His family and her family had been in the same business for over a decade, yet they could not be termed competitors, because they were both not in the same league. Not enemies, too; her father had never used that word but rivals in the particular way of two people who occupy the same space and both believe they deserve more of it. Her father had spoken about the Prices the way chess players speak about opponents they respect: carefully and with full awareness that respect and trust were not the same thing.
She clicked through three pages of results before she found what she was looking for, buried under the Forbes profiles and the architectural features and the society page photographs where he always looked faintly bored.
Price Group Executive Assistant, Office of the CEO. Applications open.
Serena read it twice.
Then she read it a third time, more slowly, the way you read something that you already know is going to change something and you just haven't admitted it yet.
She needed to learn this industry. Quickly, thoroughly, from the inside. She needed to understand how a great hotel company operated, not from a textbook, not from a seminar, but from the inside, from the ground up, from the office of someone who had been building empires since before she understood what an empire was.
There was exactly one person in New York City who could teach her that.
She closed the laptop.
She opened it again thirty seconds later and pulled up the application before she could argue herself out of it.
She started typing. Her hands were steady. The rest of her was not.
She submitted it at 11:47 PM.
She didn't tell her best friend Mia. Mia would have opinions, loud ones, and Serena was not ready for opinions yet. She was still in the phase where the decision felt like jumping off something and she hadn't looked down yet and she would very much prefer to stay in that phase a little longer.
She went to bed.
She did not sleep for a long time.
When she finally did, she dreamed about the Sovereign Hotel, not as it was now, modest and struggling, but as it could be. Lights in the lobby. Every room full. Her mother's name on the building in letters that deserved to be there.
A day after, she woke up at 6 AM to an email from the Price Group.
'Dear Miss Holloway, thank you for your application. Mr. Price will conduct your interview personally. Please attend our offices Thursday at 9 AM.'
Serena read it standing in her kitchen in yesterday's t-shirt with her hair still in its sleep braid and her heart doing something complicated in her chest.
Mr. Price will conduct your interview personally.
Not HR. Not a junior manager. Not anyone with a normal job title and a clipboard and a standard list of questions.
Him.
She set her phone down on the counter. Picked it up. Set it down again.
He already knew who she was. Of course he did. The name Holloway in a hotel industry application that landed on his desk, he had known before he finished reading the first line. And he had called her in anyway.
The question was why.
She was still thinking about that question on Thursday morning when she walked through his building's front doors and the cold lobby air hit her like a held breath, and then the elevator opened, and the man who stepped out of it looked at her from across the marble lobby, and every careful, rational, well-organized thought she'd had about this morning dissolved into something she had absolutely no name for.
He was so much worse in person.
Serena had prepared for this.
She had prepared for the building: tall, glass, the kind of midtown presence that wasn't trying to intimidate you, which, somehow, made it more intimidating. She had prepared for the lobby marble, hushed, and staffed by people who moved with the specific efficiency of those who had been trained to make everything look effortless. She had prepared for the wait, for the PA who would collect her, for the forty-second elevator ride up to a floor that probably had a view that was designed to make visitors feel small.
She had not prepared for him to be standing in the lobby.
He was on his way out; that much was clear. Coat on, phone in hand, moving with the focused energy of a man who allocated his minutes deliberately. He stopped when he saw her. Not a stumble, not a dramatic pause, just a slight recalibration, the way a person recalibrates when something appears in their path that wasn't in the plan.
She made herself walk toward the reception desk. She made herself not look at him again. She gave her name to the receptionist in a voice that came out, mercifully, completely normal.
"Miss Holloway."
His voice. Low, unhurried, the kind of voice that expected to be heard without having to raise itself.
She turned.
This close, the photographs were even more useless as preparation than she'd already decided they were. There was something about him in person, something in the way he looked at her, direct and entirely unrushed, like he had decided this moment was worth his full attention and he had no intention of pretending otherwise, that made her want to take a step back.
She didn't.
"Mr. Price," she said.
Something shifted at the corner of his mouth. Not a smile. The suggestion of one. "You're early."
"You're in the lobby."
"I wanted to see if you'd actually come in."
Serena blinked. "Excuse me?"
"The Holloway name," he said simply. "And my building. I gave it forty percent odds." His eyes moved over her once, not the way men looked at women when they were being inappropriate but the way people looked at things they were trying to accurately assess. "I was wrong."
"Glad I could surprise you," she said, giving him a faint smile.
With a serious face, he said, " please accept my condolences."
I gave him another faint smile as my thank-you.
This time the almost-smile became something more definite. He gestured toward the elevator.