One of the checkins is, thankfully, a man traveling solo named Dr. Romano; he has the chiseled good looks of a doctor on a soap opera. Dr. Romano is staying in a room, not a suite, and he’s wearing a black titanium wedding band, but Alessandra chooses to overlook these two unfortunate circumstances and slips him her number. He tilts his head at her upside-down name tag and says, “Thank you very much, Alessandra.”
Outstanding, she thinks. He’ll text her the second he gets to the room, she’s sure of it.
Edie, meanwhile, is trying to get the woman in room 110 a blowout at R. J. Miller. Forget it, they’re booked solid, Alessandra thinks; she hasn’t been able to squeeze anyone in there all summer. But then she overhears Lindsay at the salon granting a favor because it’s “Sweet Edie Robbins” calling. When Edie hangs up, Zeke wanders over to the desk and says, “How do you make room keys, anyway? Is it like magic or something?”
Edie takes a breath, no doubt to explain that it’s magnetic not magic, but Alessandra pipes up first. “It’s a desk thing. You wouldn’t understand.”
“Yeah, it’s a desk thing,” Edie says. She beams at Alessandra so earnestly that Alessandra cringes. Edie is desperate to bond, but no, sorry, Alessandra can’t let that happen.
A couple enter the hotel, loaded down with luggage and baby paraphernalia—a stroller, a car seat, a bulging diaper bag.
“Gotta go,” Zeke says. “It’s a bell thing.”
Is it Alessandra’s imagination or has Zeke been lingering around the desk an awful lot? Before she can stop herself, she turns to Edie. “I think he likes you.”
Edie’s eyes widen. “What?”
“He’s always hanging at the desk, asking questions,” Alessandra says. “Have you noticed?”
“Yeah, he asked you why you wear your name tag upside down and he asked you how to say checkout in Italian and he asked you the strangest place you’ve ever had sex,” Edie says. “He likes you.”
“I think he does that to make you jealous,” Alessandra says, and she believes this. She’s too much woman for Zeke, and he knows it. “I’m old enough to be his grandmother.”
Edie laughs and grabs her bag. “I’m taking lunch.”
She’s leaving Alessandra with the onerous task of checking in the couple with the baby. They’ll need a crib; they’ll ask about laundry facilities and a babysitter, preferably someone with six references and four grown children of her own, so that they can have a nice quiet dinner at Galley Beach or the Chanticleer. Alessandra’s phone, which she keeps stashed at the back of the shelf under her computer, buzzes with a text. That would be Dr. Romano. Alessandra is so pleased that she’s able to give the approaching couple a nearly genuine smile. “Checking in?”
The woman, who is wearing a clingy green knit dress that shows off her breastfeeding boobs as well as her impossibly flat stomach, gasps. “Ali Powell?” she says.
Alessandra freezes like an animal in the wilderness confronted with a predator—because anyone who uses Alessandra’s childhood nickname is an existential threat. She focuses on the woman’s face.
Oh God, she thinks. It’s Duffy Beecham from high school, the friend whose father she seduced, Stanford professor Dr. Andrew Beecham.
To Alessandra’s knowledge, Duffy never found out about the affair. The reason why Dr. Beecham—Drew—was so eager to buy Alessandra a one-way plane ticket to Rome was that at some point, he realized Alessandra had the power to destroy his life. By the time Alessandra landed in Rome, Duffy was a sophomore at Pepperdine, lounging on the beaches of Malibu, dating aspiring movie execs. Their friendship had been winnowed down to the occasional text (when one or the other of them was drunk and heard the Dave Matthews Band).
Every so often, Alessandra stalked Duffy on Facebook and Instagram (Alessandra had nominal profiles on both but never posted). Duffy had married a Silicon Valley executive. (Alessandra’s invitation to the wedding was delivered to her mother’s home, but Alessandra, who was then living in Ibiza, told her mother to decline; she realizes only now that she never sent a present, which was maybe forgivable, since she was overseas.) Alessandra doesn’t know the husband’s name (though she’ll find out in a few short moments!). Duffy went to grad school to pursue a master’s in social work. She had always been a do-gooder; her senior service project was distributing blankets to the homeless in Oakland. There was a way, too, in which Duffy’s do-gooding extended to her friendship with Alessandra—Duffy saw Alessandra as a project, a girl with no father and a shabby excuse for a mother.
On her social media platforms, Duffy posted the predictable photos of apple picking with her husband (they wore matching sweaters; it was almost laughable), waiting in line at Swan Oyster Depot, a picturesque fog lying beneath the Golden Gate, a pork-belly banh mi in the stands at a 49ers game captioned Only in San Francisco! And then, later, she posted pics of their new apartment in Nob Hill, where she allowed her 537 followers to weigh in on decorating decisions. Wallpaper or paint for the powder room? Salvaged wood floors in the kitchen or chicer epoxy?
Alessandra hasn’t heard about the baby, so it must have been well over a year since Duffy last surfaced in Alessandra’s consciousness. If she had been keeping track more closely, she might have been prepared for Duffy’s trip to Nantucket.
“Duffy!” Alessandra says, trying to tamp down all of these confusing thoughts. “I can’t believe it! You’re staying here?”
“Yes!” Duffy says. “For three nights. Are you…working here?”
“I am!” Alessandra says, brightly stating the absolutely obvious. She won’t let this be awkward, she thinks, though it is—it is! Alessandra was the far superior student in high school, the original thinker with the uncanny ear for languages. She should be the bigger success, but as this situation painfully illustrates, she’s just not. “I’m the front-desk manager.”
Duffy pushes the stroller toward the desk and the husband jogs over after he finishes loading all the crap onto the luggage trolley that Zeke is holding steady.
“I thought you were in…I don’t know…St. Tropez or something, living on some rich guy’s yacht.”
That was the plan, Alessandra thinks. “I lived in Europe forever,” Alessandra says. “Italy most recently, but also Spain and Monaco.”
“Honey?” Duffy says to the husband. “This is Ali Powell, my BFF from high school.”
Zeke is lingering over by the door with the trolley, listening to every word, Alessandra can tell. If Zeke tells Adam that she used to go by Ali, she’ll never hear the end of it.
The husband reaches across the desk to give Alessandra a strong Silicon Valley handshake with intentional eye contact. “Jamie Chung,” he says. “Nice to meet you, Ali.”
Alessandra, she thinks, but she can’t bear to correct him, because she doesn’t want to seem pretentious. “I’ll be checking you in,” Alessandra says. “I’ll just need an ID and a credit card.”
Jamie Chung slides a California driver’s license and a purple Reserve American Express card across the desk. “So you know Duff from high school?”
Duffy swats him. “We were best friends!” she says. “We were inseparable. Ali practically lived at my house. She was the one who held my hair that time I got so drunk on tequila—”
“Aha!” Jamie says. “You’re the reason my wife can’t drink margaritas.”
I didn’t give her the tequila, Alessandra thinks. I held her hair! But again, she keeps quiet.
“My parents loved Ali, my mother especially.” Duffy lowers her voice. “She used to talk about adopting you. She wanted to give you a nice normal home.”
Alessandra won’t take the bait, won’t mention that she had both a mother and a home, and she won’t give in to her rogue impulse to lean across the desk and say to Jamie in a stage whisper, I had an affair with Duffy’s father the spring of our senior year.
Instead, Alessandra says, “I’m going to comp your first night.”
“Oh my God, thank you!” Duffy says. “Aren’t you just the summer Santa!”
Ho-ho-ho! Alessandra thinks. “I never got you guys a wedding present, so…”