He dashed to the bathroom in the lobby without fully taking it in, and looked at the inscrutable screen of his phone again. No texts, as far as he could tell. He’d have to call Whitney from the lobby to figure out where they might meet up again. He had the keys to the apartment, after all, so she couldn’t get inside without him.
He found Jenna in a plush leather chair near the elevator bank. The lobby was decorated with the sort of dark velvets and fresh-cut flowers one might find in the country estate of a monarch.
“I’m gonna make some coffee,” she said. “I’m gonna change my clothes.”
“Got it,” he said. “I’ll just wait down here to see—”
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “You just fell in a gutter.”
“I’m fine, really.”
She looked at him sweetly, pitifully: “You’re not doing anything wrong, you know? Nothing’s gonna happen that you’re gonna have to lie about later.”
He hadn’t been suggesting that. He hadn’t presumed anything.
“Okay,” he said, carefully. “I could probably wash these scrapes out better, you’re right.”
As they passed the front desk, the concierge beckoned for her at a casual volume: “Ms. Silverstein, your father asked that you return his call at your earliest convenience.”
Jenna nodded and waved thanks.
Will waited for the elevator doors to shut to ask, frozen up as he was by the ever-revealing luxury: “Who’s Ms. Silverstein?”
“Moi,” she said.
“Leonard. Jenna. Ms. Saisquoi. Ms. Silverstein.”
“That about covers it.”
The doors dinged open and she led him down the hallway and they were inside quickly.
The room was small and dark but hung with the same velvets as the lobby, voluminously appointed around a single king bed and a mahogany table. There was a leather luggage perch at the end of the bed, where the oversize suitcase that had lasted her all year rested. She’d barely unpacked anything. This room was clearly as she’d described: a place to escape to, a place all her own to breathe. But this was of a different order than what he’d expected. The price was all Will could think of.
When the door latched shut, he felt suddenly nauseated. He’d had too much to drink and his head was heavy. His ankle and wrist were throbbing—maybe he’d sprained something. He felt the sand filling up his skull and he felt a shock of alarm in his stomach. There was nothing good that could come of this. And yet: he was in control here, all he had to do was the right thing.
She ran the water in the bathroom to warm up her hands. She handed him a small laundry bag to wrap his phone in. Then she started fiddling with the coffee maker—an old American drip-coffee model with grounds and everything. He sat on the edge of the bed. She took the pot into the bathroom and filled it with water and dumped it down the back of the coffee maker.
“Well, that’s a nice perk,” he said, trying to bait her into acknowledging the hotel and the room.
“Every morning for, like, ten years, I watched my mom work one of these,” she said. “Six a.m. with her at the diner before school. Black pot, regular; orange pot, decaf. I usually can’t drink this stuff ’cause of it.”
Will sat on the edge of the bed, narrowing his eyes. She’d said her mother was a businesswoman who worked in Asian markets. It reminded him of the thing she’d said about the Valley, about hot summers in the Valley. The quicksand of facts.
“Where was the diner?” he said, tentatively.
She was operating mindlessly. She had to have been drunk, too. She was speaking without thinking.
“Uh…on Magnolia. Magnolia and, like, Lankershim, I think.”
North Hollywood. The Valley. Not Santa Monica. Not Rustic Canyon.
He made a sound of unsurprised understanding. Maybe they’d moved from one place to the other at some point. Maybe this was a stepmom.
The coffee maker was burbling and she turned, snapping out of the routine, and told him she was gonna hop in the shower.
The water started, he heard her clothes hit the floor. The door wasn’t closed all the way, but he didn’t try to sneak a peek through the crack. It all felt like a setup for something. Concentrating on not looking, he looked, but he couldn’t see anything, anyway. He stood and walked toward the coffee maker to check on its progress, and couldn’t see anything through the crack from over there, either.
He could have pressed her on the discrepancies—either the old story was a lie or the new story was a lie, or none of it was true. He didn’t know her. The only thing that was certain was that it was all some ruse. And at this point he didn’t even want to catch her out. He didn’t want to trap her in the corner. What would be the point, anyway? He hated confrontations that exposed people, that wrong-footed them. How had he become a lawyer? He so very much needed a new job.
The water was running. Jenna was humming something. He sat back down on the edge of the bed and pulled out his busted phone. It was still alive. He touched the cracked screen tentatively, as though it were a pan handle straight off a stovetop. The shower knobs screeched off. He could hear the showerhead dripping, the slide of the curtain on the rod, the infamous feet padding out of the tub, one and then another. He could hear a brush
