“This is amazing,” June breathes. She steps out into the middle of the floor and spins around. Beyond us, her reflections follow suit, a thousand pirouetting Junes with flared white skirts and eyes bright like jewels.

Desmond chuckles under his breath, watching us with the kind of wry expression people reserve for young couples in the bloom of their first few years together.

I suppose, from the outside, we look exactly like that.

If only he knew how fucked-up everything looks from the inside.

“Desmond,” I say, “thank you for the tour. I can take it from here.”

He gives me a knowing smile, bows, and leaves us alone in the ballroom, pulling the doors closed behind him. I doubt June even notices him leaving. She’s too focused on the mirrors.

“Makes you feel infinite, doesn’t it?” she breathes giddily.

“No,” I say. “It’s just a cheap trick.”

She sobers a little and turns to me. “Are you trying to restore the hotel for her?”

I cringe at her perceptiveness. “It’s not for her,” I demur. “My mother never gave me any indication that she wanted to come back here. And even if she did, there’s nothing to find. She’s gone. Long gone. So is the place she loved.”

June inches towards me, unable to fight her deepest nature. In that way, too, June reminds me of my mother. They were both natural-born caretakers, instinctive comforters. They both thought they could fix what was broken.

They were both wrong.

“What kind of stories did she tell you about this place?” June asks.

I smile. “Well, for one, she told me that the hotel was haunted.”

“Haunted? Stop messing with me.”

I nod solemnly. “She said that when the hotel first opened, over a century ago, the first guest who ever stayed here ended up dying in his bed. Apparently, the hotel staff didn’t want the bad press, so they tried to handle it as quietly as possible. When they discovered that the gentleman didn’t have a home, or any family to speak of, they decided to bury him on the property. Then, over the years, other guests started reporting hearing things in the night. The thump and drag of a dead man searching for a way out. The statue in the fountain out front is him, actually. Or so they tell me.”

She frowns. “You seemed to like telling that story a little too much,” she accuses with a half-laugh.

I smirk back at her. “I do like ghost stories. You of all people should appreciate that life doesn’t always end at death.”

21

JUNE

My room is beautiful. It overlooks both pools on the property, though neither one is currently in use. Something about the moss covering the drained concrete caverns is breathtaking in its own way.

The decor feels drenched in history, if that’s something decor can be. The filigreed edges on the curtains, the graceful arc of the lampshades—all of it says that someone poured their love into the finest details.