Chapter 12: His Desk

I stood there with his keys digging into my palm and a hundred and forty people staring at us.

"Why?" I said, too quietly for anyone else to hear.

"Because you're wasted on the floor," Kendrick said.

"And if you're going to go through my desk anyway, you might as well do it at nine in the morning with the lights on."

He walked out.

The banquet captain cleared his throat and went back to his clipboard.

Nobody smirked after that.

His office was the room behind pastry, not the study.

The study was for the board and for the will and for my father's ghost.

The office was where he actually worked.

A steel desk, two monitors, a whiteboard covered in event dates, a coffee machine older than me.

My desk was a folding table he'd had someone carry in and put across from his.

On it was a laptop, a phone, and a mug.

My father's mug, with the faded blue H.

He'd brought it over from the cottage.

I didn't ask.

For two days I did the job.

I was good at it.

I'd run a hotel ballroom in Manhattan for five years.

I knew how to answer a phone so a bride stopped crying.

I knew how to move a florist without the florist knowing she'd been moved.

Kendrick barely spoke to me.

He said "thank you" when I handed him things, and "good" when something went right, and nothing else.

He didn't mention the cellar.

Neither did I.

But I had his calendar now.

All of it, back to January.

On Tuesday afternoon, while he was down in the kitchen, I scrolled back through the spring.

Every Tuesday night from April to July, there was the same entry.

7 p.m. Dinner. P.S.

Danielle Thorndike.

Every single Tuesday.

Then in the middle of July it just stopped.

I also found a spreadsheet in his shared folder labeled "Summer staff."

It was the bonuses.

Every August my father paid every employee a bonus after the wedding season, a week's wages, cash in an envelope.