Chapter 7
SASHA
Imade it all the way back down to the lobby before my hands stopped.
Not shaking. They hadn't been shaking, not really—it was something finer than that, a hum way down in the bones of them, the way a glass hums after you've run a finger around the rim.
The kid at the desk—Devon Lawrence, twenty-two, good hands, no instincts yet—looked up when I came around the end of the counter.
"Everything good, Miss Benning?"
"Everything's good."
"You want me to stay on?"
"Go home, baby."
He went, the way twenty-two goes home, which is fast and without looking back. Then, it was me and the chandelier and the long, empty stretch of marble and the sound of the building doing what it does when nobody's listening.
The folio was still lying there.
Face up. Where I'd left it. I had walked away from a signed folio, which is a thing I have never done, not once, not in fifteen years.
Not the night my mother died and not the night the third floor went sideways and not one single time in between.
There are procedures. I could recite them at gunpoint.
I stood there and looked at that piece of paper for a while.
I wasn’t angry.
I wasn’t standing in my lobby, at the end of a long night, seething at anybody. Not at Izzy. Not at the building, and not at my mother, and not at whatever combination of them had put me behind that counter and left me there.
I loved that hotel.
I loved it. I loved the fourth stair and the service door and the chandelier that ticks.
I loved walking into a room that had gone all the way sideways and watching the shoulders come down, and I loved being the reason they came down.
There is not a syllable of bitterness in me about a single hour of it.
I wasn't a woman being crushed under something she hated. I was a woman being crushed under something she loved, which is quieter, and takes longer, and doesn’t leave a mark anybody can point to.
I turned the folio around.
Clint Dane.
He'd written it small. Print, not script, the letters square and a little cramped, the way a man writes who learned to write on forms. He'd signed it the way you'd sign for a package.
I stood there in the empty lobby of The Palmetto Rose and looked at that name.
Clint.
I had never heard of a Clint. Fifteen years of that family coming through my doors and I had never once heard the name. Not from Izzy, not from Ryker, not from any of them, and I have heard everything. I have heard things I would have paid money to unhear.
Here was a brother nobody had ever mentioned, and he had walked into my hotel with a canvas bag and no car, and he had stood at my marble with his hands empty and asked me what I would rather be doing.
I'll pour their coffee. I'll burn their paperwork. But I will not love one.
I had stood on this exact square of floor and said that to myself. I could have shown you the spot. I could have put my finger on it.
It's fine, I thought.
I wasn't in danger of loving that man.
I'd known him a few, short minutes. I'm thirty-two years old. I've had my heart broken twice and I've done the breaking once. I know exactly what love looks like from a distance. This was not that.
What I was in danger of was something worse.
He had asked me one question—what would you be doing if you weren't standing there—and I had opened my mouth to give him the answer I give, the good one, the built one, the one that comes out perfect every time.
And there wasn't one.
Not I'd rather be at the beach. Not I'd rather be asleep.
Not one solitary thing had come up out of me except a fog, and a kind of vertigo, and then a whole lot of talking in a hallway that I could not now account for, because I had said things to a stranger that I have never said to my best friend.
I had said them fast, and I had said them like a woman kicking a door.
I don't think I know how.
I put my hand flat on the marble.
Dubai.
I had told a man I'd never met. Out loud. In a hallway. To a Dane.
I closed my eyes.
I stood there in the dark lobby with my eyes shut and my hand on the stone.
And I didn’t cry, because I had a shift to close, and because I don't, and because there was nothing to cry about.
There was only something to see.
He'd seen it right away. That's what got me.
Not that he was handsome—he was, and I had already had a very unhelpful conversation with myself about the forearms, and about the way he crossed a room like the floor belonged to him and he had graciously decided not to mention it.
Not that he'd been kind, though he had been.
It was that he had walked into a building that had known me my entire life, and he had looked at me for ninety seconds, and he had seen something that nobody else had seen.
You're looking to start your own thing.
Not one person had ever said that to me. Not one. And I have been screaming it, apparently, in some register only strangers can hear.
I picked up the folio. I entered him into the system under a code that would tell anybody who went looking exactly nothing.
I closed the drawer and I ran the night audit.
I balanced a set of numbers that came out to the penny, the way they always come out to the penny, because I am extraordinarily good at this.
Then, I got out my phone and I opened the email I never open.
It comes once a year. It's from a payroll system in a city I've never been to. The subject line has an exclamation point in it, which somebody somewhere thought was cheerful.
Your accrued paid time off!
There was a number.
I sat down on the stool behind the desk. I held my phone in both hands and I looked at that number.
I had weeks. Not days. Weeks. Sitting in a spreadsheet. I had never touched one hour of it, and every year, the same email came with the same exclamation point. Every year, I read it and felt a warm flush of something I had always assumed was pride.
Look at that, I'd think. Look how much they need me.
But that number wasn't a trophy. It was a receipt.
I'd been paying into something for fifteen years and never once drawing on it. I had let myself believe that the not-drawing was the point, and it wasn't. It was just a very orderly way of disappearing.
And nobody had done that to me.
That's the part I had to sit with, on Otis's stool, in a dark lobby.
Nobody had ever stood over me with a whip.
Every one of those hours was one I volunteered.
I picked up that phone in the shower. I drove back over that bridge at midnight in stocking feet with a wrench.
I said of course and I said I've got it and I said go home, baby, and every single time I said it, some old, hungry, beautiful thing in me sat up and purred, because being needed is the cleanest drug there is.
I liked it.
I did. I still do. I don't know how to want to be a person who doesn't.
But there is a difference between a woman who is needed and a woman who has been spent. I had crossed that line somewhere, quietly, without any ceremony. Probably on an ordinary evening while I was upgrading somebody's anniversary.
And I had been standing on the wrong side of it long enough that a man in bad boots could see it from across a lobby.
I thought about Rashad.
That good, funny, patient man, and I had spent months telling myself the truth was scheduling. And it was scheduling, that part was real—but I had also never once, in eleven months, picked up that phone and said, I'm taking Thursday. Tell me where to meet you.
I could have.
Oh, I thought.
It wasn't Rashad. It was never Rashad. I could have found a night for anybody I wanted to find a night for, and I hadn't found one for him. The reason was not the building.
Okay.
I put my phone face-down on the marble.
And then, I did something I have not done since I was nine years old.
I went up the front stairs to the second floor. I walked down the corridor past the ice machine to the door of the linen closet. I opened it, and I stood in it.
It smelled the same. That's the thing about a building.
It doesn't have the decency to change. Bleach and lavender and hot cotton and the faint dead-sweet smell of the dryer sheets they've been buying since before I was born, and the shelves going up the wall, and the stack of duvets on the bottom left where a small girl could sit with a coloring book and be very quiet and not let them see her.
Don't come out unless it's me.
I stood in there in the dark with my hand on a stack of towels and I let my head go back against the shelf.
She would have been so proud of me. That's the truth.
She'd have come in that lobby and looked at me in that pink blouse behind that marble and her whole face would have come apart.
She'd have gone home and told everybody she knew, and she'd have said my daughter, and she'd have meant my daughter runs it.
And she also would have taken one look at that email with the exclamation point in it and slapped it out of my hand.
I laughed in the linen closet. Out loud, alone, in the dark. One short, ugly bark of it. Then, it turned over into something else halfway and I stood there breathing with my hand over my mouth for a while and got it back.
I got it back. I always get it back.
Then, I fixed my face in the little mirror by the ice machine and I went down my mother's stairs—the back ones, the narrow ones, the unlit ones—and I came out through the service door behind the concierge stand. I stood behind my desk in my empty lobby.
I need a break.
There it was. Plain as a bill.
Just a break. Just one square of unclaimed time. Just a day that belonged to me, that I did not give to anybody, that I did not apologize for.
And the fact that the idea made my heart go like a bird in a box—the fact that I stood in my own lobby and felt genuine, animal fear at the thought of asking Isabel Harper Dane for a single day off—
Well.
That told me everything I needed to know about how bad it had gotten.
I opened the leather book to the arrivals page.
There it was, where I'd left it. Magnolia Suite—hold, open. And beside it, in the column that wanted a name, the long, clean nothing I had left there because I hadn't been given one, and had known better than to ask, and had been good about it, the way I am always good about it.
I picked up my pen.
And I wrote, in my own hand, in a book that will outlive me:
Dane, C.
I looked at it a while.
Then, I closed the book, and turned out the lamp. I went home to a condo I owned outright, and I lay down in the dark in a room I had paid for with fifteen years of my life.
And I did not set an alarm.