10. Monique
Monique
The overnight queue is cleaned by half past the hour.
The overnight manager's note about a housekeeping issue had resolved itself before I came on, so I closed it out and moved to the next item. By the time the lobby settled, I was already three steps ahead of everything in it.
Iris comes in with Beckett at the quieter stretch of the night.
I know Iris's footsteps, quick and slightly uneven. Tonight they're slower.
She comes to the desk while Beckett stays near the entrance with one hand in his jacket pocket, thumb moving over the screen of his phone, shoulders back and easy.
"Hey," Iris says.
"Hey." I glance at her.
Her elbows come down on the counter, but her shoulders are pulled in by a quarter inch on each side.
"Late night?" I ask.
"We were at that new place again on Broad." She glances back at Beckett. His eyes are still on his phone. "He liked it."
I tilt my head. "And you?"
"It was fine." A pause. "The lighting was terrible. I kept trying to take photos, but they all came out wrong."
"That happens."
"Yeah." Her mouth does a small thing. "He said I was being annoying about it."
I look at my screen. "Mm."
"He was joking."
"I know," I say.
She straightens off the counter and gives one more glance toward Beckett, who is still on his phone. She looks back at me, and I think she's going to say something else, but she doesn't.
She says good night and crosses back to him.
His phone disappears into his pocket, and his hand goes to the small of her back, steering her toward the elevator before she's finished her turn.
I watch them go until the elevator doors close. Then I go back to the screen.
Weston comes downstairs a while later. I know the elevator and the sound of his footsteps. He stops at the counter.
His eyes are on me. "We need to talk."
"I know."
"Tonight?"
The overnight runner is on the fourth floor. Juan is handling an early check-in at the side desk. There are two items still open in the queue. "I can't. Not yet."
He nods, but he doesn't move toward the elevator yet. His hand goes to the back of his neck.
"Then not that," he says. "Something easier."
He reaches into his jacket and unfolds a sheet of paper on the counter between us — a floor plan, creased soft from handling, three colors of ink circling the same stretch of it.
"The coastal property. I can't get the arrival right. Guests come in off the water side, and the whole flow fights them." He turns it so it faces me. "You read rooms better than anyone I've got on it. I'd take your eyes on it. When you have a minute that isn't this one."
I look at the plan. I don't mean to. It's a reflex, the same one that catches a double-booking before it becomes a fight, but my eyes are already moving across the entry, the drop-off, the distance to the desk.
I can see the problem before I've decided to look for it.
"Your check-in's too far from the door," I say, before I can stop myself.
Something shifts in his face. "See," he says quietly. "That. That's what I mean."
I slide the plan back across the counter. "I have a few minutes another night. Not tonight."
"Another night then." He folds it carefully, a ridiculous smile lingering on his face, and tucks it away. "I'll hold you to it."
He goes back to the elevator, and I hear the doors close.
Looking at the screen, I don't move for a moment.
Then I go back to work.
Georgia calls during the quiet stretch after midnight. I step into the corridor behind the desk to answer, close enough to see if Juan needs me in the lobby.
"How are you?" she says.
I lean against the wall with my eyes on the ceiling. "I'm working."
"That's not what I asked."
"I know." I push my hair back. "There's a lot going on."
"What kind of lot?"
The pool. His hand at my jaw. His abs and biceps. "I've been asked for my opinion on things," I say. "For the coastal property. Layout, flow."
"Are you good at it?"
"I've spent years in hotels."
"Again, that's not what I mean."
I look at the wall. "Yes. I think so."
"Okay." She's quiet for a moment. "Do you think you deserved to be asked, or do you think he was just being nice?"
My mouth closes.
"Monique."
"I don't know," I say, and that's truer than I'd like it to be, and also not entirely true.
We both know it, but Georgia doesn't push it.
We hang up, and I stand in the corridor with the phone in my hand and the question sitting somewhere around my sternum. Whether I deserved it or if he was just being nice.
The difference between those two things is the gap I've been living inside for almost a year, and I haven't found the bottom of it yet.
I go back to the desk.
Iris and Beckett come through the lobby again later. He's going to the car for something, and she waits by the elevator.
I watch her in the ten seconds he's not in the room. Her shoulders come up a fraction. She takes a breath, longer than the ones before it, and rolls her neck once, quick, like something's been sitting on it.
When he comes back through the entrance, her shoulders drop back down before she's turned to look at him, like her body is already responding to the sound of his footsteps.
I think about my mother laughing too quickly at things that weren't funny.
I write nothing down and go back to work.
When Victor walks into The Langford, I know him before my brain has finished the sentence.
It's his right shoulder. It always drops when he's been drinking. He's bigger and smaller at the same time, still wide through the chest, but the face has gone slack at the jaw. His hair is further gray.
He scans the lobby, and his eyes find me.
My shoulders fold inward half an inch.
I catch it happening and stop it — my chin dropping, hands moving together on the counter, folding into that small, still, available position. Diana held like this at the kitchen table for eighteen years.
I'm doing it before I've chosen to. My body remembers it.
Don't.
I straighten, pull my shoulders back, level my chin, and place my hands flat on the counter, palms down. I breathe. My sternum aches from the effort.
He reaches the desk.
Up close, there's the smell of a long drive on him — stale air, something underneath it. His eyes move across my face. He settles his forearms on the counter.
"There you are," he says.
I don't answer. My hands stay flat.
"You don't call back." He takes in the lobby, and his chin comes up slightly. "Nice place. You're doing well for yourself."
His eyes come back to me, and there's nothing in them that resembles being glad about it.
"Had to call a lot of hotels. Do you know how many hotels are in this state?
" He pauses. "Someone here was nice enough to confirm you were working. A man named Juan. He doesn’t know who I am and why I was looking for you. "
He looks at my hands on the counter. "But then you were always like that, even as a girl. Difficult. Had to handle you carefully. That was my job."
Handle.
It sits in my chest where he put it.
"I don't have anything to say to you," I say. My voice is even. It takes everything I have to make it even.
"That's fine." He crosses his arms, leans back a fraction, and his voice drops into the register I grew up inside, not raised, just the low steady weight of it, the tone that made every room I was ever in feel like it was shrinking at the edges.
"I'll talk. You can listen. That's how we used to do it. "
His eyes stay on my face. "I need some help.
Money. Nothing dramatic. You're clearly doing well.
You can afford to help the man who brought you into this world.
That's not an unreasonable thing to ask.
" He pauses. "You were always a selfish girl.
Your mother used to make excuses for it. She was wrong about a lot of things."
My palms press flat against the counter. I look at a point slightly past his shoulder — the far wall, the lamp against it.
I count my own breaths, one and two and three, and I wait.
"Sir." Juan is at my left. I didn't hear him come. His voice is certain. "Step back from the desk."
Victor looks at Juan for a long moment. Juan's eyes don't move. Victor's jaw shifts.
He looks back at me. "Stop ignoring my calls."
Then he turns and walks back through the lobby. The door swings shut behind him.
Juan stands at my elbow for a moment. "Are you okay? I’m sorry, Monique. I didn’t know it was your father."
"I am. It’s okay. It’s not your fault. Thank you for telling me."
“No problem. Let me know if you need anything." After a while, he drifts back to his post.
My hands are still unsteady, but I stay at my desk and finish the queue.
I route a room service call from 314. The billing question from 507 gets the same answer as before; the guest thanks me and hangs up.
My hands move over the keyboard, my voice stays the same each time, and I do what I do.
At the end of it, I go to the staff bathroom at the back of the building and close the door.
I sit down on the floor against the wall because my legs have decided they're finished. I put my hands over my face, and the sound that comes out of me is not the careful quiet kind. I break down completely, despite my best efforts to hold it in.
I cry for the counter. For my hands folding themselves into my mother's hands without me asking them to.
For my mom's cardigan folded the way she always folded it because I couldn't leave it there. For every night at that kitchen table when my dad’s voice dropped into that register and I watched her hands fold.
For eighteen years of saying nothing. For leaving after she was gone because there was nothing left to stay for.
When it stops, my face is cold and wet.
My tired body stands up at the sink and runs cold water. I press my wet hands to my face and look at myself in the mirror — the dark circles, the redness around my eyes, still here.
I can do this.
I change out of my work shirt, find the pool key, and go.
The pool is dark except for the underwater lights, green-blue and still. I stand at the edge and look at it. The filtration hums. The water moves in small slow patterns at the edge where the tile meets the surface.
I step in from the side. The water takes my weight. I push off from the wall and stroke. Pull, catch, recovery, and breathe.
My arms move through the water, and the sequence holds. For several lengths of the pool, I’m alone in the dark doing the strokes Weston showed me.
My breathing stays, and I think, There. There it is.
Then Victor's voice arrives. Handle. My chest closes around it before I've decided to let it.
I breathe wrong — too fast, too shallow, a gasp instead of the turn and pull.
The stroke breaks, and I lose the sequence. The water that was holding me stops and starts being everywhere at once, in my ears and against my face.
My feet search for the floor, and it isn't where I expect it. My chest locks, and I go down once and come up coughing and go down again.
The filtration hum is inside my skull now, and the pool lights are fractured above me, green and broken, and I can't find the wall.
I start to go under.