Chapter 4

The service elevator was slow, the kind of machine that rattled and hummed and made you wonder if it would make it to your floor. Sasha watched the numbers tick by, the wine now drying into a dark crust on her vest. She would have to strip it off the moment she got to the locker room, let it soak in cold water, pray the stain bleached out. It was her best vest, the one she saved for events like this, the one that didn't have a loose thread or a stained collar.

She had not planned to be in the ballroom corridor tonight. She had been scheduled for the east wing, but a call from the banquet floor had pulled her over. There had been a spill at table seven, a child with a juice box, nothing dramatic. She had been resetting the napkins when the ballroom doors opened for the late arrivals and she had seen the man in the charcoal suit walk in.

Six years, and she had known him instantly. The way he moved, the way he carried himself, the way he looked around the room like he owned every inch of it from the tie pin to the floorboards. He was wearing the same watch he had worn the day he proposed, the vintage gold one she had helped him pick out at a pawn shop in the Village.

Sasha had ducked out through the service doors before he could see her. Four years of working in this hotel, four years of careful indifference, all to avoid this exact moment. And then Nadia had followed her into the corridor.

The elevator dinged. The doors slid open.

She stepped out into the locker room, a long narrow space lined with gray lockers and a single bench. It was empty at this hour—the day shift gone, the night shift out on the floors. She walked to her locker, spun the combination, and pulled out a spare vest. It was older, faded, the gray a little too green. But it was clean.

She stripped off the stained vest first, then the shirt underneath. The wine had soaked through to her skin, leaving a pink disco's of color across her chest and the tops of her shoulders. She dabbed at it with a paper towel, wincing at the sting.

The room was silent. The fluorescent light buzzed overhead, an insect hum that she had learned to tune out years ago.

She thought about Julian's face when he had whispered her name. The shock, the grief, the desperate hope. She had spent four years building a life in this hotel, and in a single moment his voice had knocked the bricks loose.

The locker room door opened.