Violet's POV
This cannot be a mere coincidence.
"Can you tell me anything about him?" I asked. "Your boss. The birthday man."
Her expression didn't change. "I'm afraid that's not information I'm at liberty to share."
"Not at liberty," I repeated.
"No."
"Right." I tapped the desk once. Then: "Is there a security office? CCTV?"
She nodded. "Down the hall to the left. The security team would be happy to assist."
The security team were Infact very polite about it.
They showed me everything - the full footage from last night, every camera, every angle, the lobby and the lifts and the corridor on the fourteenth floor.
I watched myself not appear.
That was the thing. I watched and rewatched and I simply did not exist on any camera, anywhere. No arrival. No escort. No footage of the fourteenth floor corridor showing anyone going into or out of room 1407 at any point during the night.
Just... a gap. A clean, smooth, inexplicable gap, where a person and three men should have been.
I sat in the security office for a moment after they stopped the footage.
"Is it possible," I said carefully, "that the cameras malfunctioned?"
The security officer - a kind-faced man who had clearly had a quiet morning up until me - looked at his screen, then at me. "They were functioning normally all night."
"But I'm not on them."
"No," he agreed.
"And you don't find that…"
"It's unusual," he allowed.
I picked up my bag.
"Great," I said. "Wonderful. Lovely. Thank you so much for your time."
I walked out of the security office, through the lobby, past the fresh flowers, out through the revolving glass door and into the morning.
I stood on the pavement and tried to reassemble my understanding of reality.
I had woken up in a hotel room with evidence of significant activity and no memory of how I'd arrived. The hotel had no record of my being there. The cameras had no record of my being there. The room had been provided on the hotel owner's birthday. My dress was missing, but the clothes in the wardrobe had fit me.
Someone had planned for me to be comfortable.
Someone had known I would need clothes in the morning.
I stood very still on the pavement.
Then I hailed a cab, because my legs had decided they'd had enough of standing, and gave the driver my address.
I heard Maddy before I saw her.
Her voice carried from half a street away - sharp and rising - and as the cab pulled up I could see her on the pavement outside our apartment building, facing a uniformed police officer with the energy of a woman who had moved through worry and grief and come out the other side into something that burned considerably hotter.
"…twenty-four hours," the officer was saying, with the patient tone of a man who had explained this many times. "The policy exists because in the majority of…"
"The majority," Maddy said, and her voice did something that made the officer take a very small step back, "is not my cousin. My cousin is twenty-seven years old and she disappeared from a nightclub at midnight and it is now ten in the morning and you are standing here telling me about policy…"
"Miss…"
"I want a search party." Maddy pointed at him. "Organized. Mobilized. Now. I want dogs, I want helicopters if you have them, I want…"
"Maddy."
She stopped.
She turned.
The expression on her face moved through three different things in about two seconds - relief, which cracked open so fast and so wide that it physically hurt to look at, and then something wet that she blinked away immediately, and then fury, which settled over everything else like a lid slamming down.
"Violet." Her voice had gone very quiet.
I paid the driver. I got out of the cab.
"Hi," I said.
The officer looked at me. Looked at Maddy. Made a quiet, discreet decision and began moving away from this situation.
Maddy crossed the distance between us in four steps. She looked at me - taking in the joggers and the sweatshirt and the mascara and the overall situation - and for one moment I thought she was going to hug me.
She did not hug me.
"Where have you been." Not a question. A sentence delivered like a verdict.
"Maddy…"
"I lost you in there last night." Her voice was shaking now, barely, underneath the fury. "One minute you were there and the next minute you were gone and I looked everywhere in that club, Violet, I checked every room, I asked every person, I went back outside, I…" She stopped. Pressed her lips together. "I called you. Forty-seven times."
"My phone died…"
"I called hospitals."
The word sat between us.
I looked at the pavement.
"I called Aunt Ruth," she continued, and that one landed differently, because we both knew what that meant. Aunt Ruth - my mother - who panicked, who catastrophized, who would have spent the entire night… "I told her I'd lost you. At a nightclub. Do you know what she said to me…"
"Maddy, I'm sorry…"
"Sorry." She laughed, and it had no warmth in it at all. "Sorry. Right." She looked at me - really looked, the kind of looking that expected answers. "Tell me where you were."
I opened my mouth.
Closed it.
A hotel room. Fourteen floors up. Alone in an enormous bed with evidence that I had not been alone. Three men whose faces I couldn't remember. Cameras with no footage. A wardrobe with clothes in my size. A hotel owner's birthday.
"I…" I started.
Maddy watched me.
"It's..." I looked at the sweatshirt sleeve. Back at her. "It's complicated."
Something shifted in her expression. The fury didn't leave, but something else moved behind it - a reading, quick and sharp, of all the things I wasn't saying.
Her jaw tightened.
"Right," she said.
"Maddy…"
"No." She stepped back. "No, you know what? I have a job." She picked up her bag from the pavement - she'd been here long enough to have set it down - and put it over her shoulder. The movement was controlled. That was worse than if she'd thrown it. "I have a job that I have not been at since morning because I have spent the last ten hours convinced my cousin was dead in a ditch, and I called the police, and I called Aunt Ruth, and I stood here arguing with that man for forty minutes because you…" she pointed at me… "went somewhere and wouldn't answer your phone and now you're standing in front of me in someone else's clothes and you can't even tell me where you were."
"I'm twenty-seven," I said, and it came out smaller than I'd intended.
"I know how old you are, Violet. That's exactly the problem." She looked at me for a long moment. "I'm not your mother. I'm not going to stand here and babysit a twenty-seven year old woman who doesn't want to be babysitted." She turned toward her car. "I'm glad you're alive. Genuinely. I'm so glad you're alive."
"Maddy…"
"I have to go to work."
"Maddy, wait…"
The car door closed.
I stood on the pavement and watched her pull away.