Carefully, I untied the bouquet and turned it over in my hands, looking for a card. Nothing. I inspected the flowers again, more cautiously this time, searching for evidence that Ryan had booby-trapped them. I stopped short, laughing at myself. What a ridiculous notion. Ryan was the sort of brainiac who thought ringing my doorbell at two in the morning was cutting revenge; he wasn’t clever enough to lure me in with an expensive bouquet of flowers and somehow sabotage them.

Who could have sent them? Nick? In college, he’d had some sort of pathological aversion to flowers, but maybe he’d grown to appreciate their charms. Maybe Cat? I’d told her about the incident with Ryan; maybe she had sent them to cheer me up? But no—Cat’s answer had been that I should move in with her; it wasn’t sending flowers. Besides, Cat surely would have mentioned it.

As I fingered the orange blossoms, I suddenly remembered a conversation I’d had with Lawrence the other day. I had been walking by his desk when he stopped me and pointed at his computer screen, where a collared shirt from J.Crew was on display.

“Audrey, you have great style. Help me out. Should I get this shirt in blue or in orange?”

“Orange, definitely,” I’d told him. “It’s more distinctive. And it’s my favorite color.”

He had smiled and clicked, adding the shirt to his shopping cart. “Done.”

Lawrence knew how much I loved the color orange, and he knew about the win with Irina Venn. Besides, with his on-trend glasses, neatly buffed fingernails, and penchant for bow ties, Lawrence seemed like the kind of man who could pick out a killer bouquet. Could he have sent these?

It doesn’t matter, I thought, pressing my face into the bouquet and inhaling the floral scent as I carried it inside my apartment. Never look a gift bouquet in the mouth.

I AWOKE WITH A START, uncertain what had roused me. As I blinked my eyes open in the dark, I strained my ears, listening for something amiss. I heard nothing other than the bright sound of silence. At first, I had found DC’s nighttime quiet unnerving—New York, after all, was never anything less than noisy—but now I relished it.

Convinced I had awoken over nothing, I closed my eyes and rolled over, nestling beneath the soft new sheets I’d received from a start-up linen company in exchange for a review that I had yet to write. Comfortable even when your sleep isn’t, I drafted in my head. No, that’s terrible. It should be something more like—

Scratch.

My eyes flew open. What the hell was that? I was almost certain it had been a footfall in the alley, and I lay still as a corpse, listening closely. I heard nothing—which, rather than reassuring me, made my skin prickle. Someone was out there and they weren’t moving through the alley. No, they had stopped right outside my window. The window that overlooked my bed.