“Take me,” you say.
He does.
The employee corridor behind the gleaming lobby smells like bleach, hot machinery, damp linen, and long shifts. It is the real body of the hotel, where the glamour is stripped down to carts, pipes, concrete walls, and bulletin boards cluttered with cheerful notices that promise teamwork while people bleed hours off the clock. You know this kind of hallway better than you know ballrooms. Your mother spent half your childhood walking them in buildings that were never hers.
Memory sneaks up strange at times like this.
You are twelve again for one flashing second, waiting on a plastic chair in the back of an office complex because your mother said she just needed twenty more minutes to finish waxing a floor. You remember the fever sweat on her neck, the smile she put on anyway, the sandwich she claimed she had already eaten so you would take the whole thing. You remember hearing a supervisor tell another worker, loud enough to sting, that people like her were replaceable before the mop water cooled.
That man’s voice never really left you.
Maybe that is why men like Esteban never stand a chance once you see them clearly.
The basement laundry corridor hums with industrial washers, fluorescent lights, and the weary rattle of carts. A housekeeper pushes a bin around the corner, sees Esteban with you, and freezes so hard one towel falls to the floor. Her eyes go first to him, then to you, then to the child-sized rain boots peeking from under the bench where Ximena must have hidden earlier. Fear travels fast when it has had practice.
You stop the woman gently. “What’s your name?”
“Marisol.”
“Where’s Carolina?”
Continued on the next page
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