“I never should have touched you,” Russell D’Angelo says to the empty room.

He twists the lock, toes off his cowboy boots, and leans his forehead against the hotel-room door, against the framed placard. He’s too close to read the emergency evacuation routes it details, even if his eyes weren’t blurry with tears. He pinches the bridge of his nose, hard. This is an emergency, the worst he’s ever been in, and knowing how to exit the building safely won’t help.

He is thinking about how she looked, about what he’d said.

I never meant for this to happen, he’d told her as she’d glared at him from the hallway, her face shocked and pale and heartbroken. He’d kept talking, hating the pleading sound of his voice. I’m sorry.

Russell shakes his head to stop the thoughts. Three paces bring him to the bar cart. He unscrews the cap of the whiskey bottle and lifts it to his mouth, welcoming the burn of the liquor. His eyes are closed, but he can still see them both. Two sets of eyes, two faces, turned toward his. Different faces, but with the same shape to their lips, the same slope of their cheeks. Two women, waiting for an answer Russell didn’t have.

“I’m an idiot,” he tells the room. And it’s true. He hadn’t even noticed what was happening until it was too late. It wasn’t until he was standing in front of an officiant, thirty of their closest friends, three hundred fellow celebrities, and a photographer from People magazine that he’d looked over his bride’s shoulder and caught her sister’s eyes, and the knowledge of the mistake that he was making hit him like a punch to the breastbone, rattling his heart. “I do,” he’d said. I’m fucked, he’d thought. And from that moment on, a part of him has been waiting, counting down toward this place and this night.

You have to choose, she’d told him. Except there isn’t a choice here. Not really. Not at all.