Scarlett looked to Spencer, and he met her gaze with a raised eyebrow. He smelled it, too.

“That’s not right,” he said.

The kitchen door swung open, and Lola emerged. She was immaculately dressed in her “beauty scrubs,” lean black pants, a slim black T-shirt, and low heels. Her white-blonde, stick-straight hair was wound into a knot.

Lola always looked good. This was just one of the laws of Scarlett’s universe. Like Spencer, she was thinner and taller than average. She had tiny, sharp eyes and thin lips, both of which managed to convey fullness. She was universally regarded as beautiful, in an easily-bruised and delicate kind of way. Painters would want to capture her beauty on canvas. Doctors would want to give her a blood transfusion. Such was Lola’s appeal.

“Happy birthday!” she said with a smile. “This is really hot. Don’t touch it for a minute.”

She set down a small jug of chocolate syrup wrapped in a towel. The syrup, usually a gooey pot of chocolaty perfection, looked a bit more like something you might get if you melted down a tire with a pound of butter. Before Scarlett could ask why they were having buttery stewed tire for breakfast, her dad came bursting out with a large plate of waffles.

Scarlett’s dad was frequently the most dressed-down of them all. He had an affection for a thrift shop in the village where NYU students tended to shop, so his wardrobe consisted of a lot of vintage T-shirts and hoodies, well-worn jeans, and incredibly strange shoes. (Today, he was wearing his threadbare “My name is Mr. Pineapple” shirt.) People sometimes thought he was their older, blonder brother or cousin. Guests rarely ever thought he was in any way in charge of the hotel, much less its official owner.

“Belinda isn’t here today,” he said, settling down a plate of deflated, undercooked waffles, topped by a few deeply charred ones. “We did our best.”

Truthfully, this was a disappointment. Birthday breakfasts were sacred events, but Scarlett wasn’t about to scream in protest. Marlene, however, was more than prepared to do so.

“We can’t eat those,” she said.

“They’re not that bad,” her dad lied, picking through them. “This one looks okay.”

He found one in the middle that looked like it had hit the waffle iron at exactly the right time, purely out of luck. He stabbed it with a fork and lifted it toward Marlene’s plate. As usual, Marlene was the center of everything, even on Scarlett’s birthday.

Lola was fidgeting with the syrup, even though she was one of the least fidgety people Scarlett knew. Spencer gave Scarlett a long sideways glance. Something was very much not right here.

Her mom followed a moment later, bearing the rest of the breakfast on a tray. There was something vaguely French about their mother—her pale skin and dark eyes and hair, the natural grace and poise (those went right to Lola when traits were being handed out). Like Scarlett, she had a head of thick curls. Unlike Scarlett, hers didn’t look like they had been styled in space, where gravity is not a factor.