New Life

The Aurelia’s lobby was the kind of beautiful that makes you lower your voice without being told to, marble underfoot, a beautiful chandelier, gold-leaf letters over the front desk spelling out a name I had grown up hearing at the dinner table like it was a person instead of a building.

“You’re the new girl.” The voice came from behind. The woman was about my age, sharp-eyed, and her hair was pulled back so tight it looked like it hurt. She was holding two coffees like she had already decided one of them was for me before we’d even spoken. “Ivy. I train you, you survive me, we become best friends. That’s the order of operations.”

“Rosalie.”

“I know.” She handed me the coffee. “Everyone knows who you are. Small favor, don’t let that get to your head. It’s mostly gossip, half of it’s wrong, and the other half is also wrong, but you can laugh that one off.”

I decided, almost instantly, that I liked her more than I had liked anyone new in a very long time.

She walked me through the staff corridors first, the unglamorous guts behind all that marble, laundry carts and service elevators and a break room with a coffee machine that made a sound like it was dying every time someone used it. She explained the schedule, the uniform policy, which managers to actually listen to, and the other ones who just liked hearing themselves assign tasks.

“Fair warning,” she said, lowering her voice as we passed the events office, “there’s a whole thing happening with corporate right now. Big merger, the Cross family, you’ve probably heard the name if you’ve been anywhere near a society page in the last month.”

“I might have heard something,” I said, and made my face look mildly curious instead of like a woman whose stomach had just dropped three floors.

Ivy didn’t seem to notice anything off in my voice, which I was starting to understand was going to be both a relief and a liability, depending on how much I eventually decided to tell her.

“Apparently it’s not just business, there’s an engagement attached to it too. Boss’s son marrying into it.” She said it with that exact relish of someone who enjoyed gossip as a sport. “I’ve never met him myself. Apparently he’s unbearably good-looking and even more unbearably difficult, which tracks, honestly, the pretty ones always are.”

“Must be exhausting for everyone involved,” I said, and meant it more literally than she could possibly have known.

She laughed and kept walking, and I followed behind her, past a wall of framed photographs documenting decades of Grimwood family events in this building, galas and openings and one particularly large portrait of Dad cutting a ribbon sometime in the previous decade, looking exactly as pleased with himself as he always is.

My first real task of the day was learning the reservation system, which Ivy explained very patiently, making it very clear that she had trained several people before me and lost faith in most of them. I was decent at it, I think. Spending years being quietly good at things and trying not to be a burden to anyone might have its pros.

“You’re fast,” Ivy said, sounding almost surprised, watching me move through a block of overlapping bookings without needing her to walk me through it twice. “Most new hires take a week to stop looking terrified of this screen.”

“I’m good under pressure,” I said, which was true in ways she did not have the context to appreciate, and also felt, in that moment, like the single funniest sentence I had said in weeks.

She gave me a look that suggested she’d clocked something underneath the joke without being able to name it, but then she filed it away and moved on to showing me the key system instead.

Around noon, during the lull between the lunch rush and whatever came next, Ivy leaned against the desk and studied me in a way that made me feel momentarily transparent.

“You okay?”

“Yes.” I answered immediately before she finished her sentence.

“Are you sure? You’ve got a look.”

“What look?”

“The look people get right before they tell you a sad story they’ve decided not to tell you yet.” She said it lightly, no pressure in it, which somehow made it land harder than if she had pushed. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to make you. I just notice things. Occupational hazard of working front desk, you watch enough people check in and out of their own lives eventually.”

I filed that away too, in the same drawer as everything else I was collecting, and told her I was just tired from the move, which was true, at the same time, maybe not really.

The afternoon passed in a blur of phone calls, room blocks, and a bride who called twice to ask the same question about centerpiece delivery times. I was starting to think, carefully, that maybe this job could just be a job. Something separate from everything else. A place I could go to, do my work, and leave without it following me home.

That belief lasted until almost five o’clock, when the events coordinator walked past the front desk with a clipboard and said to no one in particular, “We need the Magnolia ballroom cleared and reset by Thursday. Private function. Mr. Grimwood’s booked the whole east wing for it personally.”

Ivy did not react at all, already moving on to the next task on her own list, clearly having heard a hundred sentences like this one and filed them under ordinary hotel business.

I copied her, doing the exact same thing, nothing. My hands were steady on the keyboard, and I swallowed the one question actually burning its way up my throat.

Which Mr. Grimwood?

There were two of them, technically, Nathaniel and Roman both carried the name on their own bookings depending on the function, and until four days from now I had no real way of knowing which I was about to be standing in a room with, dressed in a uniform, pretending for an entire shift that I had never once in my life worn his hands on my skin like a second layer of clothing.

I spent the rest of my shift telling myself it was probably Nathaniel. Fathers host things. Fathers throw parties for mergers and engagements and all the other business of running an empire that requires champagne and a guest list. It was a perfectly reasonable thing to believe, and I almost managed it, right up until I clocked out and found myself standing in the staff parking lot still turning the sentence over in my head like a stone I could not put down.

Or maybe it’s the two Grimwoods?