PART 1
I said it as a joke.
With my hand still on my suitcase handle, in a lobby, pleased with myself, the way you are when you have organised something nice.
I’m surprised you remember us. We haven’t been here in forty years.
And her face changed.
My name is Odessa. I am sixty-four years old.
My husband is Hollis Thorne. He is sixty-seven and he was a surveyor until he retired and he has never in his life been a man anybody would describe as complicated.
We married in the August of 1985, four days after I finished my training, in a church with about forty people in it.
That hotel is where we spent our honeymoon.
Four nights in a room we could not possibly afford, paid for with an envelope his mother pressed into his hand at the church door and absolutely would not discuss.
I remember the carpet in that corridor, which was green.
I remember a man on the desk with a moustache who called me madam and made us both laugh about four times.
I remember that it rained for two of the four days and that neither of us minded in the slightest.
The woman behind that desk looked at my husband.
Then back at me. Then at him again, for about a second and a half, which is exactly long enough to be worth noticing and not long enough to say anything about.
And she said: oh. I thought Mr Thorne had stayed with us more recently.
I turned to him and I said: what?
Hollis barely moved. He said: she’s got me confused with somebody.
But she was already on her computer. Four or five keystrokes.
She said: no, I’m quite sure. Same name.
And then she frowned at that screen.
And she said a thing she should not have said — the one piece of information in this entire account that nobody intended me to have, delivered by a woman who had been careful for eleven years and who had a bad four seconds.
She said: Mr Thorne usually asks for the same room.
Usually.
That is the word. Out of everything said to me in that building over two days, that is the one that did it.
Not before. Not last year. Usually is a word about a pattern, and a pattern is a number of times, and a number of times is a thing a wife does not have.
