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Franco’s mouth drops open. “As in, Graham Nathaniel Slaughter’s daughter?”

“The one and only.”

Franco rattles through his own rapid-fire hello: He’s a Georgetown alum (who cares) whose dad owns a marketing company that does a ton of contract work for Lockheed Martin (go to hell), and he remembers the moment of my father’s perp walk like it was 9/11 (he was nineteen, in an Intro to Advertising class). He’s been hoping for a documentary like ours his entire adult life.

“It’s so cool to see you in person,” he says to me, shaking my hand. “I feel honored.”

I despise Franco immediately.

“Give her some space to settle,” Daniel says as if he’s not actively suffocating me, “and then you can bother her all you want. Let’s get some drinks going.”

We are summarily slammed into the flow of the club. I scramble to keep up: Another round of intros as Franco ushers Felicity and Alyssa up to the booths and insists that he is at our service. Franco’s model girlfriend—or whatever she is, her name is Magnolia apparently—looks at us over her red-tinted glasses and offers a disinterested smile. Daniel waves over our sweet-faced bottle girl to order some drink package or another.

“Okay,” Alyssa says, leaning closer to Felicity and me while the grown men are distracted by our server’s award-winning smile. “What exactly are we doing here? How is this helping with your”—she struggles for the word—”investigation?”

“I need something from the cameraman,” I say as Felicity tucks themself possessively against me. “I’ll handle it. Don’t worry about it.”

“Morgan.”

“Just look pretty and make sure I don’t get too fucked up.”

Felicity chimes in, “Yeah, you’ll be fine.”

Alyssa chews on her lip, unsure.

Whatever. Felicity’s right. She’ll be fine. All she has to do is be here—let her presence tell these men that I’m not alone in the room, that someone’s keeping an eye on me, that they need to watch themselves. Even she can handle that.

It’s loud. The bass of the music thumps through the floor and rattles my sternum. Everybody talks at once. The heat of so many bodies packed together is only cut by the October breeze coming through the open ceiling, chilling the sweat on the back of my neck.

I’m not built for this. My brain roars on overdrive, nitpicking my eye contact, the way I’m holding my hands, the smallest muscle twitches of my facial expressions. I look perfect, but it’s a performance—it’s all a show, every piece and movement consciously controlled.

Daniel insists on making my drink for me. In the back corner of the VIP booth, he talks me through the liquor and mixer combinations, preens about how he’d make good money as a bartender if he weren’t so dedicated to his craft. He gets something out of it, I think. Showing me what to do, explaining the alcohol content, being the man introducing me to new tastes and new clubs and new people. I smile and flatter him like it’s my job, because it is. I need him happy and drunk and pliant. I need him with his guard down.

Tonight, I need to be the girl he wants. No matter how hard it is.

To my left, Felicity and Alyssa are being regaled with Franco’s tales of his adventures as a marketing industry nepo baby, consulting for a military contractor that builds bombs to drop on children in other countries, while Magnolia looks on. Felicity keeps glancing at me. I offer a half shrug: I’m good here.

Daniel asks me to try whatever concoction he’s made. I throw it back and it burns. Nearly knocks the wind out of me. Fifty percent fruit, fifty percent lighter fluid.

“Easy,” he says, laughing, when I cough. “Easy. There we go.” Then, like it’s nothing, “You really had me going for a moment with the whole transitioning thing.”

I glare at him over my glass, still struggling to regain my composure. My brain is too full of noises and strobing lights to approach this with the level of care required, but under no circumstances can Daniel know I’m not firing on all cylinders.

I want to rip his throat out with my teeth.

“You believed me?” I ask.

“I mean—you never know these days.” He laughs nervously. “Not that, uh, being transgender is bad. I’m not an asshole. All I’m saying is, it surprised me. Especially since it’d be a shame. If you were.”

“And what do you mean by that?”

He steels himself.

“It’d be a waste,” he says.

Neither of us says anything for a moment. Each waiting for the other to move first, some broken game of chess.

I say, “Of course it was bullshit.”