Stuart didn’t stay for dinner.

He walked us to the table, placed us there with a kind of ceremonial ease, and made sure everything was in order—the wine chosen, the waiter briefed. Then he handed me a key. Not just any key, but the one that opened the rec room and the suite upstairs. He smiled, wished us a good night, and disappeared down the corridor. It felt less like being abandoned than being released, as if he had done his part and now the story belonged to us. Not a fairy godfather exactly—more like a benevolent stage manager who knew when to step out of the light.

The meal passed in a warm blur. Candlelight, good food, Leslie’s voice animated and quick, her presence making the room feel charged. I was aware, even then, of how unusual the situation was—an office at the conference center, a major project unfolding, a woman beside me who represented a different life entirely. But awareness didn’t slow anything down. If anything, it fed the momentum.

Later, in the rec room, we slipped into the hot tub naked, the water already steaming. Outside the windows, the grounds were dark and still. Inside, everything felt suspended. I poured the cognac. The glass caught the light. Someone—me, probably—put the tape on.

Billie Holiday’s voice filled the room.

“Sunday is gloomy, my hours are slumberless…”

Gloomy Sunday. Not background music. An invocation.

Her voice was intimate, exhausted, devastatingly calm. It carried the weight of things endured too long, too quietly. The water lapped at the edges of the tub. Steam rose and fell with our breathing. Leslie leaned back, eyes closed, listening. I felt the words settle into me in a way I didn’t fully understand at the time.

“Angels have no thought of returning you…”

I had never been suicidal. That wasn’t my story. But I was drinking too much, and I knew it. Alcohol was becoming the solvent that dissolved the seams between things that should have stayed separate—work and desire, ambition and escape, confidence and denial. I was lucky in one way: I never followed the darker trends of the eighties into drugs. I stopped short of that edge. But alcohol alone was enough to blur judgment and soften warning signs.

Earlier that day, I had stood in my office at the conference center looking at drawings of Bird City that were no longer models but blueprints for something immense. Bridges. Elevated paths. Structures that would take years, money, people, persuasion. A million dollars had been spoken aloud, almost casually, as if naming it made it reasonable. I had nodded, smiled, played my role. Inside, a quieter voice was asking how this had grown so large so fast.

In the hot tub, that voice went underwater.

Leslie reached for my hand beneath the surface. It was an easy, unhesitating gesture, full of confidence. She belonged in rooms like this, in moments that unfolded after hours. New York had taught her how to move through intensity without flinching. With her, everything felt accelerated—ideas, intimacy, risk. I told myself that this was vitality, that this was what it meant to be alive and working and desired all at once.

Billie sang on.

“Dreaming, I was only dreaming…”

The song felt like a mirror held just slightly out of focus. Beautiful. Dangerous. Honest in a way that didn’t announce itself.

I drank more cognac. The warmth spread. The steam thickened. For a while, the world reduced itself to sound and touch and the conviction that I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

But the pressure was already there—the affair unfolding alongside commitments I wasn’t resolving, the nonprofit forming even as doubts about its feasibility crept in, Artpaper still demanding attention I no longer had to give. I was living inside multiple futures and pretending they could coexist indefinitely.

That night felt like a gift. It also felt like a warning, though I didn’t have language for that yet.

When the tape clicked at the end, the silence was startling. We stayed in the water a little longer, reluctant to break the spell. Eventually we dried off, wrapped in towels, moving down the hallway toward the suite Stuart had quietly left us. It felt luxurious. It felt deserved.

It felt unsustainable.

I didn’t know then that this night—soaked in music, generosity, desire, and excess—was part of a slow accumulation that would soon demand a reckoning. I only knew that I was moving faster than my footing, and that the beauty of the moment made it harder, not easier, to stop.