One Last Ever After

March 2026. Present day.

“These are your key cards,” the woman behind the front desk said, placing two plastic cards on the counter and pushing them toward Valentina. “Breakfast is served from seven until ten every morning in the dining area just past the lobby. The pool is open until nine, and there are vending machines and an ice machine on every other floor. If you need fresh towels, room service, directions, reservations, or really anything at all, just press zero from the phone in your room and reception will take care of it.”

She delivered the entire speech with impressive enthusiasm for someone working in a hotel where the carpet had seen better decades and one of the lamps behind her flickered every few seconds.

“I hope you have an amazing stay.”

The smile she gave Valentina was bright enough to suggest she truly believed that was possible.

“I’m sure I’ll have the time of my life,” Valentina replied.

The words came out as dry as intended, but she paired them with a polite smile and a sincere, “Thank you,” before picking up the cards. There was no reason to punish the receptionist for being cheerful. She was only doing her job, and Valentina had already met enough unpleasant people during her shifts at the supermarket to know how exhausting it was when strangers decided their bad mood belonged to everyone nearby.

Besides, the woman did not need to know that Valentina had not returned to Las Vegas in search of an amazing stay, a life-changing experience, or whatever other promise was probably printed across the hotel brochure sitting between two bowls of complimentary mints.

She had come because it was March.

That was reason enough.

Valentina picked up the key cards, slipped them into her tote bag, and thanked the receptionist once more before taking hold of her suitcase and heading toward the elevators. The ride to the fourth floor came with a steady mechanical hum and a small jolt at the end that sent her suitcase rolling forward until she caught the handle.

When the doors opened, she followed the faded signs down a hallway lined with identical beige doors and framed photographs of Las Vegas that looked as though they had been chosen several renovations ago.

Her room was near the end.

She tapped the key card against the lock, pushed the door open, and dragged her suitcase inside before leaving it beside the entrance. Unpacking could wait.

Valentina crossed the room and let herself fall onto the bed, landing on her back with enough force to make the mattress springs complain beneath her. She released the breath she had been holding since the plane touched down and looked around.

The same cream walls. The same dark wooden dresser beneath the television. The same red patterned curtains that did very little to keep the Nevada sun from forcing its way into the room. Even the print above the bed looked familiar, although she supposed there were only so many photographs of the Strip a moderately priced hotel could hang before someone had to start getting creative.

“Here we go again, Lina,” she murmured.

She had said some version of it every year since 2023, usually within five minutes of reaching the room and before she had enough time to question whether returning was a terrible idea.

It was always the beginning of March. Always Las Vegas. Always this hotel. She booked the same number of nights, requested the same floor when it was available, and spent the week following a routine she would have denied having if anyone pointed it out. She ate badly, slept at strange hours, wandered through casinos without gambling, and kept moving until she was too tired to think.

The first trip had been booked out of desperation.

Four years earlier, March had taken everything she thought she understood about her life and rearranged it without asking permission. She had spent most of that month crying in ways that would have embarrassed her if she had possessed enough energy to care. By the following March, she was doing better, technically. She could get through an entire day without crying, and she no longer woke every morning with the brief, stupid belief that none of it had happened.

Then March returned.

New York seemed to shrink around her. Every restaurant held a conversation she could still repeat, every street came with some memory she had spent months trying to bury, and wherever she went, there was always something waiting to remind her of him.

So she bought a plane ticket to Las Vegas and booked a hotel she could afford without pretending the price did not matter.

There had been a time when Valentina Davenport did not check hotel rates.

She had stayed in suites with private terraces, ordered room service without reading the prices, and spent vacations choosing between restaurants that required reservations months in advance. Her closet had once held more designer shoes than any reasonable person needed and enough handbags to make her younger self deeply offended by the practical black tote she now carried everywhere.

Those days had ended rather decisively.

Now she saved throughout the year for one week in Las Vegas, compared flight prices across several tabs, and considered complimentary breakfast a genuine selling point. The hotel was clean, safe, and close enough to the Strip that she could reach the noise without paying to sleep directly inside it. Luxury had become less important once she learned how expensive survival could be.

She came back the following March, then again the year after that. By the fourth trip, the receptionist’s speech, the flickering lamp, and the same tired hotel room felt almost familiar.

Valentina no longer lived in New York. Circumstances she preferred not to revisit had pushed her across the river and into Montclair, New Jersey, where rent was merely unreasonable instead of openly hostile. It should have created enough distance.

But she still lived close enough for March to find her.

Close enough for the city and the memory of Alexander Mercer to press in from every direction until staying home felt like trying to breathe in a room with no windows.

Four years had passed since he left her.

But March still belonged to him.

It was the month she met him. Right here in Las Vegas. The month he proposed. And, one year later, just before their wedding, the month he vanished without an explanation or even a goodbye.

Her best friend, Sophie Reynolds, an incurable hopeless romantic with far too much faith in meaningful timing, had once called the whole thing almost poetic. Then she had seen Valentina’s murderous expression and wisely downgraded it to heartbreaking.

Valentina thought life had a cruel sense of humor.

And apparently, she had one too, since she kept coming back to the place where it all started.

Some people might have called that masochism.

Maybe it was.

Valentina preferred to think of it as spite.

Every year, she returned to Las Vegas and tried to make March mean something else. Anything else. She wanted new memories strong enough to replace the ones Alexander Mercer had given her.

Memories she never would have had if, six years ago, around this exact time, she hadn’t met him right here in Las Vegas.

Twenty years old. Too proud to be impressed, too curious to walk away, and far too stupid to know that one conversation would become the beginning of the worst heartbreak of her life.

Now, lying on the bed in her hotel room, thinking about all of it, Valentina felt her eyes begin to burn.

She groaned and pressed the heels of her hands over her eyes, refusing to let the tears fall. Absolutely not. She was not doing this. She had cried enough over Alexander Mercer to personally raise the water level of the Hudson, and she refused to donate one more tear to the cause.

Besides, she had been doing fine.

She had not cried over him in years.

So the fact that she felt like crying now, on the first afternoon of her fourth ridiculous pilgrimage to Las Vegas, felt less like sadness and more like betrayal.

Valentina dragged her hands down her face and stared at the ceiling.

Maybe this March was defective.

Or maybe she was.

Or maybe Alexander Mercer had managed to ruin her so thoroughly that even four years later, he could still make her cry from a different coast.

Valentina kept her eyes on the ceiling and pretended, just for a second, that she was looking straight at him instead.

“I hate you, Xander,” she said bitterly. “I hate you, and I wish I’d never met you.”