“I didn’t hear you.” He tapped his right ear. “Deaf in this one. Sometimes I miss things.”
He’d failed to mention this when I’d met him in the diner, so now I wasn’t sure what to say.
But he was unfazed by my silence.
“Happened a couple of years ago, when I was young and stupid. Still stupid, actually,” he said, smiling sheepishly. “It’s weird how it messes with your depth perception. Sometimes I miss pieces of conversation, and other times I can pick out crazy-specific sounds over vast distances. Like, when you’re talking to guests up here? I can hear your voice across the lobby when the door opens.”
“Mine?”
He nodded. “Clear as a bell. Something about the pitch of it. You’re a dog whistle.”
“Oh,” I said stupidly, embarrassed.
Then it was quiet between us. Nothing but the waterfall tinkling.
“Okay,” he said. “Wow. Shit. This is weird, huh?”
“A little,” I admitted.
Should I apologize for running out on him? Should I try to explain? Bringing it up here, out in the lobby, where everything echoed, made me anxious. What if Melinda were monitoring our conversation back in her office? Was that a thing they did here?
Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong were duetting over the hotel speakers about the pronunciation of potatoes and tomatoes. I tried to focus on their relationship problems and not mine and ignored Daniel. That was a little trick I did when I didn’t know what to say to people—I just pretended they weren’t there. I learned it by observing people in the city, a local phenomenon affectionately known as the Seattle Freeze. And it worked. When I froze people out, they usually got the hint and left.
Everyone but Daniel.
“So-o-o-o...,” he drawled, one finger sliding across the counter to tap near the keyboard. “I didn’t know if you were aware, but you’ve got to make a note on the reservation that the guest took his car. It’s for insurance, or whatever, so he can’t sue us later and claim his car got jacked from our garage.”
“Oh. Okay. Thank you,” I said, trying not to look at his face as I opened a screen on the computer.Code for valet service.It was here somewhere in a drop-down menu...Freeze, freeze, freeze.
“That actually happened once,” Daniel said, propping his elbow on the counter as if he had all night. “Some doctor got her car stolen after she left the hotel. Joyriders crashed it in Ballard. Her insurance wouldn’t pay because she left her keys in the ignition, so she changed her story and saidweleft them in—that the car was stolen from our garage.” He mimicked an explosion with his fingers near the side of his head. He was a hand talker. Lots of gestures. Lots of movement in general. “Hotel owner had to go to court. It was on the news and everything.”
He reached for a rubber band that was near my arm. I tried to keep my eyes on the screen, but he was doing something with the rubber band. First it was wound around his index finger; then he opened his fist and it jumped to his pinky. Then jumped again, back to his index finger. He held up his hand and wiggled his fingers. “Jumping rubber band trick,” he said. “Want to see how it’s done?”
Yes, I did, actually. The mystery lover in me needed to know thehowbehind any and every puzzle. But I fought this urge and just said, “No, thank you.”
“Hey,” he said. “Birdie?”
I couldn’tnotlook up. “Yes?”
“Hi.” He smiled softly.
“Hi?”
“Nice to meet you again.”
Rattled, I made a vague noise somewhere between “mmm” and “hmm.”
“Sorry about earlier outside,” he said, scratching the outer shell of his bad ear. “It threw me off, seeing you here. I didn’t know what to say.”
That made two of us.
“It’s fine,” I said.
“Is it? Because last time I saw you, I thought things were going good until—”
“Yes, I know,” I said quickly, hoping he wouldn’t continue.
“Right. Well, afterward, when you bailed, I... wasn’t sure why, so I tried to chase after you. I thought maybe you’d gone back to the diner. But you weren’t there, and the server had assumed we were doing a dine and dash on the check.”
