17. Weston
Weston
She's been checking her phone every twenty minutes since she arrived, and she thinks I haven't noticed.
She sets it face down on the table. Two minutes later, she picks it up, setting it back down again after a second. Her coffee is cold. She hasn't touched the floor plan we've been working through for the past hour.
I watch her do it a third time and set my pen down.
"Talk to me," I say.
She looks at the phone, then at me.
"It's nothing," she says, a half-beat too fast.
"Monique."
She picks up the phone and holds it for a moment, and then she turns it toward me.
Unknown
You owe me.
Unknown number. Three days ago. She's been carrying this for three days.
I look at it, then at her.
"It’s Victor," she says.
I take the phone from her hand and set it on the table between us.
She looks at the table instead of me — then the phone, then the plan spread beneath it — and talks about the years after her mother died. About Victor's debts, the kind that don't come with payment plans. About a man her father borrowed from who started showing up at the apartment.
I listen without interrupting, without reaching for a solution. My hands stay on the table while she finishes.
When she does, she looks at the phone.
"I don't know how he found me," she says. "Last time he called every hotel in Newport until someone confirmed I was there. This is different. He didn't call first. He just…" She stops. "He knows where I am."
The pen is on the table. I pick it up and put it down.
"I want to help you, Monique. What do you want me to do?" I ask.
She looks up. I can see her running the check — is it the beginning of me taking this out of her hands? She's waiting for the management to arrive.
"I mean it," I say. "What do you want? Not what I think you should do."
She's quiet for a moment. Her hands come off the table and fold in her lap. "I want it to stop," she says. "I want to not be looking over my shoulder every time I walk into work."
"Okay." I hold her gaze. "Tell me what that looks like."
And I let her talk.
She doesn't have a complete plan. She has pieces — things she's been turning over for three days, fragments she clearly doesn't fully trust yet.
I listen to the fragments and ask questions about the gaps. By the end, we have something. It's not finished, but it's hers, mostly.
She trusted you with this.
Iris calls while we're still at the table.
She doesn't say hello. She says, "Did you tell the firm not to take Beckett's calls?"
I put the pen down.
"Did you tell the restaurant on Wickenden he wasn't allowed in?"
"Iris…"
"Did you tell building security at my studio that he needed to check in at the front desk?"
I can hear the flatness of her voice when she's been crying and stopped.
"I need you to answer me," she says.
"I did it for your safety," I say.
The line goes quiet for a moment.
"How could you do that!" Not a question.
"I have documentation on him, Iris. Financial problems, incidents that — "
"I don't care."
"You should care. The things I found…"
"I don't care, Weston." Her voice cracks on my name.
"Do you understand what you did? You went around me.
You made decisions about my life without asking me.
About who I'm allowed to see, where he's allowed to go, what spaces he's allowed to exist in.
Without telling me." Her breath catches.
"You decided and then you waited for me to find out. "
I'm standing. I've been standing since she started talking, the chair behind me. "He's not safe," I say.
"That's my conclusion to reach."
"He grabbed your arm outside a nightclub — "
"That’s my conclusion to reach." The control breaks for one second, then comes back, harder.
"Mine. Not yours. Not Monique's. Mine. I'm not thirteen years old.
I'm not standing outside a principal's office anymore.
I get to decide what I walk away from and when, and I need you to stop doing this for me. "
I look at the wall.
"I'll call you tomorrow," I say.
Iris hangs up.
I put the phone down. Monique is across the table from me, and she's watching me.
"She's right," I say.
Monique doesn't answer immediately.
I look at her. "It was the wrong move."
"You were scared for her."
"That doesn't make it the right thing to do.
" I pull the chair out and sit down. "My father never did that.
He protected people by making them capable.
Not by removing something they were walking toward.
" I look at the table. "He used to say it's just weight distribution.
Don't fight it. Feel where the car wants to go. "
Monique is quiet for a moment. "He sounds like he was a good teacher."
"He was," I say.
The coastal property meetings are running every other day now, and Monique has stopped pretending she doesn't have opinions in them.
She comes in with notes all over the plans and a pencil tucked behind her ear, then goes straight to the problem that’s been on her mind since the last session.
Today it's the spa terrace.
Three iterations and the architects have had the entrance off the main corridor each time.
Monique puts her hand on the table and says, "The spa should feel like a discovery. Right now, you can see it from the check-in desk. That's not a discovery, but a signpost. Tuck it around the east turn. Put the entrance behind the garden wall. Make guests find it rather than be directed to it."
The lead architect opens his mouth.
Monique looks at him.
He closes his mouth and picks up his pencil.
I watch this happen. He has twenty-two years in this industry. She is technically a front desk agent. He just closed his mouth rather than argue, and neither of them registered what that was.
I think about what my father said about what makes a hotel worth returning to. It's not the room. It's how the room makes you feel about yourself. Like you belong in it.
I was fourteen. I've been trying to build that for a decade.
She's been doing it instinctively since before she knew there was a name for it.
I write one word on the back of a meeting agenda. Yes. I fold it in quarters and put it in my jacket pocket. It's a real decision now.
We’ve been at it for hours. Eventually, we call it a day and walk back to the main house.
After dinner, she sits on the edge of the bed with her knees pulled up and her arms around them, and I sit beside her.
I put my arm around her, and she leans into it. The house is quiet around us. Her breathing slows.
I press my mouth to her hair.
The board meeting, the Driftline timeline, the Beckett situation, Reeve — I know these things are there. The list never empties.
But her weight is against my shoulder, the house is quiet, and I'm not thinking about any of it.
Don't lose her.