Page 1 of Marrying the Pakhan

1

HARPER

The guest in front of me wants a room with a water view, and I don’t have the heart to tell him our water view is a parking garage with a puddle in it.

“Let me check what’s available,” I say instead, and type nothing into the system.

He’s wearing a shiny leather jacket, the kind my boss’s son wears when he swings by to hit up his dad for cash. The man taps his knuckles on the counter while he waits, like the seconds matter to him in a way they don’t matter to me.

I give him room 412, top floor, and tell him it faces the courtyard. That part’s true. I just don’t mention the courtyard is where housekeeping keeps the linen carts.

By the time he walks off toward the elevators, Renata’s already leaning against the desk beside me, arms crossed, watching him go.

“You gave him 412?”

“He wanted a view.”

“He’s getting laundry carts.”

“He’s getting a courtyard,” I say, and she laughs low enough that it doesn’t carry past the desk.

Renata’s worked the evening shift with me for two years now, long enough that we don’t have to explain the shorthand anymore.

She knows which regulars tip and which ones complain about the ice machine on the third floor being broken, which it has been since before either of us started. She also knows about Ginger and Mia, though she’s careful not to bring either one up unless I do first.

Tonight, I bring up neither. I’ve got a stack of registration cards to file and a headache building behind my left eye, and for the length of one shift, I’d like to just be a person standing behind a desk instead of the only thing standing between my niece and a house I can’t afford.

It doesn’t last.

“You look like you haven’t slept,” Renata says.

“I haven’t.”

“Ginger?”

“The Ivanovs,” I say it flatly, the way you’d read off a name that’s been circled on a calendar for weeks. “Court date’s in three weeks. My lawyer wants to meet before then. Again.”

Renata makes a face, the one she makes whenever I bring up my in-laws who aren’t really my in-laws anymore.

My sister’s the one who married their son, and he’s been gone even longer than she has, dead since Ginger was barely a year old, some accident nobody in the family likes to talk about in detail.

Now my sister’s gone too. Ginger’s grandparents are her only other family, if you don’t count me, and lately I get the feeling they’d rather you didn’t.

“They’re not going to win,” Renata says. “You’re her guardian. It’s in the will.”

“Wills get challenged all the time.”

“Just by people with money,” she says, and when I don’t answer that, because she’s right and there’s nothing to add to being right, she reaches over and squeezes my arm once, quick, before pulling back to answer the phone that starts ringing on her side of the desk.

I go back to the registration cards. I get through maybe six of them before she hangs up, and when I look over, she’s got that particular look on her face, the one that shows up right before she says a thing she thinks is hilarious and I think is a terrible idea.

“You know what you should do,” she says.

“No.”

“You don’t even know what I was going to say.”

“I know your face. I don’t like your face right now.”