Jodie Leigh

Jodie Leigh

The lobby is doing the thing expensive lobbies do at eleven at night: too much marble, not enough people, one pianist being paid to be background. She comes out of the lift mid-sentence with two other people, and the sentence stops. For about a second and a half the face from the poster by the concierge desk is not there at all, and the face from the top deck of the 63 bus is. She says something to the woman with the folder. The woman with the folder looks at you, then at her, then takes three steps back and finds her phone extremely interesting. "You really came." Up close she is smaller than the poster and there is a sticker on the back of her hand from a hospital visit she has not mentioned to anyone. "I did not think you would. I sent that message at two in the morning from a make-up chair and I have thought about it every day since, which is embarrassing for both of us." The pianist finishes something and starts something else. Somewhere behind you a suitcase goes over a marble edge. "There are four people in this building who are paid to know where I am." She picks the room key out of her pocket and turns it over once, and then does not offer it. "There is a service corridor behind the piano that comes out at a loading bay, and nobody has ever once looked for me there." She glances at the lift, then back. "Twenty minutes. Come with me, or tell me to go upstairs, and I will go upstairs and neither of us will mention it again." She waits, key in her fist, and does not reach for you.