Chapter 4: The Stranger Who Made Me Smile

HAUNTED BY THE MAFIA KING

By Ann E.

Chapter 4: The Stranger Who Made Me Smile

Lila POV

The Marlowe Hotel smells of lilies and old money, and I walk into it like someone who has been told to stand up straight.

I have never been here. The taxi driver asked where, and I said the first hotel name I could think of that wasn't the Hallam. I could not go back to the Hallam. It would have felt like returning to the scene of my own funeral.

The bar sits off the lobby behind a pair of glass doors. Low lamps. Dark wood. A pianist plays something slow in the corner, and nobody is listening. I choose a small table near the window, as far from the crowd as the room allows, and order a gin and tonic from a waiter who doesn't ask my name.

When it comes, I don't drink it.

My phone buzzes against the table. Mum. I watch the screen light up and go dark. It lights up again. I turn the phone face down and press my palm flat on top of it, as though I could hold the whole McCann house shut.

Not tonight.

I can still hear it. Not the words. The sound, low and rough, coming through a half-open door. It plays under everything, under the piano, under the clink of glasses, like a tap left running in another room.

I touch the hairpin above my ear. The gold leaf is cool against my fingertips. It is the only thing in my life that someone gave away and I took back.

He is sitting two tables from the back wall, with two men.

I notice him because nobody else seems to. That is the strange part. The room is full of people who look at each other, who tilt their heads, who tap each other's arms. At his table, nobody touches anybody. The two men sit forward with their hands on their knees like they are waiting to be told they can leave.

He wears a dark suit and no tie. His collar is open at the throat. He is not talking much. When he does, I can't hear it, but one of the men nods fast, twice, the way you nod when you've been given an instruction you intend to follow exactly.

The other man keeps looking at the door.

Every time it opens, his eyes go to it. Not curiously. Quickly, and then away, like a man checking a clock he isn't supposed to be checking.

The stranger's phone lights up on the table. Once. Twice. A third time. He lets it. He does not even glance at it. It buzzes itself across the wood by half an inch, and he moves a glass out of its way without looking down.

I am being rude, staring. I turn my face toward the window and watch the rain begin on the glass.

I don't know how long I sit there. Long enough for the ice in the gin to melt into something grey. Long enough for the two men to rise, murmur something, and walk out with the particular stiffness of people who are glad to be going.

The stranger stays.

A waiter appears at my elbow, sets a small white cup in front of me, and lifts my gin away.

"Wait," I say. "That's not..."

He is already gone.

Across the room, the waiter sets my drink down in front of the stranger. The stranger looks at the glass. Then at the cup in front of me. Then at me.

He stands, picks up his coffee, and walks over carrying both.

He is taller than I expected. Up close, there is nothing remarkable in his face except the stillness of it, the way he gives the impression of having already decided where everything in the room belongs. He sets my gin on the table in front of me and takes the cup from my side.

"I believe this is yours," he says. His voice is low and even. "And I believe that's mine."

"You're welcome to the gin," I say. "I haven't touched it."

"I noticed." A pause. "Forgive the mix-up. This hotel employs the only waiters in the city who can lose a drink while standing next to it."

Something tugs at the corner of my mouth. I press it flat.

"I'm perfectly capable of sitting alone," I say.

"I'm sure you are." He nods once, without argument. "Good evening."

He turns to go.

I should let him. I know I should let him. I came here to be nobody's anything, to sit in the dark with my own wreckage and let it quiet down.

"It was a bad gin, anyway," I hear myself say.

He stops. Looks back.

"Was it?"

"I don't know. I didn't drink it."

"Then you're the only person in this room making a sensible decision."

I laugh.

It slips out before I can catch it, short and surprised and slightly cracked. I put my hand over my mouth. For a moment I think I might cry instead, and then I don't, and he is still there, standing at the edge of my table like a man waiting to be told whether he's allowed to stay.

"Sit," I say. "If you want."

He sits. He doesn't ask my name. He doesn't ask why my mascara has run, or why I'm alone in a hotel bar on a Sunday night wearing a green dress that looks like it was put on for someone else.

I notice that. I keep noticing it.

We talk about nothing.

The coffee, which he says is the worst he has ever been served in an establishment that charges for the privilege. The pianist, who has been playing the same four bars for forty minutes. The rain. He says it follows him. I say it follows me too, and he says in that case we must be doing something right.

I don't tell him about Jason. He doesn't ask. Twice my phone buzzes against the table, and twice I leave it face down, and twice he glances at the movement and then politely away. Not a flicker of curiosity. Not a single Is that important?

I realise I am still holding my gin. I put it down.

"That's a lovely thing," he says.

I follow his eyes to my hair. The small gold leaf, the single curved line catching the lamp.

"It was a present," I say.

"For someone else?"

"For someone who didn't want it." I turn the stem of my glass. "I took it back."

He looks at the hairpin a moment longer than I expect. Then at me. Something passes across his face that I can't read, there and gone, like a bird's shadow across a window.

"Good," he says.

That is all.

---

At some point I realise the piano has stopped.

The bar has half emptied without my noticing. The waiter is stacking chairs near the door. Rain streaks the glass.

I haven't thought about Jason in a long time.

It isn't relief, exactly. The pain is still there, sitting at the bottom of my ribs like a stone. But it no longer fills the whole room inside my head. There is space around it now. Space for a stranger's dry remark. For the shape of a laugh.

"I have no reason to go home," he says, quite casually. As if he is commenting on the weather.

"Neither do I."

"Is that true? Or is it only true tonight?"

I look at him.

"Do you want to stay here," he says, "or are you staying because you don't know where else to go?"

It lands closer to the truth than I like. I stare at my hands.

Because here is the thing I have not said to anyone, not to Chloe, not to myself, not once in all those years of holding my breath in a family that smiled at me like an echo.

I made a promise at nineteen, alone, on a night I do not talk about. It has been mine ever since, the one thing I decided for myself. Mine to keep. It has taken me until this moment, in a hotel bar that smells of lilies, to understand the second half of that sentence.

Mine to change.

Not for Jason. Not because he put a card on a tablecloth and went cold. Not because tonight I walked down a hall and heard what I heard.

And I make myself ask it. Honestly. Slowly. The way you test ice before you step on it.

Is this about him?

I imagine it. I imagine Jason finding out. His face, white, the way Chloe's went white in the mirror. I wait to feel the heat of it, the satisfaction.

Nothing comes.

I imagine him never knowing. Never hearing, never finding out, never once thinking of me at all. And I find that the thing in my chest, the small and steady thing, is still there.

I want this. Not because it would hurt anyone. Because I want it.

I look up.

"I don't want to be alone tonight," I say. "But I don't want to be rescued, either."

"I'm not offering to rescue you."

"What are you offering?"

He considers it. He doesn't rush. "A door," he says at last. "You're free to walk through it. You're free not to."

I think of the hairpin. The photograph. The suitcase, lighter than I expected.

"Do you want to leave with me?" I ask.

He studies my face. Not like a man calculating, but like a man giving me time. A whole slow breath of it. His eyes never leave mine, and I understand that if I look away, if I laugh, if I say never mind, he will simply say Of course, and stand, and go.

I don't look away.

"Yes," he says.

He doesn't take me out through the front.

A man in a dark jacket I haven't noticed before steps out of the shadows by the bar and opens a side door, one that leads to a quiet corridor with a steel handrail and a smell of cold stone. The stranger walks beside me without touching me. He doesn't speak.

Rain finds my shoulders as we step out into the alley.

A black car waits with its engine running. The driver's face is turned away. I notice that too. He has the careful, deliberate air of a man looking elsewhere.

The stranger opens the rear door and stops.

"Last chance," he says, quietly. "No one will think less of you."

The rain is cold on my neck. Somewhere behind me, a phone is buzzing in my bag, again and again, with a name I do not want to see.

I look at the open door. Then at him.

For one moment I think of the other version of tonight, the one where I turn around, go home, lock my bedroom door, and let tomorrow bury me in apologies.

I am tired of making every decision out of fear.

"Let's go," I say.

He holds my gaze a second longer. Then he steps back to let me enter first.

And I do.