How to Say Our Final Goodbye novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: Room 1206

I stood on the sidewalk on Wacker Drive for a full minute.

Tourists walked around me.

A bus went by with Kirsten's face on the side of it, an ad for a teeth-whitening app.

My phone buzzed in my purse.

It was a text from a number I didn't have saved.

Loading dock. 11 tonight. Wear something dark. Housekeeping.

The head of housekeeping had never sent me a text in her life.

At eleven I was standing at the bottom of the loading dock ramp on Lower Wacker.

Black jeans and a hoodie. I felt like a cat burglar.

The steel door rolled up two feet and stopped.

A hand waved me under it.

I ducked through and came up face to face with the night engineer.

He put a finger to his lips and pointed at the service elevator.

The head of housekeeping was inside it, holding a linen cart.

"Get in the cart," she said.

"I'm not getting in the cart."

"Your father's two gray men are on the lobby cameras all night. The service elevator has no camera. The twelfth floor hallway has one, and it's been broken since March, because I asked engineering not to fix it."

"Why did you ask them that?"

"Some guests like their privacy." She lifted a stack of folded sheets. "Get in the cart, Clementine."

I got in the cart.

She piled towels on top of me, and the elevator groaned upward.

I lay in the dark in the smell of hot cotton and tried not to sneeze.

On twelve the cart rolled down the hall and stopped.

Keys rattled.

A lock I hadn't heard turn in twelve years turned.

The towels came off.

I sat up in the middle of my mother's suite.

It was all still there.

The white dust sheets over the sofas. The walnut desk by the window, facing the river. Her reading glasses folded on the blotter.

The silver frame with her in the wedding dress, laughing under the lanterns.

A coffee cup with a dry brown ring at the bottom.

"Nobody's been in?" I whispered.

"I come in once a month and dust," the head of housekeeping said. "That's all. I never moved a thing."

She pulled the sheet off the sofa and shook it out.

"It's off the booking system. Your father forgot it existed years ago. Nobody will look for you here."

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