“I can,” I said. “You are free to refuse, of course. I am also free to double your interest rates, call in loans, and let the world know why certain doors are suddenly closing to you.”
“I…” Vivien looked at Charlotte, desperate. “Douglas…”
“Isabelle,” Daniel said quietly, “what about…”
“My engagement?” Charlotte finished, her voice cracking. She turned to him, eyes wide. “Danny, please. I didn’t know. About your mother. About any of this. I swear, I didn’t.”
He flinched at the nickname. I noticed. So did she.
“That’s the problem,” he said softly. “You didn’t need to know my mother was wealthy to treat her with respect. That you think you might have if you’d known… that’s worse, Charlotte.”
Tears spilled over now, tracking uneven lines through her perfect makeup.
“This,” I said gently, “is the one thing I won’t decide for you.” I looked between them. “That’s between my son and the woman who thought his mother wasn’t good enough to greet her guests.”
For a moment, everything hung in the air like a held breath.
Then Charlotte surprised me.
She straightened.
“I don’t deserve him,” she said quietly. “Or you.” She wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand, ruining her mascara completely. “But if you’ll let me, I want to earn your respect.”
I studied her face. Underneath the panic and the shame, something else was taking root. Determination.
“How?” I asked.
“By starting where I went wrong,” she said. She drew in a shaky breath. “I’m going upstairs. I’m going to apologize. Not just to the staff I’ve yelled at. To everyone.” She swallowed. “And I’ll start by helping in the kitchen I wanted to shove you into.”
“Charlotte,” Vivien gasped. “You can’t possibly be serious. You’ll be—”
“Working,” Charlotte said, turning to her mother. For the first time since I’d met her, there was steel in her voice that wasn’t sharpened into cruelty. “Which is more than we’ve been doing lately, if we’re honest.”
Douglas stared at her as if seeing his daughter for the first time.
Charlotte looked back at me. “Not because of your threats, Mrs. Romero,” she added, voice softening. “Because I was wrong. And I hate that I was wrong more than I hate being embarrassed.”
I nodded once.
“Very well,” I said. “Let’s go back up.”
The hallway seemed longer on the way back. Maybe it was the weight of new knowledge pressing down on all of us. The music from the suite swelled as we approached, a jazzy, polished playlist that suddenly felt too smooth for the roughness in the air.
Conversation dipped again when we re-entered. Eyes followed us. Rumors traveled faster than room service.
Charlotte didn’t hesitate. She walked straight to the nearest staff member—a tired-looking man in a crisp white jacket arranging canapés—and touched his elbow.
“Chef?” she said, voice trembling slightly. “I… owe you an apology. For earlier. For… many earlier’s, if we’re honest.”
His expression went blank, then wary, then puzzled as he glanced past her to me. I gave him a slight nod.
One by one, she moved through the room. Servers. Florists. The event planner who still clutched her clipboard like a life raft. Her words stumbled at first, then steadied. Guests whispered behind their hands. Phones recorded. No amount of PR management could fully contain what was happening, and I didn’t particularly want it contained.
I made my way back to the bar area, where Clare stood, eyes wide.
“So the rumors are true,” she said faintly. “You’re…”
“Me,” I agreed.
“We’ve all worked hundreds of these fancy events,” she said, voice shaking. “Served some of the richest people in the state. But you’re the first one…” Her throat worked. “You’re the first who talked to us like we mattered.”
I touched her arm lightly. “That’s because I was you,” I said. “A lifetime ago. I scrubbed hotel bathrooms between business school lectures. I burned my hands on dishwater hauling plates to pay for textbooks. I ate leftover bread rolls in stairwells because I couldn’t afford dinner.”
Her eyes glistened.
“Never let anyone convince you that what you do is less than,” I said. “Honest work is never small. The things people build on your backs, however…” I glanced across the room at the Holloways “…those can be very fragile.”
Later, when the worst of the tension had settled into something else—curiosity, perhaps, or the cautious thrill of having witnessed something that would be told and retold over lunches for months to come—Charlotte came to find me again.
Her hair had escaped its perfectly arranged waves, stray strands sticking to her cheeks. Someone had given her a kitchen apron to tie around her waist. It clashed magnificently with her couture gown. There was a smear of something—sauce? lipstick?—near her collarbone. Her feet, I noticed, were no longer encased in diamanté heels. She wore a pair of worn black flats that had clearly lived their lives on tile, not red carpet.
“I’ve been awful, haven’t I?” she said without preamble.
“Self-awareness,” I said, “is an excellent first step.”
Her laugh came out half-sob. “I thought I was… cultured. Refined. I thought the way I treated staff was just… normal. Expectations. Standards. I didn’t realize…” She trailed off, looking down at her hands. They were red at the fingertips, nails chipped from carrying trays without thinking.
“What matters isn’t who you were this morning,” I said. “It’s who you choose to be tomorrow.”
“I want to do something that doesn’t just… fix optics,” she said. “I want to set up scholarships. For staff. For their kids. For people who do the work we pretend not to see. If you’ll help me do it right, I… I want to help.”
It would have been easy to dismiss her as performative. To assume this was another performance, this time of humility. But there was something different in her posture now—a slump she didn’t bother to correct, the way her eyes didn’t skim past the people in uniform anymore but lingered.
“One condition,” I said.
She straightened, bracing.
“You’ll spend one month working in this hotel,” I said. “Not shadowing. Not posing for photos. Working. Training with housekeeping. Doing breakfast shifts with the servers. Helping front desk at three in the morning when someone’s room key stops working and they decide you’re the reason their life is falling apart. Then we’ll talk about scholarship structures.”
Her throat bobbed. “When do I start?”
“Tomorrow,” I said. “Five in the morning. Wear flats. You own some now, apparently.”
She looked down at her borrowed shoes, then back up again.
“I’ll be here,” she said.
As she hurried off to break the news to her parents, Daniel joined me by the window. Outside, the vineyards lay in neat, dark rows under the moonlight, the kind of view that made people sigh and drop small fortunes on tasting tours.
“You’re seriously putting her on hotel duty?” he asked.
“I’m giving her a free education,” I said. “The kind I paid for with blisters and tips.”
“And her parents?”
“They have their own homework,” I replied. “Tomorrow morning, my auditors will start going through every transaction linked to their accounts across our properties. Quietly. Thoroughly. We’ll see how much of their lifestyle still stands when it has to meet regulations.”
He let out a low whistle. “Remind me never to get on your bad side.”
“Too late,” I said affectionately, bumping his shoulder. “Remember when you were thirteen and told me you wanted to drop out of school to become a DJ?”
He groaned. “Okay, fair. You were scarier then.”
“I had less to lose,” I said.
He fell quiet for a moment, watching Charlotte across the room as she fumbled with a tray of appetizers, cheeks flushed as she apologized to yet another staff member.
“You knew this would happen,” he said finally. “You let them treat you like that. You walked into that elevator and you… chose to let them think you were staff. You set it up.”
“I set nothing up,” I said. “I simply didn’t correct their assumptions.”
“Same thing,” he said.
“Not exactly,” I said. “If you want to see who someone really is, Daniel, you give them the illusion of power and watch what they do with it. Tonight, your future in-laws introduced themselves to me in the language they speak most fluently. Entitlement.”
“And Charlotte?” he asked.
“That remains to be seen,” I said. “She is, however, the first Holloway I’ve met who volunteered for a 5 a.m. shift.”
“And if she fails?” he pressed, voice soft.
“Then she fails,” I said. “Better to fail while trying to grow than succeed with a rotten heart.”
The band shifted into a slower number. A few couples drifted toward the makeshift dance floor. The tension in the room loosened, though the undercurrent remained—excitement, speculation, the thrill of a story people knew they’d tell later beginning with, “You’ll never believe what I saw…”
