Page 7 of The Wake-Up Call

“Unlike Izzy? Excuse me? Who was complaining about my budget fairy lights this morning? If you had your way, we’d make everything in this hotel out of solid gold.”

“That is ridiculous,” Lucas says without even bothering to look at me. “My solution is not solid-gold fairy lights, clearly. My solution is no fairy lights.”

“What next?” I say, my voice rising. “No sofas? No beds?”

“Stop it, please,” Mrs. SB says, holding up both hands in surrender. “There’s no need to battle it out, I’m keeping you both on until the new year. The agency director has kindly released us from our contract, in the circumstances, and will just provide a skeleton staff for front-of-house on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, if the two of you are willing to work five days?”

“Yes,” we both say, so loudly that Mrs. SB startles slightly.

Usually, our fifth day is a split shift, so one of us covers the evening for Mandy to have her night off. I won’t miss that, though—evening shifts are less fun. All the kids at the hotel have gone to bed, for starters.

“Well. Good. Thank you, both of you. I need responsible, experienced staff here—I can trust you two and Mandy with anything. I know you’ll muck in wherever you’re needed. I’ll be letting half the waiting staff go, and even more of the housekeeping team, and Arjun will have to cope with just Ollie in the kitchen.”

“You’re only leaving him the kitchen porter?” I say, unable to help myself. Arjun is not going to take that well.

“Raw talent,” Mrs. SB says briskly. “He can mould the boy in his own image. Now...” She sniffs, reaching her hands out. I take one first; Lucas hesitates before gripping her other hand in his own. “That’s enough business talk,” she says. “May I remind you that we are a family here. Whatever happens, that won’t change. If Forest Manor has to close, I will do whatever I can to help you.WhateverI can. Please know that the two of you will always be very dear to me.”

I’m tearing up. Mrs. SB knows exactly how hard it is for me to have a conversation like this, and she squeezes my hand tightly. For a second I actually let myself think about it: drinking my last coffee-spiked hot chocolate with Arjun; packing my box o’ bits into my car; hugging goodbye to Barty and Mrs. SB, the people who made me feel at home when that mattered more than anything.

“Absolutely,” I say. My voice is a bit squeaky. “And I’m here for you for as long as you can have me. Just name a job, and I’m on it.”

Lucas nods once. “Whatever you need.”

“Wonderful. Well”—Mrs. SB gives us a small, tired smile and releases our hands—“we’re selling as much as we can. That’s step one.”

I widen my eyes. “And Barty’s...”

“Very upset about it,” Mrs. SB says, lowering her voice and glancing towards the kitchen. “But if we can’t raise funds, we will lose the hotel. So some of those old Bartholomew pieces have to go. Can I put you two in charge of the lost-property room?”

“In charge of, as in, ofsellingit all?” I say. The lost-property room started out as a lost-property box, but over the years it grew, and now there are hundreds—if not thousands—of items in there. We’re not big on throwing things away here at Forest Manor. “Can we even do that?”

“I’ve had a look, and the law is a bit vague, but I think as longas we took steps to return the items—which we always do when something new lands in there—and a reasonable amount of time has passed, then we’re entitled to call it ours. And if it’s ours... then I don’t see why it can’t raise us some money. It’s a bit of a mess in there, but you never know, there might be some gems. Can I count on you two to get it all sold off? I’m sure Poor Mandy will help.”

“Absolutely,” Lucas says. “I look forward to it.”

My eyebrow twitches. Lucas hates the lost-property room. He calls it “the bin.”

Mrs. SB sits back with a long sigh, then notices she has her cardigan only half on and says, “Oh, bother. What a day. I’m going to need you two to really step up now. I hope you’ve realised this means you’ll be working shifts together five days a week.” She brings her glasses back down onto the bridge of her nose and adopts her sternest expression. “Can you both do that?”

Neither of us makes eye contact with the other.

“Of course,” I say brightly.

“Yes,” Lucas says. “Yes, I can work with Izzy. No problem at all.”

•••••

The next day, I realise what Mrs. SB means when she saysmucking in. We’re in the kitchen: I’m suddenly a sous-chef and Lucas has just been enlisted to wait on tables at lunch. There is a gold-trimmed notice on the front desk that reads,Please ring for assistance and we will be with you in a jiffy!in Barty’s curling cursive. I suspect that note is going to be on the desk a lot in the next few weeks.

“It will not fit,” Lucas says, voice muffled from inside the polo shirt he’s trying to pull on. The issue is that Lucas is enormous, andthe waiting uniforms are not designed for people who tower over everyone and have those weird extra muscles joining their neck and their shoulders.

Arjun shoots me a gleeful glance over the pot he is currently stirring. Looking gleeful while slowly stirring a pot does make you look a bit witchy, so I try to stay poker-faced on the other hob. Arjun’s making his black dal, which has to be prepared in an extremely precise way. He’s already yelled at me five times and apologised seven times.

Arjun is a sweetheart, he justactslike a dragon. If Forest Manor is my family, Arjun’s my overbearing older brother. He always thinks he’s right, and annoyingly he often is—he was the first person to tell me Drew wasn’t a good friend to me. But he’s softer than he seems. Every year, he makes me a special batch of brownies on the date of my dad’s birthday, because I once told him brownies were Dad’s favourite, and if he clocks I’m having a rough day, he always slips a teaspoon of sugar into my tea.

“You’re almost there,” Arjun says to Lucas. This is clearly cheering Arjun up, which is good, because he’s been in a terrible mood ever since Mrs. SB told him about the cuts to the kitchen staff. “Just tug it a bit more,” he says.

“It... won’t...” Lucas’s head pops out. He clocks our expressions and his face darkens. “You are laughing at me.”

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