The Sovereign Hotel smelled like old carpet and potential.
Serena stood in the lobby on Saturday morning, her day off, technically, which meant she was here by choice, which meant something she was not prepared to examine, and looked at the space the way you look at a sick relative you love. Honestly, and without the mercy of pretending things were better than they were.
The lobby was small. Not charmingly boutique small. Just small. The furniture was the kind that had been replaced on a budget sometime in the previous decade and not touched since. The lighting was doing its best, but its best was inadequate. The front desk was staffed by a man named Gerald who had been working there for eleven years and greeted her with the careful warmth of someone who had heard about her but was not yet sure she was going to save them or sell them.
"Miss Holloway," he said.
"Serena," she said. "Please. Can you show me everything?"
Gerald showed her everything.
It took three hours.
The good news: the bones were extraordinary. The original architecture was still there under years of cheap renovation choices, like a beautiful face under bad makeup. High ceilings. Real plasterwork in the older sections. A courtyard in the back that someone had inexplicably converted into a storage space and that Serena stood in for five full minutes imagining as something else entirely.
The not-good news: it needed money she did not have, expertise she was still acquiring, and structural work that couldn't be delayed much longer without becoming dangerous.
Gerald walked her through everything with the honest thoroughness of a man who had watched the hotel decline and was ready to tell the truth about it to someone who might actually do something. He had loved the place for eleven years. It showed.
"Your father," Gerald said, toward the end, standing in the courtyard that should have been a garden, "he used to come here sometimes. Not often. Mostly when things were hard, I think. He'd just sit in the lobby for an hour. He never stayed. He'd have the coffee, terrible coffee, I'll be honest, we've never got that right, and then he'd go."
Serena looked at the courtyard wall. There was a wisteria growing along it, untended, growing wherever it wanted. It had probably been trying to bloom for years without anyone noticing.
"He named it for my mother," she said. "I didn't know that."
"He told me once," Gerald said. "He said she would have made it beautiful." A pause. "I think he always meant to do more with it. Just never got there."
She stood there for a moment with the wisteria and the overgrown courtyard and the weight of a story she had only partially known, and she did not cry, because she had made a practice of that, but it was a close thing.
"We're going to fix the courtyard first," she said. "As soon as I work out the money. It should have been a garden a long time ago."
Gerald looked at her with an expression that was eleven years of patience and a considerable amount of hope. "Yes," he said. "It should have."
-----
She was sitting on the low courtyard wall an hour later, eating the granola bar she had found at the bottom of her bag, making notes on her phone, when she heard footsteps that she recognized before she turned around.
She turned around anyway.
Damien Price was standing in the courtyard doorway in dark jeans and a gray shirt, looking at the wisteria with an expression that suggested he was already running calculations.
"What are you doing here?" she said.
"I own a hotel two blocks east," he said. "I take walks."
"You take walks."
"I take walks."
She looked at him. He looked at the wisteria. He was a spectacularly unconvincing liar, which surprised her, because he was exceptional at everything else.
"You followed me here," she said.
"I was in the neighborhood."
"It's a Saturday."
"I work on Saturdays."
"In jeans."
He looked down at his jeans as though noticing them for the first time, with an expression that was so close to caught that she had to look away to avoid doing something embarrassing, like smiling.
"I wanted to see it," he said, after a pause that conceded more than his words did. "The building. I've seen the reports. I wanted to see the actual space."
She looked at him for a moment. Then she moved over on the courtyard wall, making room.
He came and sat beside her.
They sat in the overgrown courtyard for a while, not talking about anything important, and she showed him the wisteria and told him about Gerald and the coffee that had always been terrible, and he listened the way he listened in meetings, fully, without performing it. He pointed out the east wall's structural issue before she'd gotten to it in her notes, which meant he had been thinking about this building, and she wasn't sure what to do with that information so she filed it away.
Eventually he said, "The courtyard could be extraordinary."
"I know."
"Garden dining, if you open up that back wall. The bones are right for it."
"I know." She looked at the wisteria. "I just need to find the money to get there."
He didn't offer anything. He didn't make it a transaction or a negotiation. He just nodded, and they sat with the wisteria, and the morning light came through the gap in the old wall, and it was the most uncomplicated thirty minutes she had spent with another person since her father died.
Then his phone went off.
He looked at the screen. Something changed in his face, not dramatically, just a slight closing, the way a room looks when a cloud passes the window.
He stood. "I should get back."
She didn't ask who called. It wasn't her business. She already knew, from the way he had lo
oked at the screen, that it was the kind of call he did not particularly want to take.
"Thanks for the structural notes," she said.
"I didn't give you structural notes."
"You pointed at the east wall and looked like an engineer having a bad day. Same thing."
He almost smiled. That one, the real almost-smile, the one that made her want to be extremely careful. "Monday," he said.
"Monday," she agreed.
She watched him go.
Then she looked back at the wisteria and told it firmly that she was here for the hotel and the hotel only, and the wisteria said nothing, and she did not find that reassuring.