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I’ll wipe my makeup off later. Because if I let go now, I’m worried he’ll be gone when I turn back around.
He doesn’t put his arm around me. He’s completely reserved, withdrawn, but it doesn’t matter.
Because he’s here.
He didn’t leave, even when I gave him every reason to do so.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Choose Happiness
I’m preoccupied at work. I missed cleaning this place when I first started seventeen months ago—I miss the distraction scrubbing toilet bowls and wiping down showers and scouring suspicious stains from carpets brought with it. Admittedly, it’s great I don’t have to work weekends, but being a hotel receptionist means I start early and finish late.
I didn’t even want the promotion, but as soon as the job became available, Archer pushed me to apply because the role came with a multitude of benefit schemes.
Yeah, benefit schemes, but nothing was mentioned about needing patience of steel.
If I had ten-pence for every time someone dropped in to demand a room without prebooking, I might actually be able to afford a house in the heart of London.
But other than biting my tongue and smiling through seething hatred, there isn’t much to it. My days consist of greeting customers, handing them a hotel policy form for them to sign, and chucking them their key cards. Mostly the hotel is full of people staying for work trips, but we get the occasional gooey couple, and the way they look at each other makes me relieved I’m not cleaning rooms anymore.
Emmy and I play a game calledMarried or Single?where we guess if a couple is legit or if they’re using the hotel to cheat. Sometimes it’s obvious, when a woman wears a wedding band but has a different surname to the man she’s checking in with, but other times couples look so in lust it’s difficult to tell if they’re just catching a steamy night away from their kids.
But Emmy isn’t here today, and even if she was, I doubt she’d be pleasant. Not after how I treated her last night.
Jase takes her place Thursdays—which is just fantastic, because I don’t think he’s said a single word to me since last Christmas and that shitshow of a party, nothing beyond anything work related, but he refuses to look at me, too. Oftentimes I find myself wanting to demand what I’ve done to upset his fragile ego, but I have to work with this guy.
Breaking the silence will only make things more awkward between us.
So, with no one to talk to and the infrequent traffic filtering into the lobby, all I think about is Archer.
Will he stay out again tonight? Will he come home at all? Maybe he’ll finish early, pack his things, and leave. I wouldn’t be surprised after what I did, after not telling him where I was going. I latch onto every subtle shift in his mood, readying myself for an outburst. I barely slept last night, and I was awake when his alarm went off, but he didn’t take me from behind as he usually does; he just rolled out of bed, took a shower, and left.
And I stared at the door, long after his absence, unable to shift the hollow feeling in my stomach. My mind has been quiet all day, detached; I didn’t even feel the warmth of my shower or taste my food, and although my belly growls, I have no appetite.
All day I’ve warred with yearning to text him and wanting to give him space. But why am I fretting about him when it’s clear he’s not thinking about me at all?
I shoot him a quick text as I walk to my car.
Popping my dad’s for a bit, be back late x
I did mention I’d planned to go sometime this week after work, so he can’t say I didn’t pre-warn him, can he?
It’s gone nine by the time I pull my car up on the curb. The street is quiet, so quiet I can almost hear Chase’s laughter and see my highlighters fly across the garden, the Stagg gleaming beneath the sun. The Stagg still sits in the driveway, but a cover is thrown over it, untouched, just like it was when I last visited one month ago, and the month before that—preserving that day last spring, the wind in my hair and the ocean cool on my arms, as if the car was made only for that moment, to exist only for that.
Thankfully Jan manages the lawn, and I smile at the drooping wildflowers, long since perished in the approaching winter. She’s even left the blossom tree I planted, which is no more than a stalk with smaller stalks branching off it.
Kevin leaves a key beneath a mole ornament on the porch for Jan because she checks on him so many times a day he’s ‘tired of answering the door’ and he ‘doesn’t get up as many times to pee as he does to answer that flipping door.’ And he pees a lot these days.
I find him sitting in an armchair, watchingDog the Bounty Hunter.
‘Jan?’ he calls. ‘Is that you?’
‘The one and only.’ I take a seat on the sofa.
His face lights up—his eyes, his cheeks, even his skin, usually so gaunt and jaundice lately. ‘Oh, Frankie! Hey, kiddo.’
‘Hey, Dad.’
