15. Weston
Weston
She's still asleep.
We slept through the night. Her weight is against my chest, her hand over mine on her waist, her breathing slow. I look at the ceiling. She's actually here with me, and I can’t believe it.
Every Friday when I handed over the key card, every trip downstairs for a printer that wasn't broken, part of me was waiting for her to remember me. Now she's here.
Her hand is over mine, and she's asleep.
I’m acutely aware that I have no idea what to do with any of this.
Don't ruin it.
I don't move. Her shoulder shifts, and her hand pulls mine a half inch tighter. Looking at the light coming through the windows, I breathe.
She wakes gradually. Her breathing changes, and I wait for her to open her eyes.
She turns over and looks at me. Her hair is loose, her eyes still soft.
"Morning." I kiss her.
She smiles. "Morning.”
She reaches up and presses her palm flat against my jaw. I cover her hand with mine and hold it there, and we stay like that for some time while the tide works at the rocks outside.
She showers, and I make coffee. When she comes back into the kitchen her hair is wet, and she looks around — two mugs, instant, a bag that might be sugar.
"Does your coastal property have a better kitchen than this?" she says.
"It's going to have a restaurant."
"That's not what I asked."
"Yes," I say. "Much better kitchen."
She takes the mug from my hand and looks at the floor plan I've unrolled on the table — the Driftline arrival sequence — and her eyes start moving across it.
"Can I look at these?"
"Yeah. That's why I unrolled them."
She sets the mug down, puts both hands on the plan's edges, and leans over it. Her finger traces the arrival sequence without touching the paper — entrance, drop-off, the distance from the door to the desk. She goes quiet for about thirty seconds.
"The check-in is too far from the lobby entrance," she says.
"The architects opened up the arrival sightline. Sixty feet."
"Sixty feet of marble between a tired guest and the person who can give them a room key is sixty feet of I should have stayed somewhere else." She looks up at me. "I think you need to pull the desk forward. Reorient it so it's the first thing they see when they come through the door."
I've looked at this plan thirty-seven times, and I haven't seen it once.
"What else?" I say.
She finds the staffing schedule in the folder at the end of the table without being pointed toward it. She opens it and reads for about a minute and then sets it flat on top of the floor plan.
"Your shift handover creates a gap in peak-hour coverage.
The outgoing shift logs out before the incoming is fully deployed.
" She points at the overlap point. "Stagger the change — senior staff fifteen minutes earlier, hold the juniors until the floor is confirmed covered.
You close the gap without adding a single hour. "
I go to the door and call in Liam and the two project leads who've been running the staffing models. They come in with tablets and coffee.
Monique walks them through both observations in about twelve minutes, drawing on the margin of the floor plan with a pencil she found on the windowsill.
When she finishes, the two project leads agree and look at each other.
The investor meeting happens in the site trailer in the afternoon. Adrian Reeve comes in, shakes hands, and sits down, wearing a dark suit and a good watch. Polished is the word.
He shakes Monique's hand. "How long have you been with The Langford?"
"Almost a year," she says and takes a seat.
"Remarkable property." Smooth. Pleasant. His eyes move to mine while she answers and then back to her. Nothing you could point at.
Under the table, Monique's hand is in mine.
She tenses. One contraction — her fingers closing against my palm, then releasing. It's over in under a second, and she doesn't look at me, and I don't look at her.
Her voice stays level as she answers his next question. Her hand stays in mine, fingers loose now, but present.
The meeting runs an hour. Reeve asks questions that already have answers, checking whether your answer matches what he already knows. When he leaves and the door closes, I look at her.
"What was that?" I say.
She looks at the empty doorway. "The way he asks questions. He's not asking because he wants to know — he's asking to find the gap. The part that's soft." She turns to me. "Like he already knows the building's floor plan and he's walking the rooms to see which one doesn't lock."
I look at the door and turn that over.
She's right. I've been running the same read on Reeve for two meetings, and I haven't put it into words until she did it in one sentence.
The day runs long. By the time the light goes flat off the water, Monique is at the kitchen table with her shoes off and her legs drawn up under her on the chair, working through the staffing model for the third time with a notepad in her lap, her handwriting small and illegible to anyone who isn't her.
"Pool," I say.
She looks up. One eyebrow. "Now?"
"You've been avoiding it since."
"I’m here, just busy."
She looks at me over the notepad. "This is a terrible idea."
"Probably," I say.
She puts the notepad down and comes.
The pool is narrow and still, and the underwater lights have turned the water pale green. She stands at the edge with her arms crossed, taking stock.
"Get in," I say.
"I'm thinking."
"You're stalling."
"I'm actually thinking, you know." She sighs and gets in.
I get in after her. She faces me, her hair already floating out, and I think, not for the first time, that I'm in serious trouble where this woman is concerned.
She tries the stroke sequence. Her elbow goes wrong on the first attempt, and I step in, hand on her forearm. She adjusts without looking at me, tries it again, and gets it right.
“Better,” I say.
“Oh right.” She smiles and does it a third time.
We work through the sequence for a while. At some point, she lifts her hand off the water and brings it flat down on the surface, sending a sheet of water directly into my face.
I stand there with it dripping off my chin. “That was on purpose.”
“Was it?” Her eyes are wide.
She's already backing toward the far end of the pool. She's moving quickly in the way that means she absolutely did it on purpose.
I start moving toward her.
She goes under, her feet kicking up and her hands going out. She’s up, presses both hands to her mouth as if that might stop it. The laugh comes through anyway, unmistakably higher than her speaking voice.
I stop moving and just look at her.
She stops laughing and looks back to me. The pool is quiet.
I close the distance, and my hands go to her waist under the water. She puts her hands on my arms, keeping her eyes on me, and the coast is dark outside the windows.
She was laughing thirty seconds ago. She was actually just laughing, in a pool, at night, with me. How is this my life?
“You're not going anywhere,” I say.
Her hands tighten on my arms. “No,” she says.
She's here. She's choosing to be here with me. And I've been so focused on giving her room to leave that I didn't notice when she stopped needing it.
I lean down and kiss her, and she comes up onto her toes to meet me. I smile and laugh. The full version. From the chest. The one I stopped using at some point in my twenties and apparently still have.
She stops and looks at me with her hand on my jaw. "You actually laughed."
"I know."
"Like a real one." Her mouth curves.
"Don't analyze it."
"I'm not analyzing it," she says. "I'm just noting it for the record."
"Well, the record is closed," I say and kiss her again, and she's still smiling when I do.
We end up on the pool deck afterward, backs against the wall, feet in the water, the night around us.
She tells me about a woman at Harbor House who kept a photo of her daughter in her shoe for two years because it was the only place she knew it would be safe. Then about a hotel night manager in Trenton who did crossword puzzles and taught her how to solve cryptic clues. She still can.
I tell her about learning to drive at fourteen on my father’s property in Maine, his voice from the passenger seat on the service road — It's just weight distribution, so don't fight it. Feel where the car wants to go.
After a while, I find myself talking about Iris at thirteen, sleeping on my floor in the weeks after the funeral. She’d lie on her back and stare at the ceiling. I’d pretend to be asleep because if she thought I was asleep.
Then I tell her about the first Friday I saw her.
“You were at the desk,” I say. “You looked up and said my room was ready, and you said my name and handed over the key.” I look at the water. “That’s when I knew you didn’t remember.”
She's quiet beside me.
“I went upstairs and stood in the suite for about five minutes,” I say.
“I've been checking into hotels since I was twelve years old. Nobody had done that.” I turn to her.
“I rearranged my week. I look at the schedule and move things so I'm in Newport on Fridays.
I want you to know that because I should've said it a long time ago, but I didn't, and I'm saying it now.”
She looks at the water. Her foot moves through it, slow. Then she leans her head against my shoulder.
I put my arm around her, and she lets me.
We sit there on the pool deck with the water around our feet and the coast outside. I turn my head and press my mouth to her hair.
She tilts her face up.
I kiss her once — soft, nothing urgent in it. She kisses me back the same way. Then she puts her forehead to mine and her hand to my jaw. We stay there, her forehead against mine, her hand warm on my face, the pool still around our feet.
Mom. Dad. You would have liked her.
The thought arrives, and I let it stay.
I let it sit there with us in the dark on the pool deck. Monique's forehead is against mine. Her hand is on my jaw.
I'm not going to say it tonight.
But the fact that I'm thinking it and not immediately pushing it aside feels like its own kind of thing. I know it.
I stay exactly where I am.
I haven't said it out loud yet.
But I'm going to.