Page 67 of Boardroom Sins

22

RAE

LAZAREV GLOBAL ANNUAL GALA

The Plaza Hotel, Grand Ballroom

Saturday, November 22, 2025 | 6:00 PM

The car is a black Rolls Royce with tinted windows. The driver, dressed in full chauffeur regalia down to the peaked cap with an interlockedLLlogo on it, holds the door open for me without a word. I slide inside.

We pull away from the curb. As we depart, I watch my building shrink in the rear window. My crappy little fire escape. My crappy little window unit. My crappy life, getting smaller and smaller, until we turn a corner and it’s gone.

I check my phone, mostly out of anxiety and/or misplaced hope. I don’t have any instructions from Lukas from this point forward, so I’m really flying blind here.

I kind of assumed he’d be in the car. He’s definitely not. He’s sort of a hard guy to miss.

So I sit alone in the back of this fancy sedan, wearing a dress that feels too sexy to even be touching the skin of someone like me, heading to a party where I know exactly zero people.

I don’t see how this could go badly, do you?

The driver takes us over the bridge into Manhattan, through Midtown, then north toward the Upper East Side. We pass restaurants I’ve only ever read about, buildings with doormen in white gloves, women in fur coats stepping out of other black sedans.

It’s painfully obvious that I don’t belong here.I don’t belong here. I don’t belong here. I don’t belong?—

The car stops. We’re here.

I look up to see we’re in front of a massive stone building. It looks like a museum, or a mansion, or maybe both. Columns frame the entrance. A red carpet runs from the curb to the front doors. Photographers line both sides, cameras flashing.

“Ma’am?” The driver is holding my door open. I didn’t even notice him get out.

I step onto the curb. The heels wobble under me but I catch myself on the car door.

“Thank you,” I say.

He nods, unsmiling, and turns away.

And I’m alone.

There’s no loneliness worse than being alone in a crowd. Glamorous people stream past me toward the entrance, dressed to the nines. Everyone looks like they’ve done this a thousandtimes before. They laugh and air-kiss each other and pose for the cameras like it’s nothing.

I stand there like a traffic cone in a cocktail dress.

Where is Lukas? He said I was attending as his guest. Doesn’t that imply he’d actually be here to, I don’t know,guestme?

I pull out my phone and check again, just to be sure. Again, there’s nothing.

A photographer swings his camera in my direction. The flash blinds me. I blink and stumble back.

“Sorry, sorry,” I mumble to him.

When he realizes I’m clearly a nobody, he scowls, as if he’s mad at me for even wasting the space on his camera’s memory card.

The crowd keeps flowing around me. I’m a rock in a river.

Okay. Okay, it’s fine. I can do this. I can walk into a party by myself. I’ve done harder things. I’ve paid bills. I’ve filed taxes. I’ve watched Gideon detox in a hospital bed.

This is just a dumb party.