The lobby has a bathroom, but its fixtures haven’t been installed yet: Three toilets sit, attached to nothing, in the stalls. Lulu heads upstairs and then hesitates. Ryan said something the first time she was here about spending time in room Three, but she’s only ever seen him in Four. He’s probably still there, right? And it probably has a functioning bathroom, right? Cass said there was running water now.

Lulu is in luck: Three is deserted and the toilet works. There’s toilet paper, but no soap to wash her hands with, which is better than it could have been, at least. She doesn’t even think about the sound of the flush in the otherwise silent morning until she emerges back into the hallway and finds Cass there.

Cass is wrapped in a blanket, and above its woven fabric, her pale shoulders are bare except for one dark tank top strap.

Oh, Lulu thinks. Well, that makes sense. Good for them.

“Sorry,” Cass says. “I know we kind of abandoned you guys out there last night. You were very insistent about sleeping under the stars, and—”

“It’s fine,” Lulu says, though she has only the vaguest memory of this part of the conversation. She definitely overdid it on the vodka. “I’m good.”

“You found the bathroom okay?”

“Yeah.”

Ryan appears over Cass’s shoulder. He’s dressed, or at least wearing sweats and a T-shirt.

“You gonna invite her in?” he asks.

Cass looks flustered.

Lulu doesn’t want to make her feel weird. “I should probably,” she says, “go.”

“Don’t be silly.” Ryan steps back and gestures for Lulu to join them. “Come on.”

Ryan’s bed is unmade. An enormous digital camera is sitting in the nest of its sheets.

“I was just taking advantage of the light,” he says.

“Ryan’s a photographer.” Cass flops onto the bed and lets the blanket fall from her grasp. She’s wearing a pair of sweats that look identical to Ryan’s except they’re enormous on her, fabric pooling shapelessly between her waist and where she’s scrunched them up on her calves.

Cass grabs the camera and aims it at Lulu and Ryan. “Click!” she announces.

Ryan isn’t interested. “Cass. C’mon.”

She rolls her eyes and hands it to him.

Light is streaming in through the windows. Cass’s face falls in shadow, and her hair, still sleep-mussed, is an electric halo of crimson and gold. Lulu looks at the camera in Ryan’s hand and understands the instinct to capture her, and all of this: to pin down the strangeness of this space, and the impossibly beautiful girl in it.