13. Lena
LENA
The yellow roses were wilting.
Two weeks since Stephanie’s murder, and I still couldn’t walk past the florist shop without stopping.
I stood in the staff hallway, police tape stretched across the doorway in bright crime-scene yellow, and watched the petals curl and brown at the edges.
No one had watered them. No one had thought to, or maybe no one could bear to go inside.
The snapdragons she had been arranging before her death drooped in their vases, their white heads bowed like mourners at a funeral.
Thirty-three years. She had been at this hotel longer than I had been alive.
Through the glass, I could see her work station exactly as she had left it.
Secateurs resting on the cutting board. A spool of green ribbon half-unwound.
The arrangement she had been building when I had walked past that last morning, all sunshine and optimism, now sagging from neglect.
She had waved at me with that ribbon trailing from her fingers. Called out something about sunflowers.
I couldn’t remember her exact words. Already they were fading, and I hated myself for not paying closer attention.
The corridor smelled wrong. Cleaning chemicals layered over copper and decay, traces the hazmat crew hadn’t quite erased. I breathed through my mouth and tried not to think about the fountain, about the way the red had pumped through the jets and filled my lobby with the scent of death.
Someone had killed her. Someone she knew. Someone she had trusted enough to meet alone in that storage room while I sat in a conference room debating the merits of local versus imported flower suppliers.
I had been arguing about hydrangeas while Stephanie was dying.
The guilt sat in my chest like a stone. Heavy and cold and impossible to move.
I should have seen something. Should have seen that she was worried, or scared, or meeting someone she shouldn’t have been meeting.
But I had been too wrapped up in my own problems, the stalker and the marriage and the man whose scent I could still smell on my skin.
A maintenance worker rounded the corner, saw me standing there, and quickly reversed direction. They were all doing that today. Avoiding the corridor. Avoiding me. As if grief were contagious, or as if they didn’t know what to say to the woman whose hotel had become a crime scene.
“Ms. Hughes?”
I turned. Sandra stood a few feet away, clipboard pressed to her chest, her face pale and uncertain. Her mascara was smudged at the corners. She had been crying. They all had.
“The florist from the agency is here. For the, um. The arrangements. In the lobby.”
Right. The hotel didn’t stop because someone died. Guests still expected fresh flowers. Events still needed centerpieces. The world kept turning whether we wanted it to or not.
“Send her to my office. I’ll be there in five minutes.”
Sandra nodded and retreated down the corridor.
I looked back at the wilting roses one more time. Then I walked away, leaving Stephanie’s garden to wither behind the police tape.
The morning passed in the endless tasks of running a hotel and the careful act of pretending everything was fine.
Michael found me in my office an hour later.
He stood in the doorway, one hand braced against the frame, looking worse than I had ever seen him.
His suit was wrinkled in places he would normally never allow.
His tie hung loose around his collar, the knot tugged down like he had been pulling at it.
Dark circles carved deep crescents beneath his eyes, and his usually immaculate hair fell across his forehead in disarray.
“Can I come in?”
I nodded, and he crossed to the chair across from my desk. Didn’t sit. Just stood there, hands hanging at his sides, staring at the carpet like he couldn’t quite remember how he had ended up here.
“I keep thinking I should have seen something.” His voice cracked on the last word.
“She was acting strange this week. Quieter than usual. Maybe she was just tired, or dealing with something personal.” He pressed his palm against his forehead, squeezing his eyes shut.
“I should have asked. I should have checked on her.”
“Michael.” I stood, crossed around my desk to him. “This isn’t your fault.”
“Isn’t it?” He looked up, and his eyes were red-rimmed, raw with the kind of grief that couldn’t be hidden. “I’m the general manager. I’m supposed to know what’s happening in this hotel. I’m supposed to protect the people who work here. That’s literally my job, Lena.”
The guilt in his voice matched the guilt in my chest. We were both carrying it, this impossible weight of should-have-known, should-have-seen, should-have-stopped-it.
“She had been here thirty-three years,” he said quietly. “Said your grandmother had excellent taste in flowers.” A ghost of a smile crossed his face, fragile and fleeting. “She said you inherited it.”
“She told me the same thing. Yesterday morning.”
Michael’s expression crumpled. He covered his face with one hand, shoulders curving inward, and I watched the unflappable general manager fall apart in front of me.
“She reminded me of my grandmother.” The words came muffled through his fingers.
“Someone who actually saw me. Not the GM, not the position, not the role I play every day. Just me. Do you know how rare that is? Most people in this industry only see what you can do for them. Stephanie just saw people.”
His voice broke on the last word.
I crossed the remaining distance between us and put my hand on his arm. The fabric of his jacket was damp under my palm. Sweat or tears, I couldn’t tell. He flinched at the touch, then leaned into it, his forehead dropping to my shoulder as a sob escaped him.
I let my hand rest on his back, feeling the tension coiled in his muscles. He shook against me, silent except for the occasional hitched breath, and I held him the way I wished someone had held me when my father died.
“I’m sorry.” The words came muffled against my blazer. “You shouldn’t be comforting me. You have enough to carry without adding my breakdown to the pile.”
“We all lost someone.” I kept my voice gentle. “You’re allowed to grieve, Michael. You knew her better than almost anyone.”
He stayed like that for a long moment. I could feel his breath evening out, his shoulders slowly unclenching, the worst of the storm passing through him and leaving exhaustion in its wake. When he finally pulled back, his eyes were still wet, but his expression was calmer.
“Family is the only thing that matters, in the end.” He wiped his face with the back of his hand, looking almost embarrassed by his own emotion. “That’s what my grandmother used to say. I never really understood what she meant until now.”
“Family?”
“The people who see you. Who know you.” He met my eyes, and there was an intensity that seemed at odds with the grief.
“Stephanie was like that. She knew everyone’s coffee orders.
Everyone’s birthdays. Everyone’s problems and triumphs and secret heartbreaks.
She was the heart of this hotel, and now she’s gone, and I don’t know how to fill that hole. ”
I nodded, not trusting my voice.
Michael straightened his tie, smoothed his jacket, ran his fingers through his hair to restore some semblance of order. The mask of competence sliding back into place, piece by piece. I understood the impulse. I had been doing the same thing all morning.
“I should get back to work. The police want to interview more of the staff this afternoon, and someone needs to coordinate the schedule so we don’t leave any department understaffed.”
“I can handle that.”
“No.” He shook his head firmly, a flicker of stubbornness in his jaw. “You’ve been handling everything since your father died. Let me take this one thing off your plate. Please.”
I wanted to argue. This was my hotel, my responsibility, my staff. But Michael was already moving toward the door, and the exhaustion in my bones was too heavy to fight.
“Thank you,” I said.
He paused in the doorway, one hand on the frame. Looked back at me over his shoulder.
And for just a moment, his eyes went flat. Cold. The grief vanished, replaced by calculation.
Then he smiled, warm and sad and perfectly sympathetic, and the moment was gone so fast I wondered if I had imagined it.
“I’m not going anywhere, Lena.” His voice was gentle. “Whatever you need, whenever you need it. I’m here.”
The door closed behind him, and I stood there for a long moment, trying to name the unease crawling up my spine.
I couldn’t. The grief was too fresh, the exhaustion too deep. I was seeing shadows where there were none.
I went back to my desk and tried to work. The hours crawled past, each minute heavier than the last.
Detective Marsh arrived at three with an update I didn’t want to hear.
We sat in the conference room, Michael and me on one side of the long table, the detective and her partner on the other. My coffee had gone cold two hours ago, but I kept my hands wrapped around the mug anyway, needing something to hold.
“The blood in the fountain was Stephanie’s.
” Marsh’s voice was clinical. Detached. The voice of someone who delivered bad news for a living and had learned to separate herself from it.
“Based on decomposition rates and lividity, she was killed approximately eighteen to twenty-four hours before her body was discovered. Which means the fountain incident happened after her death.”
I processed that slowly. The red water pumping through the jets. The copper smell filling my lobby. The child’s scream that had ripped through the vacation morning calm. Stephanie had already been dead when someone fed her blood into my fountain.
The coffee turned to acid in my stomach.