Chapter 3

Elliot comes at midnight, alone. No lawyer, no Camille. Five years of marriage, and it's the first time I watch him not know what to do with his hands.

"You didn't have to make it a thing." He paces the emptied lobby. "Monday. The cameras. Just sign quiet, take the money. Why do you want a crowd?"

I stay behind the desk, where I always am. My hand rests on the ring of keys and doesn't leave it. On the counter between us, the guest register sits where Camille set it down, and his eyes keep snagging on it like it might speak.

His phone buzzes. He checks it, and for a second he's a boy on Christmas morning -- the board's confirmed, the press RSVP'd, the town car's booked. His homecoming. His production, start to finish; nobody made him invite the world.

Then he looks up and finds me watching him, calm, and the Christmas goes out of his face.

"...Why do you want everyone there," he says. "You hate being looked at."

"I stood behind this desk for five years. I'll hand it back the same way. In front of everyone."

He wants that to be the whole answer, and it isn't, and now it's too late to make it smaller -- he can't call off his own coronation without looking, to the board he bled five years to impress, like a man afraid of his own front-desk clerk.

"I need Monday clean, Esme." Almost pleading. "That's all."

I need. From the man who held every card in the deck.

He leaves without finishing a sentence. At the door he turns and looks back at me, the way you check a stove you're sure you turned off. Then the highway takes his taillights.

I lock the door. I turn the vacancy sign to NO, slow, until it faces the empty road.

Then I pick up the register -- twenty years of my handwriting, every guest, every night -- carry it into the back office, and lock it in the drawer. The brass key turns stiff, then sudden.

I counted the promises Elliot kept in five years. The number was the same as the one in that room this morning. Zero.

I pick up the desk phone, the line only I use, and dial from memory. It rings once.

"It's me. You're in Room 1 by eight. You don't move until I'm standing in that room -- not one second before, whatever they say." I listen. "Good."

Five years.

"It's Monday, then."