Chapter 14: Ninety Reasons

Thatcher's POV

By midnight I had written sixty-one reasons from memory, and I was angry at every one of them.

The notebook was gone, so I was copying it onto hotel stationery.

Reason 12 was that she had learned my driver's dog's name by the second week.

Reason 31 was that she counted my nos aloud and kept the total better than my accountants kept the quarter.

Reason 44 was that she told the doorman I said hello.

I had not said hello.

I had nodded at a man.

She had turned the nod into a greeting, and now the doorman saluted me.

I wrote the sixty-second line and stopped, because the voice came into my head at last.

"Scheduled maintenance," it said, in the same bright flat tone it had used for three years.

"Quest paused for six hours. Affection meter frozen. No penalties will be issued. Service resumes at seven."

I put down the pen.

In three years it had never paused for anything.

It had not paused for Mariel's last night, or for Dot's.

I opened the bottom drawer of my desk.

The cup was still in it.

It was a white cup from the Grand's own coffee bar, with a lipstick mark worn nearly off the rim.

I had kept it for three years because I could not stand being the only person who had held it.

Mariel had kissed me in a coat check and said it was destiny.

For sixty days I was cold to her, and on the sixtieth she stopped existing in front of my desk.

I thought about June in the hallway outside my door.

She was on the night desk, and had been since ten.

If the voice had said the same thing to her, she was free of it for the first time since March.

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