Two Words

Chapter 5

The note said two words and I read it forty times.

Thank you.

Not thanks. Not had a great time. Thank you, in black ink, hard and fast, on hotel paper he'd had in his coat pocket like a man who travels with something to write on because he's used to writing things down and leaving them behind.

I sat on the edge of my own bed — the bed he'd made, the bed that looked like a hotel bed in a movie, corners folded, sheet flat — and I read those two words until the sun came all the way up and my eyes hurt.

Then I got up and I did what people do.

I put the note on the counter. I made coffee I didn't drink. I picked up his shirt off the back of the chair and I held it and then I put it back down on the back of the chair, which is not throwing it away, and I knew it wasn't throwing it away while I was doing it.

My phone was dead. I plugged it in and stood there watching the little battery icon fill up like I was waiting for a bus.

Nothing came in.

I want to be specific about that, because I spent the rest of the morning being specific about it in my own head. I checked at seven. Nothing. Eight. Nothing. Nine-fifteen, nine-forty, ten. My mother sent a link to a thing about posture. A girl from work sent a group text about a birthday brunch. My dentist sent a reminder.

No text. No call. No made it home. No I'll send you the rest, which he'd said with his mouth on my forehead at four in the morning like a man paying a tab.

He'd said he'd send me the rest.

He didn't send me the rest.

At ten-forty I called Dani.

She picked up on the second ring, which meant she'd been holding the phone.

"Are you alive," she said.

"I'm alive."

"Are you alone."

I looked at the chair with the shirt on it. "I'm alone."

"Mia."

"It's not — Dani, it's not what you think."

"Then tell me what it is, because what it is on my end is you disappeared from a hotel ballroom with a man nobody at that table had ever seen before and you didn't answer your phone for eleven hours."

"He's — " I stopped. I was standing in my kitchen with the note on the counter under my hand and I did not have the next word.

"He's what."

"He's tall," I said.

Silence on the line. Long silence.

"Come over," I said. "Bring coffee. Bring the expensive kind. Bring the kind that costs as much as a cab."

"On a Sunday?"

"On a Sunday."

She sighed the sigh. "Twenty minutes."

She was there in fifteen, in a sweatshirt and no makeup, holding two cups and a bag, and she looked at me standing in my own hallway in yesterday's mascara and she said, "Oh, honey," and pushed past me into the apartment.

She stopped in the bedroom doorway.

"What," I said.

"Why is your bed made?"

"I made it."

"You have never made a bed in your life. You told me making a bed is a capitalist lie."

"I made it," I said, and my voice came out wrong, and she turned around and looked at me, really looked, and her face changed.

"Okay," she said, gently. "Where's the note."

"What note?"

"Mia."

I went and got it. I brought it back and put it in her hand and she stood in my kitchen reading two words and then she looked up.

"That's it?"

"That's it."

"That's — he left you a note that says thank you and made the bed and —" She flipped it over. Blank. She flipped it back. "There's no number."

"No."

"There's no name."

"No."

"On the note. On the paper. There's no name."

"Dani."

"Mia. What's his name?"

I stood in my kitchen with my mouth open.

"He told you his name," she said. "Right? At some point in the last — how many hours was it — did he tell you his name?"

"He's Daniel," I said.

"Daniel what?"

"He's — he's Daniel, from the Hamptons—"

"Those are the words you gave him." She put her coffee down. "You told him his name. I was there. You said it in a bar: your name is Daniel, you're in finance. That's a costume, Mia. That's not a name."

I picked up my phone. I looked at it. Nothing.

"He has a driver," I said. "He has a car. He had a photographer take his picture and then he told the photographer to put the camera down, and the guy did, Dani. Nobody does that. You don't tell a photographer to put his camera down at a hotel unless he knows exactly who you are—"

"Then who is he?"

"He had a coat that cost more than my car."

"Who is he?"

"He knew what I paid."

"Who is he?"

"I don't know," I said. "I don't know his name. I don't know where he lives. I don't know what he does or where he's from or why he was standing in the lobby of the Brennan Hotel by himself at eight o'clock on a Saturday night in a coat like that, and I don't know how he knew my coffee order, because—"

I stopped dead.

Dani's face went very still. "He knew your coffee order?"

"No."

"You just said he knew your coffee order."

"He — he brought me coffee this morning. Coffee's right there. He picked it up—"

"Did he?"

I stopped again.

I couldn't remember. That was the problem. I had a lot of things in my head from that night and every single one of them was a mouth or a hand or a door, and I could not say, with any certainty, that a cup of coffee had ever been in that apartment.

"Okay," Dani said, and picked up her cup and held it out to me like evidence. "What am I holding?"

"Coffee."

"What kind?"

"How would I know what kind—"

"You know what kind. You have told me your order so many times that I can recite it in my sleep. Say it."

"Oat milk, one sugar, cinnamon on top—"

"And did he bring you that?"

I stared at her.

"Did he bring you that, Mia?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know."

"I was drunk."

"You were three drinks in at ten o'clock last night. You were stone cold sober by midnight." She set the cup down on the counter, hard, and it sloshed. "You don't know his name. You don't know where he lives. He made your bed and left two words on a piece of paper with no name and no number on it, and you're standing here in a shirt that isn't yours telling me about his coat."

"It's not a shirt that isn't mine, it's —" I looked over at the chair. "It's his shirt."

"You kept his shirt."

"I'm going to throw it away."

"You kept his shirt," Dani said, "and you can't even tell me the man's last name."

And that was the moment. That was the exact moment, standing in my kitchen with the sun on the linoleum and my best friend looking at me like I was standing on a ledge.

I could see the lobby. I could see it — the marble, the column, the clipboard guy, the two women by the elevators — and there was a shape in my head, a sound, a name, something somebody had said loud enough to turn heads, and it was right there, right at the edge, and then it was gone.

"Say something," Dani said.

"I'm going to be fine," I said.

"You're not fine. You're—"

"I'm fine," I said. "It was a transaction. I paid for a service. I got the service. He left, and that's what people who are paid to leave do, and I'm not going to sit here on a Sunday and make it into a thing."

"It's already a thing."

"It's not a thing."

"You kept his shirt."

"It's on the chair," I said, and I heard my own voice go up, and I hated it, and I kept going anyway, because the alternative was stopping and I couldn't stop. "I've got a dinner I already paid for and a dress I have to return and a job I have to go to tomorrow where everybody saw those photos, so no, Dani, I don't have time for it to be a thing."

Dani looked at me for a long moment.

"Fine," she said, and picked up her bag. "Then you're fine. But if he calls—"

"He's not going to call. He doesn't have my number. He never asked for my number."

"He can get your number."

"He's not going to."

"He can get anything he wants," Dani said, and went to the door, and turned around with her hand on the knob. "That's the part that scares me."

"It doesn't scare me."

"It should." She opened the door. "Let it go, Mia. Whatever it was, let it go. And do not, for the love of God, G****e him in the middle of the night."

She pulled the door shut behind her. Not a slam. A quiet close, which is worse.

I stood there in the silence.

Then I went down to the lobby, because Luis was on the day shift and Luis sees everything.

"Morning, Miss Brennan."

"Morning, Luis." I leaned on the counter like I wasn't dying. "Question. Weird question. The guy who left this morning, about four-fifteen. Tall, black coat, car waiting out front. You see him?"

Luis looked at me. Then he looked at the door. Then he looked back at me.

"I seen him."

"Was he — did he say anything?"

"He said good morning." Luis took his cap off and put it back on. "Then he folded a hundred-dollar bill and put it in my hand and said sorry for the hour."

"Sorry for the hour."

"Sorry for the hour," Luis said, and shook his head. "Nobody's sorry for the hour, Miss Brennan. Nobody's got a car like that and says sorry. You got yourself a strange one."

I stood there in the lobby in my sweatshirt with my heart doing something stupid and my chest going warm all over.

Sorry for the hour.

I went back upstairs. I sat on the couch. I read the note four more times.

Then my phone rang — a number I didn't know, a city number, no name attached.

I picked it up on the first ring, and a woman's voice said, bored and bright at the same time:

"Ms. Brennan? This is the Event Date Agency, I'm calling about your Saturday booking? Ma'am, I don't know how to say this, so I'm just going to say it, and I need you to hear the whole thing before you hang up, because we've already run the refund."

I sat forward. "The what?"

"The refund," she said. "For the two thousand two hundred. Ma'am, your date never showed up."

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Chapter 5 Ends