Page 5 of The Wake-Up Call

“I’m very sorry, but you’ll need to vacate your room for a short time, just while we get all this sorted.”

He is looking at “all this” with interest. I clench my fists. Louis puts me on edge. There is something hungry underneath his easy smile—something calculating. He was here last Christmas, and even then he was asking Mrs. SB if she would consider selling to his father’s company—or, as he calls it, “the Keele family firm.” She laughed and told him no, but the situation is so different now. We were in serious financial troublebeforethe ceiling caved in.

Louis whistles slowly, tucking his hands in his trouser pockets. “This sort of damage, with the broader renovations needed here...” He grimaces in sympathy. “Excuse the crude language, but you guys are in real deep shit, aren’t you?”

“Louis!” Izzy trills, appearing from the dining room and shooting me a warning look that suggests my expression is not as obliging as it should be. “Let me take you outside. We’re having an impromptu winter picnic under the pergola, or the pergoda, or the pagoda, I have actually never known what the difference is between all of those, but you know what I mean.”

She has her hand on his arm. Izzy is very tactile for a Brit—with everyone except me.

“Mrs. SB called,” Izzy says to me over her shoulder as she leads Louis away. “Someone needs to phone the already hysterical bride whose wedding just got cancelled. I told her how passionate you were about the set-up for tomorrow’s wedding and said you’d be the perfect person to make the bride feel heard.”

I grit my teeth. Izzy knows I do not enjoy emotional conversations. The only consolation is that I have already signed Izzy up to help Barty fill in a forty-four-page insurance document, which he has definitely downloaded in the wrong format. It will be pure torture for her.

“And she wants to see us both in the office at five,” Izzy adds.

It is only as the front door creaks shut behind Izzy and Louis that I realise what this is likely to mean.

Even if it is safe to use the downstairs of the hotel, that leaves us with five bedrooms instead of twenty-five. They are five of the most expensive bedrooms, which is something, but still, it’s a fraction of what we’d usually earn over the winter months, and doesn’t exactly require a full front-of-house team. In the average week, Izzy and I would each share the desk with one of the agency receptionists Mrs. SB employs, and endure our one overlap day. (Monday. The gloomiest of days.) Mandy would take most of the evening shifts, when only one receptionist is required.

If I were Mrs. SB, I would be looking to cut a member of front-of-house staff. Given the short notice, she will probably have to pay the agency receptionists even if they don’t come in, and Mandy is an old family friend of Barty’s.

Which leaves... me and Izzy.

Izzy

It’s five o’clock. I’ve got my pitch ready. I’ve had some useful feedback from Arjun, who said I was focusing a bit too much on why I was better at my job than Lucas, which doesn’t make me sound like a team player. I disagree, obviously—if anyone isn’t a team player, it’s Lucas. He’s always annoying housekeeping, and he once made Ollie cry when the dishwasher broke. But maybe I don’t need the slide about how my booking book is better than his online booking system in literally every way.

Now that the two of us are standing side by side outside Opal Cottage—the old gate house where the Singh-Bartholomews live—I am finding myself feeling a teeny bit sorry for Lucas. He looks as anxious as I feel. It’s a freezing cold day, and the grass is still wet from this morning’s sleet, but he’s rolled his shirtsleeves up and keeps tugging at his collar as if he’s too hot. He catches my eye, and I amjustconsidering smiling at him when he says, “By the way, I reorganised your box for you.”

All thoughts of smiling evaporate.

“My box o’ bits?”

Lucas’s expression shifts from “tense and implacable” to a subtle “I tire of your nonsense.”

“The box that you keep under our desk, filled with your belongings, yes.”

“You can’t go through my box o’ bits! That’s been there for eight years!”

“That was obvious from the contents,” Lucas says. “It was easy to condense it into a smaller, more sensible container when I removed all the out-of-date packets of sweets.”

“Sweets never go off! Tell me you didnotthrow anything away.”

He regards me flatly. “I kick that box at least twice per day. I have asked you repeatedly to move it. Rationalising the contents seemed like a compromise. Aren’t you always telling me to compromise?”

“Excuse me? You’ve been kicking my box? There are breakables in there, you know.” Well, myTeen Wolfmug. But that isveryprecious.

Mrs. SB opens the door and we snap to attention. It’s obvious that her day has been a lot more stressful than mine—and mine has been nonstop chaos. She’s wearing a cardigan, but only has one arm in a sleeve. The other is just dangling down her back like a bright pink tail. She has a phone trapped between her shoulder and cheek, and her usually flamboyant eyeshadow is an ominously boring shade of taupe. She gestures us inside, cardigan arm flapping, and says into the phone, “Absolutely, yes, that won’t be a problem at all,” while pulling a face.

She flaps her hands at the armchairs in the entrance hall, where she seems to have nested, judging by the half-eaten bowl of pasta, the hooded blanket draped over a chair arm, and the important-looking paperwork strewn everywhere. Barty waves at us from the kitchen without looking up—he is literally elbow-deep in ring-binder files, his spectacles balanced on the tip of his long, aristocratic nose.

Lucas sits down gingerly, as though all the chaos might becatching. I settle in with my laptop bag clutched to my chest, trying to remember my opening lines.In the last eight years at Forest Manor, I have become an invaluable member of the team, coordinating everything from large-scale weddings to...

“Hi,” Mrs. SB says on an exhale once she’s hung up the phone. “You two are a sight for sore eyes. Is it still a crime scene over there?”

She waves her hands at the window that looks over the hotel. Lucas and I exchange a quick glance.

“There’s a lot going on,” I say brightly. “But things have calmed now that Barty’s sorted everyone’s temporary accommodation, and I’ve got four builders coming around for quotes...”

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