Rosa Martinez stood beneath the service awning holding a plastic container with both hands. Her gray-streaked hair was tied back, and one wrist was wrapped in a faded elastic brace. She looked tired in a way Samuel recognized immediately: not the tiredness of one hard shift, but the deeper wear of a person who had been compensating for too few people for too long.
“I’m all right,” he said.
“No, you’re not.” She looked at his wet clothes. “Come inside. Kitchen’s warm.”
“I was just thrown out of the lobby.”
Rosa’s expression changed. “Holloway?”
Samuel said nothing.
She sighed. “Of course.”
She glanced toward the security camera over the door, then used her own employee badge. “Come quick. If he sees you on the hall cameras, he’ll make it a whole thing.”
The kitchen was between meal periods and quieter than Samuel remembered hotel kitchens ever being. A prep cook looked up, saw Rosa, saw the old man, and deliberately looked back down. Rosa led Samuel to a stool near the employee break room, put hot soup in front of him, and found a clean towel.
“You shouldn’t risk your job for me,” Samuel said.
Rosa snorted softly. “I’ve worked here eighteen years. If kindness gets me fired now, at least I’ll know why.”
“Eighteen years?”
“It used to feel like family.”
“What changed?”
She did not answer at first. Her eyes moved toward the hallway.
“Three years ago,” she said.
The timing was precise enough that Samuel did not have to ask who arrived three years earlier.
Rosa sat across from him, rubbing her wrapped wrist. “They used to know our names upstairs. Not all of them, but enough. You had a problem, you could tell someone.
Then Mr. Holloway came in with his efficiency plans. Fewer people, more rooms, faster turns. At first we thought it was normal management. Then hours started disappearing.”
“Disappearing?”
“You work ten, payroll says eight. You work nine and a half, payroll says eight. You complain, next week you get four shifts instead of five.” Rosa’s voice remained low. “I started writing mine down. Almost a year now.”
“Why not go to accounting?”
She gave him a tired look. “Accounting reports to him.”
Samuel heard Holloway’s voice from the original transcript of the anonymous complaints in his mind as clearly as if the man were standing beside them.
Rosa continued. “Then there’s the tips. Guests leave envelopes, banquet gratuities, holiday tips. Last Saturday our floor team made about three hundred dollars from one group. We got forty to split.”
“Where did the rest go?”
“You tell me.”
Samuel looked at the soup.
Rosa noticed. “Eat.”
He smiled slightly. “You remind me of someone who used to work here.”
“Who?”
“A banquet captain named Margaret Greene. Terrified everyone into eating.”
Rosa’s eyes narrowed. “How would you know Margaret?”
Samuel realized he had stepped too close to his own history. “Long story.”
Before she could ask more, footsteps sounded in the corridor.
Rosa stiffened.
A young houseman named Luis Ortega Jr.—no relation to the security officer, though everyone called him Lou to avoid confusion—appeared at the break-room door. “Rosa, Holloway’s looking for you.”
“Why?”