Page 79 of Torin

A big oak desk sits beneath the window. Filing cabinets cover most of one wall, and the shelves behind the desk are packed with ledgers, folders and binders. There’s an old computer on the floor, a dead plant in the corner, a corkboard still covered in notices.

“Oh!” Hannah looks around for a moment, then she goes over to the filing cabinets. She pulls open the top drawer, then pauses. “Can I?”

“That’s why I brought you up here.”

She pulls the drawer all the way open and flicks through the files.

“Guest complaints. Supplier invoices. Maintenance requests.” She pulls a face. “Okay, this one’s not very promising.” She keeps going.

“You could try another drawer.”

“I haven’t finished with this one.”

I laugh.

She pulls out a file and opens it.

“Oh, here we go. Someone complained that a bear stole their cooler.”

“Sounds plausible.”

“It says the manager reimbursed them fifty-seven dollars.”

“Expensive bear.”

She smiles and puts the file back. Then she opens another.

I watch her for a while, enjoying how quickly she’s forgotten everything except what’s in front of her.

Then she finds some photographs in a thick folder beneath a stack of old paperwork. She carries them to the desk.

The first few show the lodge years ago, the timber fresh and flowers running the length of the porch. Cars fill the parking lot. People sit outside with drinks while kids run across the grass. In another, the lounge is packed around a huge Christmas tree.

Hannah picks up a photograph of the lodge from the front. “It was beautiful.”

“It still could be.”

She picks up another.

A wedding. The bride and groom are standing on the front steps beneath an arch of white flowers, with guests crowded behind them.

Hannah turns it over.

“Nineteen ninety-four.”

The next one is a Thanksgiving dinner in the lounge. Then a birthday party on the porch. People fishing at the lake.

Soon she’s spreading them across the desk, checking the dates on the backs and going back to ones she’s already seen when something in a new one catches her attention.

I watch her pick up the first wedding photograph again, check the back, then reach for another.

I could stand here and watch her for hours. Not because I give a damn what happened at some stranger’s wedding thirty years ago.

Because every few minutes, I’m learning something new about her.

The way she reads faster when she’s excited. The way she goes back and checks something instead of trusting that she remembered it right.

All these little things—I want to know all of them.