Bathroom Girl snorts.
I open the door a crack and listen. Voices down the hall, not this door. Good. I slide out and pull it shut without a bang, then reverse my steps back to the exit. The guard looks up. He sees the garment bag, the laptop sleeve, the sneakers hooked in my fingers. He doesn’t ask. He buzzes the door without me touching the bell.
“Saint,” I say.
“I’m a man who wants quiet,” he says again.
Even though the load I’m carrying isn’t getting lighter, I have to ask, “I’ve never really had quiet. What’s that like?”
He chuckles to himself. “I’ll let you know if I ever get any.”
Outside, the driver straightens in his seat when he sees me. I load the garment bag in the back with a gentleness that would get me roasted if Salem from five years ago saw it. I slide the laptop onto the seat and climb in.
“Good?” the driver says.
“Good.”
He glances at the mirror. “You were fast.”
“There wasn’t much to take.”
The driver’s radio murmurs low. The city opens ahead like a hallway with too many doors. I lean my head back for one second and breathe.
I replay the grip on Troy’s throat, the sound of the cough, the way the girl’s thumb twitched when she said the wordcloud. It’ll surface. It always does.
9
LOU
The headline hitsmy screen as Houston and I cross the marble toward The Gold Bar’s elevators.
Troy Turner’s Ex Moves On…With His Brother?
I don’t even have to tap it. The preview is enough. There’s Salem with his hand at Troy’s throat, Troy’s heels off the carpet. Troy looks like spoiled milk in human form. Salem looks like the devil if the devil did push-ups.
I set that alert on Troy back when we started dating. I thought monitoring the blast radius would help me keep us steady. It never did. I still have it. Of course, this is what it serves me when I’m finally breathing again.
“Lou?” Houston’s voice is low. He’s already angling his body to block anyone else’s sight line, like he can physically push the internet away from me.
“I saw it.” I keep walking. I’m not going to be the girl crying in a lobby. I’m not going to be any of the girls I’ve been when I was with him. Never again.
We ride up in a square of silence. I stare at my screen and watch strangers write their versions of me in the comments. I could mute the word “ex” and it wouldn’t matter. The picture does the work. The story is worse—the two of them bickering over me in Troy’s hotel room. Like I’m some kind of prize to fight over instead of a person.
Houston doesn’t say anything. He understands that a quiet person right now is better than a helpful one.
The suite door opens, and Salem is standing in the living room. I want to bite his head off.
But next to him, my laptop sits on the table, my garment bag is hooked over a chair, and my sneakers are tied together by the laces on the floor.
Knox is at the table with a legal pad and a list. The TV is muted on the news. The still on screen is the same photo burned into my alert.
I open my mouth to shout, but Salem cuts me off. “Before you see it and decide I woke up today choosing violence, I went to get your things, not to cause problems.”
I lift the phone a fraction. “You grabbed him by the throat.”
“He earned it,” he says without apology. “But I was there to help you. Not to beat him up. Hell, I didn’t even do that. Just roughed him up a little. It wasn’t hard to figure out what was yours—neat piles versus his scattered approach to organization. The place looked like a rat’s nest.”
That sounds about right. When I moved in with Troy, he had two housekeepers just to keep up with him. When he’s on the road,it’s worse, and the hotel staff and I have to make sure he doesn’t fall into a pit of sepsis.
