His phone buzzed. His daughter, for the third time. Call me, Dad.

The Summer Wing was supposed to inspire "high energy and peak performance." Instead, it felt like a desert. His shirt was sticking to his back. The air conditioning had a rhythmic hum that sounded, to his exhausted brain, like a countdown clock.

Priya, buzzing from champagne, went down to buy gum from the lobby shop. Arthur, unable to sleep, went down to walk the empty streets. Eleanor, as she did every night, went down to return a book to the little "take one, leave one" shelf near the concierge.

They stood in a triangle of beige marble, not looking at one another. The elevators chimed. The night auditor, a young man named Leo, watched them on the security monitors. He saw a girl on the rise, a man on the decline, and a woman who had simply stopped moving.

"Why?" a new guest once asked.

"Beta, when will you come home?" her mother asked.

Arthur Vance had been a titan once. Now, at fifty-three, he was a titan who had been politely asked to "transition into consultancy." His current client was a startup he despised. He sat in the Summer Wing’s conference room—walls the color of overheated sand, lighting harsh as noon—staring at a spreadsheet that wouldn't balance.

He didn't answer. He couldn't explain that he was sitting in a room that cost $800 a night, surrounded by other men in identical blue suits, all pretending they weren't terrified of becoming irrelevant. He closed the laptop. For ten minutes, he just watched the automated blinds rotate slowly, casting prison-bar shadows across the table.