23. Weston
Weston
The Langford runs fine without her.
I watch it run for two weeks, and nothing breaks. The overnight queue gets handled, the guests get their room requests met, the billing discrepancies get caught — most of them, anyway.
Fine. That's the word.
Everything is fine. The hotel is in good shape. Iris, who has been coming around more frequently in the way she does when she's keeping an eye on something she doesn't want to name, is making herself busy with work.
I go to the site twice in one week, which is more than I need to. I stand in the main house and look at the entrance orientation, thinking about Monique when she was here for the first time and named a structural problem before she'd finished taking off her coat.
On Thursday, I have three decisions I would normally run past, and I turn them over to Liam instead.
Liam is good, careful, and gives me exactly the input I would’ve given myself, and none of it is wrong, but none of it is right in the way her input was right.
I think about it every morning. Call her, but I don't. She said she needed to build something on her own, and I let her.
Calling her two weeks in to tell her I'm not doing well would be exactly the kind of thing that would make her feel like she has to come back before she's ready.
So I don't call.
Instead I go to the site. I sit with the sketches and work.
In some of the sketch plans, I see her handwriting in three places:
Pull the desk forward — 60ft is too far,
in the margin beside the check-in position. On the staffing schedule, tucked into the corner where the handover times are listed:
Stagger handover by 20 min — overlap, not gap.
And on the restaurant concept page, where the kitchen service line runs to the dining room: a small bracket around the pickup window with two words underneath it:
sight line.
Two words. I'd had three architects and a hospitality consultant on this project for months. The sight line issue sat unnoticed until she looked at a page for forty seconds.
I look at these three notes a lot. More than I should, yet I keep doing it. They're the closest thing I have right now to still being in a room with her.
Iris comes over on a Tuesday. She lets herself in with the key I gave her years ago and puts a bag of groceries in my kitchen without being asked.
She sits down at the counter and looks at me. "You look terrible."
I tilt my head. "I'm fine."
"You look exactly the way you looked two months after the funeral." She crosses her arms. "Which is interesting, because you weren't in love with anyone after the funeral."
"Iris."
"I'm just observing."
"Please stop observing. Anyway, you're not still meeting Beckett, are you?" I look at her.
She sighs, opens one of the grocery bags, and starts putting things in my refrigerator. "Beckett is gone," she says. Casually, to the refrigerator. "Officially. I filed the paperwork and cut ties with him while you were busy with your heartbreak too." She laughs, small.
I look at her. "What paperwork?"
"I don't mean actual paperwork.” She puts a container of something on the back of the shelf. “I mean I blocked his number, told our mutual friends, and rearranged my studio schedule so I stop remembering him." She closes the refrigerator. "That kind of paperwork."
I sit with this for a moment. "How are you feeling now?"
"Better than I expected, actually." She looks at me and flashes a wide grin. "I keep waiting for it to be harder than it is. Mostly what I feel is…" She thinks about it. "Light. Like I put down something heavy, and it’s great."
"Good," I say.
Iris looks at me with the assessment expression again. "Have you talked to her?"
"No." I shrug.
"Well, are you going to?"
"I'm giving her time."
She's quiet for a moment. "That's very mature of you."
"Thank you." I look at my desk, the plans still spread across it, and three small annotations in clean handwriting. "She knows how to reach me," I say.
Iris looks at me. “Hold on there, brother.”
She heats something up in my kitchen, and we eat together.
She talks about a piece she's been working on, a series of photographs she shot on the coast over the winter, showing me two of them on her phone.
They're genuinely excellent, and I tell her so. She covers her expression with her coffee cup which means she's pleased.
She leaves at nine. I sit at my desk and look at the plans.
Pull the desk forward. Stagger handover by 20 min. Sight line.
I've been doing this for two weeks. Getting up, working, going to the site, sitting with the plans, not calling. Functioning. The empire running, the construction moving forward, everything operating in a competent way.
I'm sitting at the desk on a Thursday afternoon — the plans still out, the pen in my hand — when my phone rings.
The number is unfamiliar for one full second. Then I remember it may be Monique.
I pick up so fast the phone slides out of my hand and hits the edge of the desk, but I catch it just before it hits the floor.
I straighten up, clear my throat, and answer. "Hello?"
"Weston, it’s me," she says.
"I know."
"I think I heard you fumble a bit there.” I can hear her laugh, small. "Are you okay?" she asks.
"I'm perfectly fine," I say. "I was just — "
"You were just what?"
"Working." I can't help but smile.
"You were sitting at your desk looking at the plans, weren't you?"
I look at the plans. "You could say that." My shoulders lift in an easy shrug.
She laughs. I close my eyes for a second and listen to it.
"I have news," she says.
"Tell me."
She tells me about the B&B, the parking lot, the breakfast service window, and the booking system. She met the owners who offered her the job before the interview was finished.
Her voice is light and gentle, and I sit at my desk, taking it all in, with her handwriting in the margins of the plans in front of me.
I listen to every word.
"That's…that's really good, Monique."
"I know," she says, and there's something in it. She has earned this.
"I'm happy for you," I say. I mean it completely. It’s slightly painful that she’s not with me, but I mean it anyway.
"Thank you." The only sound between us is her breathing. "I wanted you to know you were the first person I wanted to tell."
"I'm glad you called me," I say.
We talk for a while — about the B&B location, Iris, the coast, nothing and everything, the way we always do. At some point, I'm pacing, not realizing I'd stood. Then she says something dry about the parking lot owner, and I laugh.
She goes quiet for a second, surprised. "Do you want to come see me?"