The draft landed in her inbox at 7:02 a.m.
Subject line: *Draft – Please Don’t Panic (Yet)*
From: *Lila Chen*
Charlotte stared at the notification for a full thirty seconds before opening it.
The email itself was short.
> Here it is. Deep breath. Don’t read alone if you can help it. > > – L
Too late.
She was alone in the kitchen, barefoot in an old NYU T-shirt, Milo still snoring softly in his room, the apartment washed in pale morning light.
Her thumb hovered over the attachment.
She considered waiting. Calling Dominic. Suggesting they read it together as they’d joked. Half-joked.
Instead, she took a breath and tapped.
The PDF opened.
*Legacy in Transition: Inside the Unlikely Partnership (and Unlikelier Family) Redefining Luxury.*
Her stomach flipped.
She forced herself to read.
Lila’s words pulled no punches.
She opened with a scene from Aspen.
Charlotte shivering slightly on a half-built balcony, dust in her hair, pointing out where kids would line up for hot chocolate while workers hammered behind her.
Dominic, boots planted, arguing with a foreman about vent placement in the kids’ club, his voice low but implacable.
*“They’re both control freaks,” one contractor told me, only half-joking. “But in different directions. She wants it to feel right. He wants it to work right. Between the two of them, this place might actually be something new.”*
The piece braided three threads: Reid’s history, Steele’s rise, and the messy, improbable fact that somewhere between those two narratives, a child had appeared.
Lila was careful.
She didn’t splash Milo’s name in the headline.
She didn’t describe his face.
She did, however, refuse to pretend he wasn’t the axis around which the story spun.
*“When I ask them about their partnership,”* she wrote at one point, *“they talk about RevPAR and cross-brand loyalty and the challenges of courting a generation that thinks of hotels as backdrops for content rather than destinations. When I ask them about each other, the language shifts. They become less polished. More…human.”*
She quoted Dominic: *“She’s braver than I am. She jumps, and then she builds the bridge under her feet. I’ve spent my life drawing maps before I move. We’re teaching each other bad habits.”*
She quoted Charlotte: *“He sees weak points before anyone else. In systems. In people. It’s terrifying. And useful. I hate that it’s useful.”*
Then, delicately, she stepped into London.
*“Two years before Aspen, there was a bar in London and two people who, by their own admission, were not at their best,”* Lila wrote. *“They told each other first names, not last. They told each other half-truths about their lives because the full ones felt too heavy to bring into that room. They had a night. They thought that was the end.”*
The way she wrote it, it almost sounded…forgivable.
Like two lonely people making a human mistake.
Then came the test.
The heartbeat.
The “options.”
Lila didn’t sensationalize it.
She let Charlotte’s own words carry it.
*“I thought about not,” Charlotte tells me, staring out the window of her office at a city she has never fully chosen and that has never fully chosen her. “For about five minutes. Then I heard his heartbeat. After that…no matter what else made sense on paper, I couldn’t unknow him.”*
She wanted to throw up reading that.
Because it was true.
Because it was on a page that would be read by God-knew-how-many people.
Lila wrote about Eleanor, too.
Carefully.
*“When I ask Eleanor Reid about her grandson, she stiffens like a cat being offered a bath. Then, slowly, the corners of her mouth soften. ‘He is…unexpected,’ she says. ‘Like most things worth having.’”*
Charlotte snorted wetly into her coffee.
She hadn’t heard that line.
She couldn’t imagine her mother admitting it easily.
Then again, Lila was very good at digging past people’s armor.
The piece walked a narrow line between admiration and critique.
Of Eleanor’s control.
Of Dominic’s ruthless ambition.
Of Charlotte’s tendency to throw herself into walls and then argue that the wall should have gotten out of the way.
It didn’t feel like PR.
It felt…like truth shaped into something palatable.
Which might be worse.
When she finished, her hands were shaking.
Her coffee had gone cold.
Footsteps padded into the kitchen.
“Mommy,” Milo mumbled, hair a fuzz of sleep, stuffed dinosaur under one arm. “The sun is up.”
“Yes,” she said, closing the laptop quickly. “It is.”
“Pancakes?” he asked.
She swallowed the lump in her throat.
“Pancakes,” she agreed.
She cracked eggs and whisked batter and let muscle memory take over while her brain spun.
When Milo was occupied with maple syrup and cartoon theme songs, she retreated to the hallway and pulled out her phone.
> Charlotte: I read it.
His reply popped up almost instantly, as if he’d been sitting there waiting with the draft open too.
> Dom: Alone?
> Charlotte: Apparently I don’t follow instructions.
> Dom: How are you?
> Charlotte: Exposed. And weirdly…seen. You?
> Dom: Same. > > I keep wanting to argue with some of it. Then realizing I’d be arguing with reality.
> Charlotte: She made me sound…both more and less noble than I am.
> Dom: She made me sound human. I’m not sure my board will recover.
She smiled despite everything.
> Charlotte: We still need to go through it page by page. With our lawyers. And Serena. And possibly a bottle of something expensive.
> Dom: Today. My office. Noon? I’ll have Gillian there. James too if he can peel himself away from whatever other fire he’s putting out.
> Charlotte: I’ll be there. > After pancakes.
> Dom: Good priorities.
***
He’d put the draft on the big screen.
Of course he had.
As Charlotte walked into his office just before noon, Gillian already in one of the chairs and James perched on the arm of the sofa with a printout and a pen, the first page of the pdf loomed above them all like a glossy, digital mirror.
Dominic stood by the window, arms folded, looking annoyingly composed for someone whose entire emotional history had just been outlined in 6,000 words.
“Ms. Reid,” James said, standing. “You made good time.”
“Thought about faking a car breakdown,” she said. “Decided…cowardice doesn’t go with my hair.”
No one laughed, but Gillian’s mouth quirked.
“Have you both read it?” she asked, tapping her tablet.
“Yes,” Dominic said.
“I did,” Charlotte said. “This morning.”
“Alone,” he added.
She glared.
Gillian cleared her throat.
“Good,” she said. “I want your emotional reactions out of your system before we talk…edits.”
“Fact-checks,” James corrected. “Not edits.”
“Fine,” she said. “Fact-checks with…tone implications.”
They went through it slowly.
Line by line.
Charlotte flagged a date Lila had gotten slightly wrong—her internship in London had been when she was nineteen, not twenty-one.
Dominic corrected the square footage of his first Chicago property.
Gillian circled a phrase about “unchecked expansion” that made Dominic’s growth strategy sound like a climate disaster.
“Too negative,” she said. “We can suggest ‘rapid’ instead of ‘unchecked.’ It’s still accurate. Less apocalyptic.”
James nodded.
“Lila’s not out to sink you,” he said. “But she’s not your in-house copywriter either. She’ll listen if corrections are framed as accuracy, not vanity.”
Charlotte chewed her pen.
They reached the sections about Milo.
Lila had written:
*“They don’t use his name when they talk about him in this context. They say ‘my son’ and ‘our boy’ and, once, when I ask what has surprised them most, ‘the person who owns us now.’ I know his name, because I’ve met him in less formal circumstances. I’ve watched him launch himself off low walls with terrifying confidence, trusting that someone—usually both of them—will be there to catch him. But his name feels, in this moment, like something that belongs to him more than to my story.* *So let’s just say this: there is a small human in this equation who did not ask to be born into an empire or a headline. The way they protect him—even as they invite the world to see them more clearly—is, perhaps, the most interesting part of this whole messy, very modern tale.”*
Charlotte’s eyes stung, reading it again.
“Do we…argue with that?” Dominic asked quietly.
“No,” she said. “We…protect him the way she described. That’s…all we can do.”
Gillian made a note.
“I like that she didn’t name him,” she said. “We should ask that any photos used are similarly…oblique. Hands. Back of head. No full face.”
James nodded.
“I’ll talk to her,” he said. “She understands. She has nieces. She’s not out for blood.”
They made it through the London section with fewer edits than Charlotte expected.
Mostly small clarifications.
She hated how…romantic it sounded on the page.
As if two people in a bar making a stupid, selfish decision had been…fated.
They weren’t.
If they’d been fated, they wouldn’t have had to work this hard now.
Finally, they reached the end.
Lila closed with Aspen.
With the opening.
With a scene of snowflakes catching in Milo’s hair as he stood between them on the half-built terrace, wearing a hard hat three sizes too big.
*“Legacy,”* she wrote. *“Is a heavy word. It conjures portraits on walls and names on buildings and generational wealth that can calcify faster than it can grow. But watching the way these three—old queen, new king, reluctant princess—are trying, awkwardly and imperfectly, to build something less brittle than what was handed to them, I wonder if maybe the most radical legacy is not a hotel at all.* *Maybe it’s a small boy who will grow up knowing, for better and worse, exactly where he comes from.”*
Silence hung thick in the room.
“Damn,” James said softly.
“Too far?” Charlotte asked.
“Maybe,” Gillian said. “For certain sensibilities. But…true.”
Dominic hadn’t moved.
He was staring at the screen, jaw tight.
“Do you…hate it?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“I hate that it’s…public,” he said. “That strangers will…chew on it for three days and then move on while we’re still…living it.”
She exhaled.
“Same,” she said.
“But the piece itself…” He searched for words. “If my son ever reads it, when he’s older… I’m…okay with him seeing…this version.”
Her throat closed.
“Me too,” she whispered.
Gillian looked between them.
“So we’re…a go?” she asked. “With the minor corrections?”
“Yes,” Charlotte said.
“Yes,” Dominic echoed.
“Then I’ll send notes to Lila and the fact-checker,” James said, standing. “And I’ll warn Serena and your PR team to start drafting talking points.”
“Talking points,” Charlotte repeated faintly. “Right.”
Gillian packed up her tablet.
“I’ll coordinate timing with the Aspen press hits,” she said. “If we do this right, the story about your…personal lives will amplify the message about the property, not overshadow it.”
“Love that you think we can…do anything right in this arena,” Dominic muttered.
She smiled.
“You’d be surprised,” she said.
When they were alone again, the room felt suddenly too large.
He walked over and turned off the screen.
The white wall felt naked without their mess projected onto it.
“How bad do you think it’ll be?” she asked quietly. “When it runs.”
“Bad,” he said. “Then…less bad. Then…background noise.”
“And in between?” she pressed.
“In between…” He shrugged. “Headlines. Opinions. Think pieces about ‘modern legacy’ written by people who barely pay their rent. Some people will be…supportive. Some will call you…irresponsible. Some will call me…predatory. None of them will know the whole story.”
“Lila knows more of it than most,” Charlotte said.
“Yes,” he said. “And she didn’t make us look like saints. That helps.”
She sank onto the sofa, suddenly exhausted.
“Are we doing the right thing?” she asked. “For him?”
He sat beside her, not touching, but close enough that she could feel the heat of his body.
“I don’t know if there *is* a ‘right thing,’” he said. “There’s just…less wrong. No matter what we do, he’ll have opinions when he’s older. We’re just trying to give him less to resent.”
“Low bar,” she said, half-laughing.
“Realistic bar,” he corrected.
She looked at him.
“I’m scared,” she said.
“I know,” he said. “Me too.”
He lifted a hand.
Hesitated.
Let it fall back to his knee.
Boundaries.
Slow.
For him as much as for her.
“We’ll get through it,” he said.
“How can you be so sure?” she asked.
He smiled, small and wry.
“Because we got through Lila’s draft without either of us throwing a chair,” he said. “That bodes well.”
She laughed, the sound shaky but real.
“Progress,” she murmured.
“Always,” he said.
Her phone buzzed.
She glanced down.
A push alert from an industry gossip site.
*Exclusive: Inside the Bombshell Profile That Will Rock the Hotel World!*
Her blood ran cold.
She clicked.
A short, breathless piece had already gone up.
Speculating.
Quoting “sources close to the families” about “a controversial upcoming feature in a major newspaper” that would reveal “the personal entanglements behind the shiny new Aspen partnership.”
No details yet.
Just enough to stoke the fire.
Her stomach dropped.
“They know,” she said, voice barely audible.
He took her phone, eyes scanning quickly.
“Of course they do,” he said tightly. “Lila works in a newsroom. Newsrooms leak. Someone heard. Connected dots.”
“This wasn’t supposed to…” She broke off, breath catching. “We were supposed to…control this.”
“We still can,” he said, jaw set. “We move up the timetable. We talk to Lila. To her editor. To *The Times*’s PR. We don’t let some blog define this as a ‘bombshell’ before the piece even runs.”
Her vision tunneled.
“Mother is going to…kill me,” she whispered.
He set the phone down and, for the first time since the urgent care hallway, reached for her without hesitation.
His hand closed around hers, warm and solid.
“Hey,” he said. “Look at me.”
She did.
His eyes were steady.
“You are not alone in this,” he said. “Not anymore. She can yell. The internet can…froth. But you and I…we’re in this together. *We* decide what we say. *We* stand next to each other when it hits. No one else gets to…frame it without our consent.”
Tears burned at the back of her eyes.
“I hate that you’re…good at speeches,” she croaked.
“It’s a burden,” he said. “I bear it well.”
She laughed wetly.
He squeezed her hand.
“Call your mother,” he said. “I’ll call Lila.”
She took a breath.
Nodded.
They let go.
Walked back toward their respective fires.
The match had been lit.
There was no putting it out now.
The only choice left was whether to be consumed—or to find a way to walk through the flames without losing themselves completely.
***