Hef could be so shallow. Everything he valued was skin-deep. That world made me shallow, too. I’d forgotten how to look past the surface, how to go deeper, to where real connection happened. Losing Greg had made me realize just how painful deep connections were when they were gone. So had losing my dad. Maybe the trauma of those two losses had already primed me to live in a world that was only surface level before I got to the mansion. Either way, I was susceptible.
