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After a weekend in New York with Will, I was prepared to forget about Winter Park forever and start a new life in the city that never sleeps. We stayed in a hotel suite that would have made Marie Antoinette proud, forty-seven floors above Fifth Avenue with a view of the real Central Park.

“Let’s only do this forever,” I said, curled against Will in the four-poster bed.

He breathed a gentle laugh, and I savored the feeling of his chest rising and falling underneath me.

I had been to New York City only once before, on a school field trip.

It was an excursion that was heavy on educational mainstays, like the Museum of Natural History and the Central Park Zoo, and then we went to Times Square to have our middle school minds blown by the sky-high billboards and fluorescent lights.

The three-day trip was a highlight from childhood, but when Will asked me to go to New York with him, I understood that it wouldn’t take much for him to overshadow the glamour of being thirteen and staying in a Westin with a pack of eighth graders and a handful of harried chaperones.

I also knew that—unlike Winter Park, a city frozen in a shiny, glittery snow globe—New York is one of those places that changes like a kaleidoscope. Turn the lens this way or that, and your viewtransforms completely. Everyone has a different vantage point.

But once the trip was under way, I came to understand something that I couldn’t have fully prepared myself for ahead of time: Will Somerset’s take on New York was a sexy, opulent glimpse of the lap of luxury.

We had brunch at the Pierre, walked along Central Park to the Museum of Modern Art, then took a car to the Battery for drinks and dancing at some exclusive rooftop bar Will somehow had access to through a legal colleague.

Now that we were unencumbered by the watchful eyes of basically everyone Will knew, PDA seemed to be a requisite activity at every stop.

We held hands at restaurants. Will draped his arm around my shoulder as we strolled through the museum.

Then we made out feverishly in the car on the way back to our hotel before staying up half the night, tangled up together in the puffy, cloud-like bedding of our room.

“Let’s never leave here.”

“What would we do in New York?” he said. My hand was on his chest, and he was tracing the outline of my fingers with his own pointer finger.

“Oh, I’m not talking about New York. I’m talking about this bed.” I nuzzled closer. “Come on. Talk dirty to me. Tell me more about the legal protections afforded through squatters’ rights in New York.”

“I think the firm would come looking for me sooner rather than later.”

“Boo.” I gave him a sarcastic thumbs-down. “I demand better dirty talk.”

“I’m not even sure Fritz could take a deposition if I wasn’t there.”

“Don’t you have an army of associates on the payroll? Let’s talk passive income. Let’s talk colonizing this mattress.”

He shifted his weight to prop up on one elbow, curling his arm around my waist and pulling me against him. He kissed me deeply before sliding me underneath him, sending molten heat down my body as he trailed kisses from the back of my ear to my collarbone.

“I’m suddenly feeling completely unmotivated to get dressed for dinner,” I said breathily.

“A pity.” Will looked up at me, one eyebrow rising, and made a tsking sound.

“We have to go back to the real world tomorrow.” I tried hard not to think about reporting to work at the museum on Monday. “Let’s order room service.”

When he started nipping at my inner thigh, I dug my nails into his back, and I thought I heard him moan a little. But it didn’t stop him from pushing me so far over the edge that I was pretty sure the entire hotel could have heard me.

The dreamy rush I got from just the scent of him felt like a drug.

And after weeks of holding the fantasy of Will at arm’s length, New York had weakened all my defenses.

Being with him—being a real couple and not just some fun distraction—suddenly seemed so logical, so attainable.

And I fell headfirst into the daydream of being his as we explored the city.

The only downside to the trip was how quickly it ended.

—

“I miss New York already,” I said the next day, unable to help myself as I stared out the window of the limo at the palm trees and low-level buildings of Winter Park. “I wonder what it’s like when it snows in the city.”

Will reached across the backseat bench and took my hand. “We’ll go back at Christmastime.”

That’s months away. A few weeks ago, I might have shrunk under the pressure of him saying something that serious, but now, everything just felt…

right. So I allowed myself the indulgence of another little fantasy—this time, one where we returned to New York to catch a show or maybe visit some fancy art opening.

I squeezed his hand like a lovesick dope and said, “I would really like that.”

He held my gaze for a minute, and it felt like we were committing to something more than another trip. Maybe guys like Will—guys with their lives in order—don’t have the “boyfriend” talk. Maybe they just decide.

I was writing his name with little hearts above it in my mind by the time the car pulled into his driveway. The driver made quick work of unloading our suitcases before Will thanked him with assurances that we could get the luggage inside.

“I’m going to put our bags in my room and order takeout,” he announced as he unlocked the front door. “Why don’t you grab a bottle of wine from the wine room and meet me in the kitchen? Thai food sound okay?”

“You’re trusting me with the wine selection?”

This must be serious.

Will didn’t have a wine “room” so much as a wine mausoleum. The temperature-controlled glass enclosure in an alcove off his living room must have housed a couple thousand bottles of wine. There was custom lighting and magnums on display and racks and racks of vintage labels.

“What if I accidentally open something from Monticello or the Last Supper?”

“Go nuts.” He smiled.

I kicked off my shoes by the door and headed toward the alcove. As I made my way through the living room, though, I picked up a splinter on my bare foot.

“Ow.” I let out a little yelp and lifted the pained foot to checkit.

“You okay?” Will called from somewhere in the house.

“Yeah, I think I just…” My foot looked clean, so I kept walking. “Never mind.”

But as my view of the alcove came into focus, I stopped in my tracks.

“Hey, Will!” I called back, staring at the wine cellar, stunned.

The wine cellar had been pilfered. Not stripped clean but picked off in batches of two or three, leaving Swiss cheese gaps on shelves that—before we left—I would have sworn were full.

The magnums had been swiped, too. And there was a broken bottle of red on the floor.

I checked my foot again to see a sliver of blood on my heel.

“Yeah,” he called back, and I could tell by the sound of his voice that he was getting closer.

“I cut my foot,” I began. “And something’s going on with the wine.”

“Jesus.” He was standing beside me now, confused at the cherry-picked burglary. “What the fuck?”

He took a few steps forward, and I grabbed his arm. “Do you have shoes on?”

Looking at his feet, I realized he did. But he looked down at my foot and the trickle of blood that was pooling at my heel.

In an instant, Will scooped me up in his arms and cradled me.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get you a Band-Aid, and then I’ll clean this up.”

I turned my head sideways to read an Opus One label amid the pieces of broken glass and an evaporating puddle of red wine, and a chill slid down my spine.

—

Twenty minutes later, Will had bandaged my foot, and we had cleaned up the broken glass. But we were still staring, bewildered, at the wine cellar. Someone had made off with Will’s priciest wines, leaving the lesser labels behind.

“You don’t think Mia would do this?” I said, not believing for a second she could.

“Mia wouldn’t know which bottles were the most valuable.” He shook his head. “She can barely tell the difference between Merlot and Welch’s.”

“Of course. But who else could even get in? Don’t you have a security system?”

He exhaled a sigh and twisted his neck to one side. “Damnit.”

“What?”

But he was on his feet, headed for his home office. I followed a few steps behind him.

He pulled out an iPad from his desk drawer. “There’s a camera on the doorbell.”

“ That’s your only camera? For the whole house?” This seemed almost as shocking as the theft. “This is a big place, Will.”

“Yeah.” He was barely listening.

He opened an app on the iPad and a video queued up.

A live feed of the front door. He slid his pointer finger to rewind the timeline, scrolling past snippets of him and me walking in the front door a little while ago.

The video feed would go blank if there was no activity, so he scrolled past some stretches of time easily.

When there was activity, though, like the mail delivery or a drop-off from UPS, he slowed down the playback to watch a little more carefully.

Then, there she was. Saturday morning around ten. A pretty, petite brunette carrying boxes of wine out of Will’s front door.

“Godfuckingdamnit.” He dropped the iPad in disgust and reached for the phone in his pocket.

I watched as the brunette in the video looked directly at the camera and flipped up her middle finger. Perfect blowout. Fresh manicure. Chanel sunglasses. “Is that—” I knew before he even said her name.

“Constance—” he said into the phone. A roar of anger came from the other end of the line.

Will held the phone away from his ear, and I was able to make out the words “twenty-year-old twat” before he muffled the phone with his hand and stepped out of the room.

So much for “Constance and I parted as friends.”

“That’s Mia’s key, Constance,” I could hear him shouting from another room. “It’s not meant to be an all-access pass to my fucking wine room.”

And then silence, followed by “Maybe you should have brought it up in the divorce settlement.” Then, “She’s not. She’s a good—Goddamnit, so what if she is! It’s none of your business.”

There was another tense stretch of silence and then, “The only reason I’m not calling the police right now is because neither one of us wants Mia to have to hear about it.”

I felt like I should leave. Like I was intruding on a family matter. That love cocoon I had wanted to keep whole was now in pieces. But I just paced his office. Frozen by indecision over whether to stay or go. And then, about ten minutes later, Will came to find me.

“Dinner will be here in twenty minutes,” he announced, as if that was the thing on our minds.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” He shook his head.

And by the time our Thai food was delivered, he was back to his light, cheerful mood.

Somehow, that was that. Will never pressed Constance to return the wine, and he never filed a report about the theft. The locks were changed the next morning. And shipments of wine arrived steadily until the wine cooler was completely replenished as if the whole thing never happened.

I gathered he had too much respect for Constance—she was Mia’s mom after all—to drag her through the mud. I was too wrapped up in the bliss of being with him to care. I should have given more thought to Will covering for her bad behavior.