Chapter 5: First Morning
The room was too quiet to trust.
It wasn’t comforting silence. It was engineered. Designer silence. The kind you find in five-star hotels where even the air feels expensive and artificial. If I had won this experience through some lucky draw event I might have enjoyed the luxury, but I did not deserve to be here. In a way this was ’luck’ too, of course. But it did not feel like lady luck smiled on me this time, but rather, it felt like an error that shouldn’t have happened.
I lay awake in the Roen Group’s executive sleeping suite, which I refused to call a bedroom. I had not slept. Not even close.
Instead, I’d spent the night catastrophizing in high definition. Every possible humiliation I could suffer as a fake heiress played in my head like an algorithm fed playlist I couldn’t turn off. The reels of doom scrolled inside my eyes.
Trip during a speech.
Say something historically offensive by accident.
Get caught googling "what is an IPO."
The bed was perfect. Too perfect. The mattress was oppressively soothing. The sheets were tucked with clinical precision. I felt like a fraud just lying on them. They knew. The blankets. They knew.
Eventually I started whispering to myself.
"If I just lie still long enough, the system will assume I’m defunct and discard me."
"If I hold my breath, maybe I’ll get logged out."