The first picture is the first one he took of the two of them sitting in bed together. Lulu is looking at Cass’s mouth. It looks just as intimate as Lulu feared it would what seems like a hundred million years ago, the way she’s leaning into Cass’s body. What she can see now, which she was too nervous to notice then, is that Cass is leaning toward her too.

They march on from there: Lulu and her milkshake; Cass painting a wall; Lulu and Cass bent over a book, their heads together, talking. That one is in black and white.

Why? Lulu wonders. What’s the point? Is it supposed to be artsier? Is it supposed to be—as she leans in closer to inspect it, she sees why. This photo is black and white and blurry because it was taken by a black-and-white camera. Not Ryan’s fancy, expensive digital, and she knows that because you can see Ryan in the photograph: His body is a blur, midway through some skateboarding trick in the bottom of the pool.

Ryan didn’t take this picture. The Hotel did.

Lulu doesn’t know where they are, but she knows that they’re here. They’ve always been here, the cameras. He mentioned them the first night, the security footage he was taking, how he needed light to do it by. That piece of printer paper taped up in the lobby: WARNING: THESE PREMISES ARE BEING MONITORED BY VIDEO. Of course Ryan needed to protect the construction site.

She hadn’t counted on him using them to surveil her too.

Lulu races through the rest of the images: There’s another black-and-white shot of her alone in her bathing suit, looking as docile and posed as a doll. She and Cass in their robes in color in the lobby, Owen and Kiley fuzzed out to vague background blurs. Ryan took these, Lulu thinks, and then, He took these.

The last images are three in a row of almost the same shot, all in black and white: Cass and Lulu asleep together in bed. They must have been taken over the course of the night they spent here. Their bodies shift around each other in the sheets, restless and random. It was dark when they were taken, and their limbs are grainy and indistinct. The images are perfectly innocent: abstract, almost. They look like shapes and shadows.

They mean that there was nothing Ryan was willing to let them keep for themselves.

The crowd around Lulu mills and swirls; it ebbs and eddies. Someone touches her shoulder, indicates the photograph on the wall, offers her a congratulations.

She sees Ryan talking to someone, some man in a suit. Ryan inclines his head to accept his praise. Lulu can almost see the crown that sits there, and how long he’s been waiting to wear it.