She would not tell Hanna everything.
Grace had quickly decided against the hostel. She’d been robbed once already and now she had a rolling suitcase full of cash. She hadn’t made any reservations, suddenly superstitious about jinxing the sale. Living without a laptop, and traveling especially, was like going back in time. She didn’t know how to do anything without a computer. She got back into the cab and had no idea where to go. A folded tourist magazine was jammed in the crack of the seat, and on the back cover was an ad for the Hotel Reiniger. Grace showed the driver the ad and told him to take her there.
She had enough cash on her for the cab, but she had to unzip the suitcase in the hotel lobby restroom to peel off the money to pay for two nights. The sight of the money—not neat bricks, but a messy pile with grimy bands—sickened her. Those dirty stacks were so damning and yet looked so insubstantial, like kindling.
She’d planned to open a bank account, but now the idea seemed impossible and cartoonish—showing up with wads of cash, like a drug moll from the movies. She couldn’t take the money anywhere but obviously she couldn’t just leave it either. She rolled the suitcase under the bed and waited to know what to do. She wished she had someone to talk to. She wished Alls had come, and when regret crept up to remind her why he had not come, she shoved it down as best she could.
She wished she could call Mrs. Graham and ask to come home.
For the next seventeen hours, Grace didn’t leave her hotel room. At six in the morning, she called for room service and ordered some proud German specialty that sounded like French toast. She clicked dumbly through the TV stations, stopping at a performance of what appeared to be quintuplets in vinyl catsuits. It was Eurovision, the multicountry singing contest. She and the boys used to watch clips of it online, baked and howling with laughter.
She had gotten what she wanted now, hadn’t she? She was rich and away from Garland. But it was like one of those three-wishes fables: She’d duped herself. Yes, she was on a down comforter in a Berlin hotel with gilded mirrors, but at home in Garland, Mrs. Graham wished Grace had never met her son. Alls likely wished her dead.
She jumped at the knock on the door.
“Room service,” a girl’s voice said.
Grace undid the chain and gestured her inside, embarrassed to be alone in this fancy hotel room. The girl was probably Grace’s age, and Grace wished she could offer some explanation. But she was rich now, and rich girls could go to hotels alone without any explanation.
“Danke,” Grace said. She didn’t think you tipped for room service in Germany, but she wasn’t sure. A fifty-euro note was the smallest bill she had, change from check-in, and she handed it to the girl, whose eyes flickered briefly in surprise. When the girl had gone, Grace peeled off a five-hundred-euro note and put it in her nightstand drawer. She needed to be brave enough, at least, to get some change.
She was eating, ravenous but surprised that she could eat at all, when she heard another knock at the door. She stopped chewing and looked to make sure she had chained the door again. She had. “No thank you!” she called, her voice unexpectedly quavering. She fumbled for the German. “Nein!” she called. “Nein danke!” The do-not-disturb sign should have been hanging on the knob. She had checked it when the room service girl left.
She muted the television and listened for whoever it was to go away, to apologize for disturbing someone who wasn’t to be disturbed. Instead there was quick, slick sound, a soft click. The swipe of a key card. And then her door was open a crack.
“Excuse me?” she accused like some hysterical mother who’d just been cut in the checkout line. “Stop!” she shouted. “Halt!”
She jumped up from the bed and ran to the end of the room, her back to the wall, which didn’t make any sense, but when you heard a frightening noise you ran away from it; you couldn’t help it. She watched the crack, the chain tight across it, and then a pair of bolt cutters clunked up the gap and quickly, neatly cut the chain in two.
The man in the door was the man who had taken her up the elevator yesterday to Wyss. The man with the slack gums.
This cannot be the end, she thought. Not this.
“Okay,” he said, shutting the door behind him. “Give it to me. Give me the money.” His voice was teasing, almost amused.
“I don’t have it,” she said as he came toward her. “I don’t.” She should have gone to the phone, she realized now, not the window.
“Oh?” His mouth stretched wide. He had stopped just before his body touched hers and now he loomed over her. She could see the dark shadows where his teeth disappeared. He nodded toward her half-eaten breakfast. “How will you pay for your Kaiserschmarrn?”
She knew that he would look under the bed first, maybe in the closet, behind the curtains, in the bathtub—
“This won’t be like the films,” he said. “I won’t ask you again and again.” He threw the bolt cutters onto the bed and grabbed Grace’s shoulders, hurling her onto the bed as if she were a bag of laundry. Grace kicked at him furiously, but her legs seemed to fall through the air. All her self-defense training had come from Mrs. Graham, who’d taught her to dig her thumbs into a man’s eye sockets, or, failing that, to knee him in the groin, or, failing that, to bite hard, anywhere. She could do none of these things. And she was supposed to be screaming. He planted his knee on her shin, pinning her down. Her bone was going to snap. Then he opened the bolt cutters and brought them up under her Achilles tendon.
“If you were a professional, I would cut you here,” he said. “But you are no professional.”
She would have told him where the money was then, if she could have spoken. This was that nightmare in which she needed to scream and couldn’t, her voice trapped in sleep, and she woke up at the sound of her own frail whimper, lungs gasping.
“It’s okay, Liebchen,” he said. “I will help you grow up.”
He stood up and yanked her ankle, flipping her onto her stomach, and she heard her sob of terror before she felt it. She shut her eyes. Her head was yanked back. He had grabbed her ponytail. The first hairs to break were the ones on the outside, growing from her face and behind her ears. But as he twisted her ponytail in the bolt cutters, she felt instead all the hairs that wouldn’t break, that wouldn’t release, dense inside her ponytail. Her scalp was coming apart. The grinding snap of breaking hair gave way all at once and her head fell forward, her face crashing into the pillow.
He tossed the ponytail onto the pillow next to her and she heaved, sobbing. Then he looked for the suitcase. She could hear him. The curtains, the bathroom, the mini-fridge. When he came back and looked under the bed, he laughed.
He pulled out the carry-on, and there was the money, nearly untouched, just as he had put it there. He zipped it back up and extended the telescoping handle.
“Okay, bye,” he said. “Enjoy the rest of your trip.”
Grace lay weeping, dry-throated, at the pain until she opened her eyes and saw the blood on her pillow, the blossom spreading as it dripped down her scalp. She pushed herself up. In the bathroom, she ran the water until it was lukewarm, and with a sharp breath, she pushed her head under the sink faucet.