She dressed for the part she wanted, not the part she’d been cast in. The hoodie was a shapeless navy from the men’s clearance rack, sleeves long enough to swallow her hands. The sweatpants had a drawstring she doubled for security, the elastic at the ankle cinched tight. The sunglasses were the most expensive thing she owned that nobody would ever know about—oversized, matte black, the kind favored by off-duty athletes and reality TV exiles.

  Kristina tied her hair in a quick, messy knot, no product, no hairnet, no sparkle. The transformation was so complete she startled herself when she caught her reflection in the suite mirror: She looked like every hungover college student in the city, a deliberate ghost in discount loungewear. If Mia Amor had been mugged for her shoes and dignity, this is the shape she’d have left behind.

  She zipped the hoodie up to her chin, checked the pockets—phone, key card, a credit card, nothing else—and practiced her expression. Blank, eyes down. No bounce in the step, no light in the face. Just another woman passing through a hotel hallway, anxious to be somewhere else.

  She set her hand on the door handle, paused, and waited for her heartbeat to slow. Years of security briefings had drilled certain habits into her: check the peephole, wait for silence, count to ten. When she finally slipped into the corridor, she did it in one smooth, silent movement.

  She bypassed the elevators entirely, heading for the service stairwell at the end of the hall. The air in the stairwell was humid and metallic, faintly undercut by the smell of floor polish and old french fries. She moved quickly, taking the steps two at a time, the rhythm as familiar as a warmup scale.

  The staff hallway was a different world. No marble, no ambient music, just scuffed linoleum and peeling motivational posters (“SMILE, IT’S CONTAGIOUS!”). She ducked into the laundry alcove and waited, listening for the whir of the industrial dryers to mask her footsteps.

  She passed two housekeepers with carts, neither of whom looked up. A maintenance man paused to check his phone, then pocketed it and gave her a nod, as if she belonged. For a brief, giddy second, she did.

  At the end of the corridor was the loading dock exit. She braced for the security camera—a cheap dome with a blue blinking LED. She ducked her head, turned her face to the wall, and moved through the frame with the confidence of someone who’d watched every heist movie ever made.

  Once outside, the air hit her in the chest—hot and dry, perfumed with exhaust, the scent of a thousand deep-fried ambitions. She had no real plan for where to go, but her feet led her to the rideshare pickup on instinct. The phone was in her hand before she even finished the thought.

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  A beige Prius pulled up, window rolled down. “Kristy?” the driver said.

  She nodded, slipped into the backseat, and pulled the hoodie lower over her forehead.

  “Where to?”

  She hesitated, then named the first place that came to mind. “Beverly Center.”

  The driver shrugged and tapped at the navigation. “You got it.”

  The city looked different from inside the car, every billboard and flashing sign suddenly aimed at someone else. She watched the stream of pedestrians—women in cocktail dresses, men in matching golf shirts, clusters of tourists blinking in the sun—and felt an odd swell of affection for all of them. Each one was the protagonist of their own disaster, blissfully unaware that the world might be watching.

  She checked her phone. Nothing from Leslie. Nothing from Victor. There were two texts from her cousin, a TikTok link and a string of emojis she didn’t bother decoding. For the first time in years, the silence in her inbox was the best kind of quiet.

  The car turned onto La Cienega Boulevard and headed south, past the hotels she knew only from the inside, past the liquor stores and designer outlets and the endless sprawl of people searching for an excuse to matter. The ride was barely ten minutes. At the mall entrance, the driver pulled to the curb and said, “Have a good one,” as if she were any other passenger in need of retail therapy or a new phone screen.

  She thanked him, stepped onto the sidewalk, and melted into the crowd.

  The mall was chaos—kids shrieking in the play area, couples window-shopping, a group of teens orbiting the food court like sharks. She kept her hood up and her hands in her pockets, letting the sounds and smells and currents of movement pull her along. Nobody stopped her. Nobody called out her name. If anyone stared, it was at her shoes, which, by comparison to the rest of her, were a little too clean.

  She wandered, aimless and electric, drifting from store to store. In the makeup aisle at Sephora, she ran her finger over a row of matte lipsticks, then ducked out before the sales clerk could offer help. In the bookstore, she found three copies of a new biography with her face on the cover, and left them untouched, the whole display slightly askew from some previous browser’s curiosity.

  She bought a soft pretzel and ate it sitting on a bench by the escalators. The salt stung her lips, the bread doughy and perfect. Across from her, two women argued in Spanish about the price of a dress; a boy in a Spider-Man costume clambered over the armrest, and an elderly man read the sports section with absolute absorption.

  She let her gaze go slack, stopped trying to control her face. For a moment, she let herself exist as a person without projection—a girl eating a snack, nobody watching, nobody waiting to make a story out of her.

  The pleasure was so sharp it almost hurt.

  She was halfway through her pretzel when movement sliced through the hum of the food court—a woman hovering near a rack of novelty socks, pretending to browse. The lens glinted first. Jordan Hayes. Not shouting, not breaking the illusion—just watching, calculating. Her hand lifted toward her camera, slow enough to make it clear she knew exactly what she’d found.

  Kristina’s pulse spiked. She tugged her hoodie lower, willing herself invisible. No one else had noticed—yet. If Jordan called her name, the entire mall would erupt. But she didn’t. She just kept drifting closer, the shutter half-pressed, as if daring Kristina to run.