Because if I signed that, then there was one woman with eleven million views on her worst afternoon and nothing to put next to it, and one woman with a cheque and a clause saying she would not discuss it.
I did not sign.
It has been five months.
There is a legal process and I am not going to write about it, except to say that the paper lost property book with the red cover turned out to be the most valuable object in that hotel.
The three videos are down. The channel is not, and she has posted twice about being targeted, and I have stopped looking.
Yusra and I speak. She rang me in the December after somebody sent her a link, and we were on that call for two hours and eleven minutes.
She is not working in hotels any more. She works in a school kitchen and she says she prefers it, and I do not entirely believe her, and I have not pushed.
Marlon got a commendation and a fifty-dollar voucher, which the two of us find funnier than anybody else does.
I am back on the same floor. I clean 1108 about twice a week.
Something small changed in that hotel and I did not ask for it and I am not sure who did.
There is a laminated card on the inside of every housekeeping cart now. Four lines.
It says what to do if you find cash or valuables in a room. It says who to hand it to. It says to write it in the book and to take a photograph of the entry on your own phone before you close it.
That last line was not in any policy anywhere before the January.
Nobody has ever said it out loud to me. It just appeared on the carts one Monday, and every woman on that floor knows exactly why it is there, and not one of us has mentioned it.
Here is the only thing I have.
Everybody wants this to be about a rich woman pointing at a poor one in a marble lobby.
That happened, and it was the worst four minutes of my adult life, and I will not forget the sound that lobby made when it went quiet.
But she did not get me sacked. She threatened a company, and the company did the sum, and I was the cheaper side of it.
Nobody in that building believed I was a thief. Not one person. Jocelyn has told me so herself, to my face, and I believe her, and it makes it worse rather than better.
They had the footage. They had my handwriting in their own book, one floor below, from an hour earlier.
Nobody looked. Because looking takes forty minutes, and firing me took four.
If you ever find yourself in the room where that sum is being done —
it will not feel like a decision. It will feel like being sensible, and being quick, and limiting the damage.
Ask for the forty minutes anyway.
Because somewhere in that building there is nearly always a red book with the answer in it, and the only reason it does not get opened is that nobody thinks the person it would clear is worth the time.
