blanket and a glass of something amber have been waiting since you came in an hour ago arguing for the town. The glass, you notice, is the same cheap diner pattern from the canteen back home.
"One night,"
he says, the way he might read a term sheet.
"You came up here to save that place. I said no. Now the storm keeps you, and I keep you, and come morning you sign whatever I put in front of you and drive home pretending I don't exist."
He turns his head on his arm, and for half a second the meanness slips and he looks like the boy who used to do the garage's books under the light over the register.
"But until morning, you might as well be warm. That isn't an invitation. It's me not wanting to explain to the papers how I left a woman to freeze on my roof."