Which is why she would not look at…

Too late. The phone was in front of her face and she was clicking through the photos. She saw her finger doing it. It was like she wasn’t even in control of her hand. It had gone rogue, disconnected itself from her brain. The hand wanted to see the photos. The hand always wanted to see the photos, clicking through them again and again, one hundred and fifty-four in all. Some were action shots from the show. Some were pictures she snapped in quiet when Eric wasn’t looking. It was a minor point of pride for Scarlett that she had gotten very good at doing that. If you’re going to be a stalker, she figured, you really should be good at it. The shame of failure was too great. Ideally, a good stalker could perhaps gain future employment as a spy. Fight crime. Go undercover. Save the world. Yes. That’s what the world needed, someone good with a camera phone, someone prepared to spend five hours online looking at the same video clip, someone who really knew how to read into a status message. Surely, all very desirable skills should the perpetrators of terror ever really get into social networking.

The dining room doors opened and a tall figure appeared in the doorway, casting a long shadow as it came farther into the room. Scarlett sat up abruptly, startling the person and causing him to yelp and almost crash into a chair.

“Sorry,” she said. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”

“God…what…Scarlett?”

Spencer was always the first awake at the hotel, fully dressed in his uniform: white dress shirt, black pants, and black tie. Unlike at the Hopewell, staff at the Waldorf-Astoria had to get dressed up for work. Also, the Waldorf-Astoria had staff—this was another major difference. Spencer worked the breakfast shift there and always woke at an unreasonable hour. He lived on almost no sleep.

“Why are you up?” he said, sitting on the edge of the platform.

“Just the heat,” she said. “Our air conditioner broke again.”

The part about the air conditioner in the Orchid Suite was true. It used to freeze Scarlett and Lola with its powerful, energy-draining, light-dimming gusts, but it had recently given up on emitting anything aside from a painfully loud squeal. So they poached all night long in the hot, damp air. That had nothing to do with why she was awake tonight, though, and Spencer seemed to know that. He looked at the phone, still grasped in her hand.

“Expecting a call?” he asked, nodding at it.

The whole Eric situation had caused tension between Scarlett and Spencer for a little while over the summer, tension that had been resolved when Spencer punched Eric in the face during a fight practice, coincidentally just minutes after Eric sort-of dumped Scarlett and made her cry. The matter had been put down by all involved as an unfortunate accident. Spencer and Eric performed every night from that point on without a problem and everyone acted as if nothing had happened between Scarlett and Eric at all. It had all been swept away, just like the play. A moment of unreality, long past.