16. Monique
Monique
I leave the property in the early morning while the coast is still gray, and the gravel is loud under my feet. My hair is still slightly damp from the pool the night before.
I arrive at my apartment building. The bakery smells of burned sugar and something acrid underneath it when I push through the door.
Rosa is behind the counter with a wooden spoon in one hand and her phone pressed between her ear and her shoulder. She's talking to someone.
In the corner, her nephew is asleep on a stool with his head against the wall and his arms crossed over his chest, mouth slightly open, entirely at peace with himself.
Rosa holds up one finger at me without breaking stride. She says something into the phone that ends decisively, waits through the response, says something shorter and even more decisive, waits again, and then says in English, with great clarity, "Then I'll find someone else."
She hangs up and turns to me.
"Ah," she says.
"Don't," I say.
"Your skin is glowing." She winks.
"It's the cold."
"You're smiling at nothing."
"I'm not smiling."
"You were smiling when you walked in." She turns to the coffee, pours a mug without asking, and sets it in front of me.
“Maybe I am.”
"Finally," she says. "You’re a woman in love."
"I look like a woman in trouble."
"A woman glowing in love and in trouble."
The nephew shifts on his stool and resettles without waking. Rosa gives him a fondly exasperated look, then looks back at me.
She picks up the wooden spoon and goes back to the burned tray, scraping at it.
I drink my coffee. The nephew snores once, quietly, and resettles. The burned tray gives up another layer.
Harbor House smells of old carpet and good intentions today, which I've always found oddly comforting.
The chairs are in the circle when I arrive. The coffee is already bad, and Georgia is in the seat beside mine, her coat folded over her lap, her hands around a Styrofoam cup.
She taps my shoulder, studying my face. "You okay?"
"Yes." I turn to her. "I think so."
"You think so?" She raises an eyebrow.
"I'm working on it."
I sit there with the warm cup in both hands and look at the circle filling around me — the woman in the blue coat, the one with the reading glasses, the newer ones I don't know yet.
I think about eighteen years of saying nothing, and about a bench in a harbor, and about a man who held me through the night without asking anything back.
The circle opens. People speak.
I listen and make the appropriate sounds, and my mind keeps circling back to the same point like a key turning in a lock it's been trying all day.
When the facilitator looks at me and says, "Monique, would you like to share?" I usually say no.
I've realized that saying yes would mean letting the words live outside my body for the first time, and I wasn't sure what would be left of me if I did that.
Today I say yes.
Then the circle is quiet, and Georgia's hand is on my knee.
I look at the center of the floor and start talking.
I tell them about my parents and how they found each other, and it eventually cost us all. The quiet years. The years that weren’t. The way a house can hold its breath so long you forget it ever breathed.
My mother’s death didn’t break things; it just made visible what was already broken. I ran from what came after — my dad, eighteen years of watching it happen and never forcing myself to call it what it was.
I tell them about the cardigan.
Still folded on the chair. The way she always left it, sleeves crossed, collar tucked. I would come into the room sometimes and reach for it without thinking, and it would still be warm from her.
The room is very quiet when I stop talking.
Georgia's hand is on my shoulder. She looks at me, direct, like she's looking at something real and doesn't need to dress it up.
"You've been living around that for a long time, haven't you?" she says.
I nod.
She lets a beat pass. Just one.
"It wasn't your fault," she says.
My eyes fill before I've registered that they're going to. I press my lips together. My hands tighten around the cup.
"I know. Thank you," I say, and opening up in a room full of people is different from sitting with it all alone.
Georgia gives my knee one squeeze and leaves it there. I’m grateful for that more than I can explain, because anything more would’ve been too much, and she knows it.
The coastal property meetings have been moving fast. Weston has started including me in everything. He walks me through the plans before the architects arrive, asks what I see, listens when I speak.
When guests get out of the car, they currently see a parking structure, service entrance, and bare concrete before anything beautiful. I suggest routing the cars to the east side, so the first thing they see is the water.
He looks at me, then at the plan. He calls Liam in and says, "Flip the car approach."
Two of the architects exchange a look. The lead one clears his throat and says there are structural considerations.
Weston says, "Then address them." End of discussion.
He doesn’t announce what has changed. He just made the call and moved on. I’m apparently supposed to find this normal.
I stand there holding my coffee and realize that Weston is a man who runs a hotel empire, and he is incorporating my parking lot suggestion without making me feel like I'm being managed.
Reeve is at one of the afternoon meetings.
He comes in with Ethan, the same dark suit, the same good watch. This time, he shakes my hand and says, "Monique, I understand you've been doing some excellent work on the property." And he says it warmly.
He listens when I walk through the arrival sequence change, nodding at the right moments, the one that means a person is waiting for their turn to speak.
When I finish, he looks at Weston and says, "You should keep her involved in this project. She sees the guest experience in a way that's hard to teach."
Weston's hand finds the small of my back for exactly one second.
I almost feel silly about the unease. The man is attentive, and he's praising my idea in front of Weston, in front of a room of architects.
After the meeting, in the corridor, Weston glances at me.
"Well?" he says.
"He's good at this," I say.
"At what specifically?"
"At making you want to trust him."
Weston is quiet for a moment. "Same read."
I nod.
We talk for a while about nothing important — a guest complaint I handled last week that was genuinely one of the more creative complaints in my eleven months at The Langford, a minor disaster Liam apparently caused with a load-bearing wall calculation that turned out to be fine but aged Weston by two years in about forty minutes.
He walks me to my car when I leave.
We stand in the gravel for a moment under the dark coast, and he looks at me the way he does — direct, in no hurry.
I look back at him, and then I go up onto my toes and kiss him once. He kisses me back.
I get in the car and drive.
The drive home is quiet and warm. I don't put the windows down, and I'm not smiling at nothing, I'm just — present, in a way I haven't been in a long time.
The apartment is quiet when I get in. I drop my bag at the door, take off my shoes, and go to the kitchen for water.
I check my phone because there's a habit that doesn't die easy.
One new message. Unknown number.
I open it.
Unknown
You owe me.