My Foolish Husband's Regret Comes Late novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Eight A.M.

Lydia sneaks into the Lowell Grand before security boxes her desk, gets her father's folder from Gwen's warm hands, turns down a job from rival hotelier Elias Colquitt, and finds the one page that matters is gone.

Nan drove me to the Lowell Grand at six forty-five the next morning in her pastry van.

She had made me eat two eggs and a cinnamon roll on her couch before she'd let me say a word about it.

"You have until eight," she said, parking at the loading dock. "Get your thing, and I'll keep the guard talking."

"What thing?" I said.

"The thing you keep looking at your bag about. Go."

The guard at the service door had worked the overnight shift for twenty years.

He took one look at me, held up his badge and turned his back to read the wall schedule.

"I didn't see anybody, Mrs. Lowell," he said.

"It's Lydia."

"Yes, ma'am."

I took the service elevator up to the events office, which still smelled of the lilies I had ordered on Thursday.

My name was already off the door.

Somebody had peeled the plate away in the night and left a rectangle of clean paint.

The lights were on inside.

Gwen stood at my desk with a cardboard box in her arms, and she had put my two ferns in it.

"Lydia!" she said. "Oh, thank God it's you."

She came around the desk and hugged me with the box between us.

"I couldn't stand the idea of security throwing your things in a bag. I came in at six to do it properly."

She had brought coffee, too, in my favorite cup from the café downstairs.

"Preston's a wreck," she said. "He sat in the car outside your place until two. Did you know that?"

"I wasn't home."

"I know. I'm so sorry. Helen is just so quick with her family-office rules."

She set the cup in my hand.

It was hot, with exactly the oat milk I take.

"You were in my chair last night," I said.

"Helen asked me to host. I said it felt wrong, and she said it was a mess already and somebody had to." Gwen looked at the floor. "I should have called you."

"You texted me."

"I know."

"You said everything was set."

"I thought it was." She bit her lip. "I'll never forgive myself."

She meant it, I think, or she was good at looking like she did.

She slid open the bottom drawer, took out a manila folder from under my spare shoes and held it out.

"This was in with your things. I didn't open it. It looked private."

It was my father's folder.

The red rubber band around it was looped once.

I always looped it twice.

"Thank you," I said.

"Anything." She squeezed my arm. "Call me if you need a friend. A real one, I mean. Not Preston's."

Nan's van was gone from the dock when I came back down.

She was at the lobby café with a croissant in each hand, glaring at the cashier.

Across the lobby, a man was standing at the marble pillar by the revolving door, watching me with his hands in the pockets of a charcoal coat.

He was about thirty-seven, broad through the shoulders, with a little gray in his dark hair at the temples.

He crossed the floor as soon as he saw I'd noticed him.

"Ms. Farrington," he said.

Nobody had called me that in four years.

"I'm Elias Colquitt. I own the Colquitt hotels."

"I know who you are." Everyone in the business knew who he was. "You're the man Helen Lowell can't buy."

"That's one way to say it."

He did not smile.

"Half of Chicago has watched the video. The part where you pushed the card across the table is the part they replay."

"Good for the card."

"I open a hotel on Wabash in January," he said. "I don't have an events director, and last night the best one in the city lost her badge."

"Is that why you're in the Lowell Grand lobby at seven in the morning?"

"I wanted you to hear it before someone else offered less."

He took a card from his coat and held it out.

I looked at the plain cream rectangle and didn't take it.

"I'm not going from one hotel owner's family to another," I said.

"I'm not anyone's family."

"That's what everyone says."

"Name your title and your salary," he said. "I'll sign whatever you write."

"No."

He nodded once, and he left the card on the edge of the cashier's counter and went out through the revolving door.

Nan came up beside me with the croissants.

"He's handsome," she said. "I hate that he's handsome."

"I said no."

"I know, babe. I heard. The whole lobby heard."

We sat in the van with the engine off, and I opened the folder on my knees.

The lease for Farrington's was all there, eight pages, with my father's signature at the bottom of each in blue pen.

I went through them twice, and then I went through the folder a third time, just the back pocket.

The letter was gone.

It was the only page that mattered.

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