He Made Her His Wife for Seven Days. I Made Him My Ex. novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: The Clerk

On Day 8, at noon, Nathaniel's night clerk stood in his office with her coat still on.

She was fifty, small and neat, and she had kept the key to room 1104 on a ring at her belt for a year.

Nathaniel sat behind his desk.

I stood at the window with my back to the Grand, because I had decided I was done looking at it.

Mr. Keating had been dead seven hours, and Gretchen had gone home to sleep with the lawyer's page folded in her bag.

Seventy-two hours had started running at seven that morning, and neither of us had said so aloud.

"Tell her what you told me this morning," Nathaniel said.

The clerk twisted her gloves.

"Mrs. Holloway's driver came to the service door on Monday night," she said. "I'd seen the car before. He gave me an envelope."

"What was in it?"

"Two thousand dollars. And a request." She looked at me. "She wanted to know who came to room 1104, and what time, and whether you ever left."

"For how long?" I said.

"Since Monday. I took it that first night." She swallowed. "I told her you went to your bakery in the day and came to the hotel at night. I told her you left your phone in Mr. Sterne's drawer on Wednesday."

"And on Day 3, at eleven-forty?"

"She wanted to hear it in person. She asked if you were sleeping with him."

Nathaniel's jaw moved.

"What did you say?" I asked.

"That I didn't know." The clerk's voice shook. "It was true then."

The office was quiet.

Nathaniel did not look at me.

"I should fire you," he said.

"I know."

"I'm going to suspend you with pay until the board meets," he said. "And you're going to tell a woman on the Holloway board exactly what you told us."

"Yes, sir."

"Is there anything else?" I said.

The clerk hesitated.

"Your box," she said. "The tin one. She talked about it that night, in the car. She said it was in her sewing room on Beacon Hill, in the bottom drawer of the cabinet. She said she'd have burned it, but it was a pretty thing."

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