Chapter 2
I came through the revolving door with Lily's weight distributed against my chest and the roses in my free hand and a carry-on over my shoulder that I had packed without help, the way I packed everything now. The lobby smelled like cedar and night-blooming jasmine, which was the scent Margaret had chosen for the ambient diffusers on the ground floor, and the smell hit me before anything else did, before I had fully oriented myself or registered the temperature of the room or done any of the other things you do when you arrive somewhere, and for a moment I simply stood in the entryway and breathed and let the smell be what it was.
Then I walked to the front desk.
There were two receptionists working the late shift, both young women in the cream and navy uniforms I had approved for this property eight years ago. They were both occupied when I arrived, one on the phone, one entering something into the system, and I waited the appropriate amount of time without making a scene about it, because I had not planned to make a scene about anything. I had planned to check in, take Lily upstairs, put her to bed, and spend some quiet time in the room that Margaret and I had designed together, the room I had reserved specifically for tonight, and try to get through the anniversary the way I got through it every year, which was mostly by staying vertical and putting one hour in front of the other until the date changed.
The receptionist who was not on the phone looked up and took me in. I watched her do it. The carry-on was a quality bag but it had been to fourteen countries and it showed. My jacket was good but it was the jacket I wore on airplanes, which meant it had been on my body for six hours and looked like it. Lily's weight had pulled my collar sideways. I had not shaved since Thursday.
"Checking in?" she said. Her voice had the specific brightness of a person who has already assigned a category.
"Vance," I said. "Reservation for Suite 904."
May you like
She typed it in. Her expression shifted in a way that was not quite skeptical but was not quite not skeptical either, the expression of someone who has encountered mismatches between what a person looks like and what a person claims to have reserved and has developed a professional method for managing the gap.
"One moment," she said, and turned to her colleague, and they had a brief exchange in voices too low to make out clearly, though I caught the word system and the word authorization, and then they both looked at the screen and then briefly at me with the twin expressions of people who have decided they are being careful rather than unkind.
