“When my great-great-grandfather built this place, he wasn’t thinking about the real estate empire he would go on to create. He wasn’t imagining a great-great-grandson feeling the weight of the family’s name heavy on his shoulders. His concerns were far more immediate: He had a beautiful new wife, and he wanted to build a beautiful place for her to live in.

“And I thought, isn’t that what we’re after, when we build buildings, and take pictures and post them on Flash? Aren’t we just looking for ways to express and capture beauty?

“I thought, I don’t know a better legacy for my family than that. Maybe it won’t last forever, but it will make you feel something while you’re here.

“Upstairs, you’ll be able to see rooms as they’ll be set when guests arrive. But you’ll also be able to walk through the photographs I took in the process of changing this place from a derelict, abandoned site to the gorgeous space you’re enjoying now. In that process, I excavated more than the land: I dug deep into my family’s history and my own aesthetic preoccupations. I wanted to give you a sense of the history of beauty that the Riggs family represents, and hopefully, a peek at the future we’re going to bring you.”

Lulu is one of the first people up the stairs. She feels Cass behind her, but she’s afraid to turn around and look at her. What did Ryan mean by all that?

The hallway is lined in the construction process shots Lulu was expecting: close-ups of rubble and walls tangled in vines. Trucks filled with debris that was emptied out of the pool, and trucks filled with tile for the bathrooms, piles of blue and gold. She starts to breathe easier.

Three, the room whose bathroom she used that first morning, after her night in the tent with Owen, is the one that’s set up as a sample. It’s in there that Lulu sees the first picture of an actual person: Kiley is hung up like art on the wall, captured sitting with her legs dangling into the empty pool, laughing up at the enormous blue sky stretched above her head. Next to her is a shot of Cass in the bathroom, wearing her pajamas, looking at herself in a mirror, caught in the act of brushing her hair. Ryan managed to keep himself out of the frame, so it’s easy to forget that someone took the photograph. It looks like it was always meant to exist.

It makes Lulu’s skin crawl a little bit. Cass was so anxious about her image earlier. She wishes Ryan would have checked with her before he put these up. It’s a beautiful picture, but who knows if Cass will agree.

Lulu glances around for her, but they’ve lost each other in the jostle of the crowd.