Wrong Room: Sleeping With My Fiancé's Uncle novel · Chapter 29 of 32

Chapter 29: The Plain Guest

I stopped walking.

Colm walked one more step and then stopped too, because I'd stopped.

"What?" he said.

"Don't look."

He looked.

"Colm."

"I'm a hotelier. I look at guests." He looked away again, at the piano. "Is that her?"

"Flat shoes. Italian leather. Canvas tote. A wig, and a good one." I kept my voice down. "That's what I wore for six years. That's her."

At the front desk, the night clerk was taking her card.

He was the same clerk who'd been on his phone under the counter my first morning.

He wasn't on it now.

He looked at her.

He looked at her shoes.

Then he looked across the lobby, straight at me, with his eyebrows all the way up.

I shook my head once.

His hand had drifted toward the keyboard. Toward the upgrade screen. I'd taught him where it was myself.

I shook my head again.

His hand came back.

"Welcome to the Kinsella," he said to her. "You're on eleven, park view. Can I help with your bag?"

"I've got it," the woman said.

Her voice was slow and a little low.

I knew that trick too.

She walked to the guest elevator with her tote on her shoulder.

She didn't look at me.

She didn't look at anyone.

She looked at the clock over the desk, and at the brass on the elevator doors.

She looked at the white roses where the lilies used to be.

The doors closed on her.

Colm relaxed after holding his breath since Bayonne.

"Upstairs," I said. "Now. Your office."

By ten o'clock the head housekeeper, the night bellman and the night clerk were standing in Colm's office with the door shut.

"Nobody upgrades her," I said. "Nobody sends fruit. Nobody puts a note on her pillow."

"Not even the good chocolates?" said the clerk.

"She gets what the couple in 1406 gets. Same towels. Same turndown. Same everything."

"And if something goes wrong in her room?"

"Then it goes wrong," I said. "And you fix it the way you'd fix it for anybody. Fast. Without a fuss."

The head housekeeper folded her arms.

"You want us to treat her like everybody else."

"I want you to treat everybody like her."

She looked at me for a long time.

"That's what we've been doing since December," she said. "You just never said it out loud before."

The bellman tipped his cap.

"Forty-one years," he said. "Never once treated a guest better than another one. Except you."

"What did I get?"

"I held the door when it stuck."

Monday was the longest day of my working life.

I didn't go to eleven.

I didn't walk past her room.

I didn't check the room-service tickets to see what she'd ordered, though my hands wanted to the whole day.

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