The Hotel Nantucket — Chapter no 15

15. Behind Closed Doors

Adam drags Raoul into the break room, and Grace follows them because it looks like trouble!

“We need to speak to Lizbet about the schedule,” Adam says. “It’s not fair that she switched our shifts. You need to talk to her. She likes you better.”

“I don’t want to talk to her,” Raoul says. “Because, believe it or not, I’m ready to stop working nights. I did it for an entire month. Now it’s your turn.”

“You just want to spend all day with Zeke,” Adam says.

Raoul blinks. “Or you do, and that’s why you’re kerking.”

“I hope you’re not accusing me of anything,” Adam says.

“Because I don’t need to remind you which one of us was caught making out with that busboy at Nikki Beach.”

“That was before we were even together,” Raoul says. “I’ve been faithful since our first date. And working with Zeke isn’t going to make me unfaithful. If you think that, then you have trust issues.”

“I have trust issues?”

“Do you have a thing for Zeke, Adam?”

At that moment the door to the break room swings open and Zeke steps in. “Adam, you’re on tonight? I’ve gotta bounce.”

“I’ll be right there,” Adam says. “Just chatting with my husband whom I never see.”

Zeke looks from Adam to Raoul and must sense something because he steps back out and closes the door.

“Why can’t we work together?” Adam says. “Zeke can work nights.”

“You know why we can’t work together,” Raoul says. “George said he’d recommend to any future employer that we be scheduled opposite each other.”

“Well, I’m lonely. I made dinner plans with Alessandra three times and she ditched me all three,” Adam says. Surprise, surprise, Grace thinks. There was Mr. Brownlee in 309, Mr. Yamaguchi in suite 215, and Dr. Romano in room 107. “I miss you.”

“I miss you too, boo.”

Suddenly, Adam and Raoul embrace and start kissing. Grace is delighted the fight is over and the making up has begun. She heads over to the jukebox and plays “Take My Breath Away,” by Berlin, and then she lights up the pinball machine.

The gentlemen don’t even seem to notice.

Could Kimber Marsh be any more obvious? Grace wonders. She comes down to the lobby—again at quarter past one in the morning (coincidentally after Adam has left and the Blue Bar has closed), again wearing her shorty pajamas, cardigan, and the hotel slippers.

“Richie?” Kimber whispers—but Richie isn’t at his usual post out front. Richie, Grace sees, is in Lizbet’s office with the door not only closed but locked. He’s on his cell phone (forbidden at work unless

you need it to conduct hotel business), having a terse conversation.

What can Grace think but that he’s speaking to his ex-wife? Who else would he be talking to at one fifteen in the morning? Then Grace sees what Richie has on the desk in front of him and she hears what he’s saying into the phone.

Oh, dear, she thinks. This is what he’s up to. What a disappointment.

Grace blows the paperwork off the desk in an attempt to be disruptive but Richie doesn’t seem to care. Then she tries to mess with the phone connection but it’s too late, the conversation is over.

When Richie hangs up, he slumps back in his chair and grabs his head.

There’s a tap on the office door. “Richie?”

The inevitable has happened, Grace thinks. Kimber has grown so comfortable at the hotel that she has crossed the border between guest and staff. She’s behind the front desk—and now she’s knocking on the office door. If it weren’t locked, Grace suspects she would have marched right in and caught Richie at his odious business.

Richie jumps to his feet, and Lizbet’s desk chair shoots back into the wall. Richie stuffs the paperwork into his pants pocket. He inhales a breath and exhales with a smile. He once again looks like the charming, affable dad everyone thinks he is. “Kimber!” he says, opening the door. “What’s up?”

“Can’t sleep,” Kimber says. She seems to realize she’s crossed some kind of invisible line because she scurries out from behind the desk. She waves what looks like a piece of notebook paper. “Also, I wanted to show you something.”

What Kimber wants to show Richie at one fifteen in the morning is an article Wanda wrote entitled “The Mystery of the Haunted Hotel.”

Richie reads aloud: “‘The Hotel Nantucket has been plaqued’—is this supposed to be plagued?—‘with difficulties for nearly a century.

Girl sleuth Wanda Marsh has uncovered the reason. There’s a ghost who inhabits the hotel’s fourth-floor storage closet.’” Richie stops.

“Did Wanda write this herself?”

“Edie helped her a little.”

“‘The ghost is the spirit of Grace Hadley, a chambermaid who died in a fire in the summer of 1922 in that fourth-floor closet.’” Richie looks up. “Is this true?”

“Wanda insisted we go to the Atheneum to look it up. They had old issues of the Nantucket Standard on microfilm.”

“Your kids are incredible,” Richie says. “Louie is a chess prodigy and Wanda is a burgeoning detective and investigative reporter. My three spend all their time playing Fortnite and watching YouTube.”

“Wanda told me that she asked the ghost to knock, and the ghost did.”

“Well, that’s exciting,” Richie says. He subtly plucks his shirt away from his body. His extracurricular activity in the back office has made him perspire.

“The thing is, she really believes it,” Kimber says. “Shall we go up and check out the fourth-floor storage closet?”

Richie frowns. “I shouldn’t leave the desk.”

“It’ll only take a minute.”

“I can’t afford to lose my job,” Richie says.

“I’m beginning to think you don’t like me,” Kimber says. “You practically ran away from me the other night.”

“I do like you,” Richie says. He reaches across the desk for Kimber’s hand. Is he being patronizing? Grace wonders. “I have a lot going on in my personal life right now.”

“You can tell me if you’re not attracted to me,” Kimber says. “I’ll survive.”

Richie lets go of Kimber’s hand—he’s not attracted to her, apparently—but then he comes out from behind the desk. “I’m not the person you think I am,” he says. “I know I put on a good act of being nice-guy Richie—”

Kimber puts a finger to his lips. “I’m probably not the person you think I am either,” she says. “But it doesn’t matter. It’s summertime and we’re on an island thirty miles out to sea.”

Richie gazes at Kimber. He seems to be deliberating, and Grace, quite frankly, is on the edge of her seat. Finally, Richie puts his arms around Kimber and pulls her close. Kimber raises her face, Richie takes his glasses off and sets them on the desk—a nice touch, Grace thinks; things are about to get steamy—and kisses her.

Grace cheers silently, even though she fears the relationship won’t last. But who doesn’t love a little summer romance? She just hopes they don’t forget about that article. If they solve her murder case, she’ll finally be able to get some much needed rest. It has been an exhausting century.

It’s Friday, a day that used to mean only one thing for Chad: slightly more raucous partying than his usual weeknight partying. Chad

hasn’t heard from Bryce or Eric in weeks, though he did get a text from Jasper thanking him for being cool about me and Winston.

Chad responded, Hey, man, I’m happy for you. If you ever want to grab a bite, hit me up. Jasper hasn’t reached out yet, but he might somewhere down the road. Chad feels only relief at the disbanding of his group of friends; the solitude has turned out to be kind of nice.

However, Chad is still desperately hoping for an e-mail from Paddy.

When Chad logs into his Yahoo! account first thing in the morning, he sees an alert that someone has hacked into the operating software of both the Steamship Authority and Hy-Line Cruises. All ferry service to and from Nantucket is halted. When he goes downstairs, his mother has the local news on television.

“They’d better get this fixed, pronto,” Whitney says. “Dad is coming tonight.”

Chad snaps to attention. “He’s coming tonight?”

“Yes, silly. His deal closed; he’s driving up with the car for the rest of the summer,” Whitney says. “Can I make you an English muffin?

Or…would you like a peach? They’re ripe.”

“I have to get to work,” Chad says. His mother still hasn’t quite acknowledged the fact that Chad has a job. Whitney Winslow is an expert at ignoring the things that make her uncomfortable. She obviously knows that Chad works every day at the Hotel Nantucket, but that doesn’t mean she has to talk about it. Chad wonders if she’s told his father.

Chad picks a peach out of the two dozen peaches piled in the fruit bowl; his mother has over-shopped again, and half of these will rot.

Chad grabs two more. He’ll give them to Bibi, and she can take them home and make baby food or whatever.

But when Chad gets to work, Bibi isn’t there, and neither are Octavia and Neves. Because…there is no ferry service.

Ms. English accepts Chad’s offer of the two peaches with a bemused expression on her face and then pulls on a pair of rubber gloves. “It’s just you and me today, Long Shot.”

“You’re going to clean the rooms?” Chad asks.

“Who else is going to do it?” she asks. “The cleaning fairies?”

Chad assumes that he and Ms. English will split the rooms, but when Ms. English follows him to room 209, he understands they’re going to deal with all the rooms together. They’ll inspect the check- ins first (these rooms are clean, but they need to fill the minibars and run through the hundred-point checklist anyway). Chad is nervous.

What if he makes a mistake or forgets something and she fires him?

He tries to pay extra attention and soon realizes that he has already been paying extra attention, because every single day, he not only does his own job but also keeps an eye on Bibi to make sure she doesn’t steal anything. The work goes quickly. Ms. English sings softly—she has a beautiful voice—and sends Chad down to the Blue Bar kitchen to get the goodies for the minibars. Down there, Chad bumps into Yolanda, the super-hot wellness guru. She’s leaning up against one of the prep tables, eating an acai bowl topped with perfect circles of banana and strawberries and talking to Beatriz, who’s over by the ovens.

“Hey, Chad,” Yolanda says, and Chad nearly drops to his knees.

Hot Yolanda knows his name!

“Hey,” Chad says as casually as he can. He goes to the walk-in for the bluefish pâté, then to the pantry for the crackers, then to a special fridge for the beer and wine. He has to write down exactly what he takes in the log, for obvious reasons. When he comes out with everything in his blue plastic handbasket (it’s hard to be sexy while carrying a handbasket but Chad tries anyway), Beatriz is slicing into one of the baguettes that she just pulled out of the oven.

“Stick around,” she says to Chad. “I’m going to blow your mind.”

Yolanda giggles. “Don’t tease him, Bea.”

“Not teasing,” Beatriz says. She slathers two slices of the warm bread with butter from a crock (“Churned this myself”), lays pieces of paper-thin watermelon radish (“These were picked this morning at Pumpkin Pond Farm”) across the top, and sprinkles the radish with sea salt. Beatriz hands one piece to Chad and one to Yolanda.

“Thank you,” Chad says, and he takes a bite. The bread with the crunchy crust and the sweet, creamy butter and the peppery zing of the radish combine in a way that nearly brings Chad to tears.

Yolanda makes a loud, uninhibited moaning noise that sounds sexual and Chad feels a stirring in his pants. They are teasing him, but Chad doesn’t mind. It’s the first semi-normal response he’s had to anything since May.

Chad and Ms. English make their way briskly through the check-ins, but the checkouts are another story. Chad and Bibi always rate the rooms on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being a room that looks like it’s barely been occupied (Bibi is amused by people who go to the trouble of making the bed before they leave) and 10 being an

apocalyptic disaster. Most rooms fall between a 4 and a 6, but naturally on the day that Chad and Ms. English work alone, all five checkouts are a 10.

When they walk into room 308, Chad nearly gags. Not only is the place a horrendous mess, but it reeks. Chad vaguely remembers a pleasant-looking young couple with infant twins being in this room.

There are two cribs shoehorned into the far corner, and in one crib is a dirty diaper lying wide open. Chad hurries to roll it up and throw it away, but the trash can is overflowing with dirty diapers as well as empty bottles of formula that smell like rancid milk. This couple left food all over the desk and dresser—granola bars, scattered almonds, a container of tuna salad that has, unfortunately, been sitting in the sun. There are ants everywhere. Most of the bed linens are in a heap on the floor, and the fitted sheet is stained with something brown. Chad finds half a melted Mounds bar under a pillow (that the stain is probably chocolate comes as a relief).

Someone must have showered with the door open because the bathroom floor is a lake, and two of the thick Turkish towels are floating in it like islands. The father shaved in the sink and didn’t bother to clean out his whiskers, which for some reason is the thing that grosses out Chad the most.

He turns to Ms. English, aghast. He can’t believe people aren’t more considerate. He has a hazy understanding that twins are a lot of work, but don’t the parents realize someone has to clean this up?

A human being? He feels like he should apologize to Ms. English, like the state of the room is somehow his fault. He realizes how much he misses working with Bibi. If she saw this, she would call the

guests every profane word she knows (and she knows a bunch), and they would both feel better.

Ms. English merely snaps on a new pair of gloves. “Okay, Long Shot,” she says. “Let’s get to work.”

Thirty minutes later, the room is sparkling clean. There are fresh sheets on the bed; the cribs have been broken down and stored; the rug has been vacuumed; the food remnants have been thrown away and the ants along with them; the puddle in the bathroom is mopped up; the towels have been replaced; the sink, tub, and toilet are scrubbed. The minibar has been emptied, cleaned, and restocked.

The hangers have been counted, the robes placed on the back of the bathroom door, the blow-dryer checked, the bottles of shampoo, conditioner, and lotion refilled. It’s so satisfying, Chad thinks, restoring this room to glory. He’s almost glad he’s no longer friends with Bryce and Eric, because they wouldn’t understand this feeling.

Paddy might understand. In the summers, he ran a lawn-mowing business in his hometown of Grimesland, North Carolina. He kept a push mower in the back of his Ford Ranger and drove to his clients’ homes—most of them ranches or saltboxes that would fit into Chad’s living room—and cut the grass, fifteen bucks for front and back. He did five or six lawns a day and put all his money in the bank so he’d have it to spend at Bucknell, but even then he had to be careful and sometimes he stayed home rather than go out to Bull Run, although Chad always offered to spot him.

Chad closes his eyes. The best part about working with Bibi is that he never has time to think about Paddy or wonder if Paddy is

healed enough to go back to mowing lawns and look over the grass, striped with diagonal lines, and feel proud of his handiwork.

Normally, Chad is done with work around five, but today he and Ms.

English don’t finish until after six. Lizbet has let them know that the boats are up and running again, and there are some pretty unhappy people waiting in the lobby for their rooms to be ready. From the five checkouts combined, there are sixty-five dollars in tips, which Ms.

English presses into Chad’s hand, despite his protests.

“I don’t want it,” he says. “You take it.”

This makes Ms. English laugh. “Don’t be ridiculous, Long Shot.”

Chad stuffs the bills into the front pocket of his khakis. “I’ll give it to Bibi tomorrow.”

“To Bibi?” Ms. English says. “She didn’t earn it. She got a day off.”

But she needs it, Chad thinks.

“I hope you and Bibi aren’t getting romantically involved,” Ms.

English says. “I don’t want to have to worry about you two alone in the rooms.”

Chad feels his face redden. The idea of fooling around with Bibi in one of the rooms makes him very uncomfortable. He wishes Ms.

English hadn’t said that; he’s afraid it will be all he thinks about tomorrow, and if he’s awkward around Bibi, she’ll notice.

“No way,” he says. “Nothing like that.”

“But you brought her peaches,” Ms. English says, and she winks.

Chad has no interest in going home to face his father, so he delays the inevitable with a drive through town. It’s a summer evening on Nantucket and there are couples strolling into galleries for openings and a well-dressed mob crowding the hostess lectern at the Boarding House. Chad sees a group of—well, for lack of a better term—Chads walking right down the middle of the street, cutting off traffic without any consideration for the drivers, heading (he’s certain) to drink at the Gazebo, where they will order their vodka sodas and talk trash about their father’s boats, their golf handicaps, and girls.

Chad used to be one of those guys but he isn’t any longer, and he’s glad. He loops around and heads for home.

He’s driving out Eel Point Road when something catches his eye.

It’s the gunmetal-gray Jeep Gladiator that Ms. English drives, parked in the driveway of number 133. The house is huge, even bigger than the Winslows’ home, and it’s closer to the water. Chad slows down.

He’s pretty sure his parents considered buying number 133 as an investment property and renting it out for fifty or sixty grand a week until they eventually gifted it to Leith or Chad.

He watches Ms. English climb out of the Gladiator.

He comes to a stop and nearly calls to her. His Range Rover is hidden by the tall decorative grasses around the mailbox. What is Ms. English doing at number 133?

A dude wearing a panama hat and a wheat-colored linen suit comes out of the house and shakes Ms. English’s hand. He holds open the door and she steps inside.

Chad takes a beat to absorb this. Ms. English must be interviewing to clean number 133. A side hustle.

Chad drives off, feeling queasy—and the worst is yet to come.

When Chad pulls into his own driveway, he sees his father’s Jaguar.

He finds Paul Winslow on the back porch in a rattan chair, sunglasses perched on top of his bald head, eyes closed, gin and tonic on the table next to him. He’s dressed in shorts, a polo shirt, and Top-Siders, which is what he wears all summer long except when they go out for dinner; for that, Paul favors pants printed with whales, lobsters, or flamingos. Chad gets it—his father works in the pressure-cooker environment of venture capital, and these six weeks are his time to relax. If Paul lets off steam by wearing flamingo pants, fine. He deserves to enjoy the things his money has bought—the pool, their private beach, the view of Nantucket Sound.

Chad doesn’t hear anyone else in the house and he realizes his mother’s Lexus wasn’t in the driveway. He takes a step backward and Paul’s eyes open.

“Hey, hey, hey, son!” Paul says, rising to his feet and offering a hand as though Chad is a client. “I’ve been waiting for you. Where’ve you been?”

“Hey, Dad,” Chad says. He feels like a bluefish gutted with a gaff.

What he wouldn’t give to wriggle free of this moment. “Where are Mom and Leith?”

“They’re at the salon,” Paul says, “getting gussied up for dinner.”

Dinner, Chad thinks. In the garden at the Chanticleer, which is their tradition the first night Paul arrives on island. Chad completely spaced about it. He can’t believe things in their family have just gone back to normal after what happened in May, but maybe enough time

has passed that they all feel they can just move on—or his parents do. Leith will hate him forever, he’s pretty sure.

“I was at work, actually,” Chad says. “I got a job at the Hotel Nantucket, cleaning rooms.”

His father’s face shows no surprise, so Chad’s mother must have prepped him. Paul sits and extends a hand to indicate that Chad should take the seat next to his. “Let’s talk that through for a minute, shall we?” Paul’s tone of voice has switched to executive mode, and seeing no option, Chad sits. “Can I get you a beer, son?”

“No, thank you.”

Paul chuckles. “Don’t tell me you’re on the wagon. If your mother and I thought you needed rehab, we would have sent you to rehab.”

“No,” Chad says, though he hasn’t had a drink since that fateful night. “But I’m all set for right now.”

Paul sits in a pose of introspection, leaning forward in the chair, elbows on his knees, fingers tented, head bent. “So what I’m hearing you say is that you got a job.”

“Yes,” Chad says. “At the Hotel Nantucket, cleaning rooms. I work for the head of housekeeping, Ms. English, who’s an extremely cool person. There are three girls—women, I mean—on the crew with me. They all live on the Cape and commute over and back every day, so, because the boats weren’t running earlier today, it was just Ms. English and me, which is why I’m late. I usually finish around five.”

Paul nods along to all this, a signal that he’s listening. “I just closed a five-billion-dollar deal. Do you have any idea why I work so hard, Chadwick?”

Chad isn’t sure how to answer. His father’s not brokering peace in the Middle East or curing childhood cancer or teaching undergraduates the novels of Toni Morrison. He’s betting on the success of ideas, technology, natural resources. Every once in a while, this does the world some good; his firm buys a pharmaceutical company that brings out an important drug or backs a fledgling company that does something to improve people’s lives. But mostly, Chad understands, Paul is playing a game on an exclusive field, which results in a lot of winning. A lot of money. “Because you like it?” Chad says.

This elicits a patronizing laugh. “I do it to provide for you and your sister and your mother.” Paul raises an arm theatrically. “I didn’t grow up with any of this.”

Right, Chad knows. His father comes from a regular background, though not one as impoverished as he might like people to believe.

He grew up in a split-level house in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, which is close to the Main Line but pointedly not on it. It was Chad’s mother, Whitney, who had the sterling pedigree—an estate in St.

David’s, private school at Baldwin, a father who was a managing partner at Rawle and Henderson, the definition of a Philadelphia lawyer. Paul met Whitney at Smokey Joe’s bar on Route 30 when she was at Bryn Mawr and Paul was a scholarship student at Haverford. It was Whitney’s father who helped Paul get into the business school at Wharton and then introduced him to the

gentlemen at the Brandywine Group.

“I know,” Chad says.

“You have the rest of your life to work,” Paul says. “I thought we agreed that you would take the summer off to enjoy yourself.”

Chad feels a lump in his throat. “I don’t deserve to enjoy myself.”

“I thought we agreed, as a family, to put what happened behind us.”

“I can’t just put it behind me, Dad,” Chad says. He seeks out Paul’s eyes. His father is essentially a decent guy who knows the difference between right and wrong. The mandate to keep “what happened” a secret is coming from Chad’s mother. She has her reputation to think of. It’s bad enough that so many people at home know; Whitney Winslow doesn’t want her social circle on Nantucket whispering about it as well. “Have you heard from the lawyers?”

Chad swallows. “Or Paddy’s family?”

“Yes,” Paul says. He exhales like he’s about to deadlift three hundred pounds. “The surgery was unsuccessful. Patrick lost sight in the eye permanently.”

Paddy O’Connor, Chad’s best friend from college, his best friend possibly ever in his life, is blind in his left eye. Permanently. Chad feels blinded himself. He bends over his knees.

“We’re offering a generous settlement—paying all the medical bills in addition to compensation for the eye.”

How much is an eye worth? Chad wonders. What is the value of a full field of vision when you meet the woman you want to marry or hold your newborn child for the first time? Or when you go to MOMA to see van Gogh’s Starry Night or watch the sun set in the evening?

Half of Paddy’s eyesight is gone. He can still see, but—Chad looked this up right after the accident—he’ll lose depth perception, and he’ll have difficulty judging distance and tracking moving objects.

“I want to contribute,” Chad says.

“That’s very generous of you, son, but—”

Chad pulls the sixty-five dollars out of his pocket and slaps it on the table next to Paul’s gin and tonic. He has nearly forty-eight hundred dollars saved from his paychecks. He’ll give everything he makes this summer to Paddy. The amount will be dwarfed by whatever Paul has offered, but Chad wants Paddy to know that he didn’t just roll over on his beach towel, beer in his hand, joint between his lips, and let his parents handle this. He went out and got a job where he deals with other people’s dirty diapers and forgotten late-night candy bars and bathroom swamps.

Paul eyes the money. “I’d like you to give your notice at the hotel

tomorrow.”

“No,” Chad says.

“Your mother doesn’t like how it looks,” Paul says. “You working as a menial laborer—”

“Menial?” Chad says. “I have another word for it: honest. It’s an honest job, cleaning rooms for people who work hard themselves and who come to Nantucket to relax and have a vacation. You haven’t seen these rooms, Dad; they’re every bit as nice as the rooms in this house. The hotel is a special place—”

“That isn’t exactly what your mother has heard.”

“It doesn’t matter!” Chad says. He realizes now why his father works so hard. It has nothing to do with the pool or the Range Rover or a bowl filled with ripe peaches. It’s so he can control people. “I could be working at a roadside motel on Route Triple Zero in Nowheresville and the work would still be noble. People’s lives include messes, and I’m cleaning them up.”

“You’re to give your notice tomorrow, Chadwick,” Paul says.

Chad stands up. “Or what? You’ll ground me? Throw me out of

the house? Disown me?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“You’re the one who’s being ridiculous,” Chad says. What kind of parents don’t want a child to actually take responsibility for his actions? His parents. Which is why he made such careless, thoughtless mistakes in the first place. His mother and father raised him to believe that he was invincible. They raised him to believe that nothing bad could ever happen in his life. But it did.

“I won’t quit,” Chad says. “I’m not a quitter.”

July 11, 2022

From: Xavier Darling ([email protected])

To: Employees of the Hotel Nantucket

Good morning! I think we can all agree the summer is now in full swing. Once again this week, the reviews reflect an exceptional job done by our front-desk manager, Alessandra Powell, and this week’s bonus goes to her. I hope the rest of you will strive to follow Alessandra’s excellent example of service.

Thank you for your continued hard work.

XD

Edie is in the break room with Zeke when the Venmo alert comes into her phone, so she ignores it. She and Zeke have become friendly and Edie isn’t going to let anything interrupt their bonding time. She spent all of her awkward freshman year of high school and at least half of her slightly less awkward sophomore year stalking Zeke English both in person and online, so the fact that they are now sitting next to each other at the Formica counter eating ice cream with their thighs practically touching is nothing short of miraculous to Edie in a long-delayed-dream kind of way.

Zeke says exactly what Edie is thinking. “I can’t believe Alessandra won the money again this week. It’s starting to feel like a setup.”

Edie makes a noncommittal murmuring noise, though what she wants to do is emphatically agree. Something must be up with Alessandra. She’s good on the desk, no question, but she doesn’t go the extra mile the way Edie does. If a guest requests an extra pillow or towel or a second container of the smoked bluefish pâté, Edie zips directly up to the room and hands it over with a bright (and sincere) smile. She has learned the first names of everyone who answers the phone at Cru in order to secure hotel guests what is, for most people, an impossible reservation. She even went so far as to buy the little boy staying in room 302 a lighthouse key chain from the Hub because he was obsessed with Brant Point Light. Edie used her own money (of which she has very little), not the hotel’s petty cash, which is what Alessandra uses to buy herself lunch. (Petty cash is not to be used for their personal expenses, Lizbet has told them

multiple times, and yet Edie says nothing to anyone because she loathes a tattletale.) Then there are the Marsh children. Edie helped Wanda write an article about the “ghost,” and when Wanda grew emotional and asked why nobody had saved Grace Hadley, Edie gave her a hug and said that was a long time ago, before there were smoke detectors. Edie also found Louie a chess instructor—a housepainter named Rustam who had been a chess champion back in Uzbekistan.

Edie would like to ask Kimber to write a TravelTattler review— Kimber would surely mention Edie—but she can’t bring herself to campaign on her own behalf.

Alessandra has won the bonus three weeks in a row. This is a side stitch that stays with Edie through all her working hours. It’s cathartic to hear that it bugs Zeke as well.

“Do Adam and Raoul ever tell you what it’s like to live with her?”

Edie asks.

Zeke rolls his eyes. “Adam says she hardly ever sleeps there.”

“What?” Edie says.

“She rolls in at five or six in the morning when Raoul is getting up to exercise,” Zeke says. “She’s out on the prowl, I guess.”

Edie isn’t surprised to hear this—Alessandra exudes a discreet but undeniable sexuality—but she won’t take part in any slut- shaming. If anything, Edie feels freshly hurt that Alessandra has chosen to confide exactly nothing in her even though they work side by side all day long. Alessandra is always civil but never friendly or warm. Why?

Beneath Alessandra’s polished facade is something else, Edie thinks. A broken doll, a smashed mirror. Alessandra is damaged. Or

maybe Edie is just making excuses for her. Graydon used to tell Edie she should stop giving other people so much credit.

Zeke finishes his ice cream and stands up. “I’m heading home.”

He gives Edie his slow, beautiful smile. “I think we should start spying on Alessandra to figure out how she’s winning the money.”

Start spying on her? Edie thinks. Are they back in middle school?

The idea, however, is not without its appeal. Edie likes the thought of having a little conspiracy going with Zeke.

“I’ll see what I can find out,” Edie says, though she knows she will find out nothing. Alessandra is all zippered up.

“Here, take my number,” Zeke says. He picks up Edie’s phone.

“Someone named Graydon has requested a five-hundred-dollar Venmo,” he says. He grins at Edie. “Who’s Graydon? Your bookie?”

Edie wants to snatch the phone from his hand, but she just laughs. “Something like that.” She watches Zeke type his number into her phone, but the thrill that should accompany getting Zeke English’s cell phone number is missing. When Zeke hands back her phone, Edie sees the Venmo request, and her face burns with shame. She has no right to judge Alessandra. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“See ya,” Zeke says, and he leaves her sitting with what is now a bowl of cold chocolate soup.

Five hundred dollars. Edie checks the date. It’s exactly three weeks since Graydon’s last Venmo request, which came exactly three weeks after his first Venmo request. The regularity of the extortion gives Edie an odd comfort. Graydon isn’t asking more frequently or asking for more money. Edie wonders if she can just think of this like a car payment or a stupidity tax.

But no, sorry, that’s absurd! She has lost a thousand dollars of her hard-earned money already and she’s not going to buckle this time.

Graydon is angry about the breakup and maybe he’s lonely out in Arizona, but even so, he would never send those videos out. They would embarrass him as much as her.

She deletes the Venmo request—but then, as though he’s watching her somehow, a text comes in from him.

It’s her mother’s cell phone number and e-mail.

Edie stops breathing for a second. She sends him the money.