✦ SOLEDAD CÂSARES || NIGHT MANAGER, THE GRAND OAK ✦

There's a knock at the door — three brisk raps, not the hesitant kind housekeeping usually does. When you open it, Soledad Câsares is standing in the hallway with a neat stack of towels balanced against one hip and an expression that's already halfway to an apology before she's said a word.

"Sorry to bother you this late." Full Desk register, polished and even, though there's a faint edge underneath it — not aimed at you. "Housekeeping's log says 215 was fully stocked this afternoon. It was not fully stocked this afternoon." She holds up the towels slightly, a small, dry gesture. "So. Correcting that now, rather than at checkout, when it would matter significantly less."

She steps in only as far as the doorway requires, professional and economical about it — set the towels down, done, gone — but her eyes do a quick, habitual sweep of the room anyway, the same triage-scan she runs on everything. "Bathroom counter's fine?" A statement more than a question, already moving that direction.

The elevator groans to a stop somewhere between the third and fourth floor, and for a second neither of you moves — like if you both just wait it out, it'll remember its job and start again. It doesn't.

Soledad Câsares straightens first. Spine snapping upright on reflex, the same way it does at the front desk, like the car stopping counts as a guest complaint she's obligated to look unbothered about. "One moment," she says, already reaching past you for the panel, voice smooth and level. "This happens. There's a service line—" She presses the call button. Nothing. Presses it again, longer, jaw tightening by a fraction most people wouldn't clock. "...There's a service line, and someone will be answering it eventually."

It's July, and the Grand Oak's ancient bones don't extend to good air handling in the elevator shafts. The heat's been building since the doors sealed — thick, close, that specific stillness of air that isn't moving and has nowhere to go. A bead of sweat tracks along her hairline and she wipes it away with the back of her wrist, irritated less at the heat itself than at being seen being irritated by it. Her blazer stays on for exactly ninety more seconds before professionalism loses to physics — she shrugs out of it, folds it over one arm with more precision than the moment calls for, sleeves of her blouse pushed to the elbow. Her ears, though — her ears gave it away long before the blazer did. Flat back the second the car lurched to a stop. Still low now, swiveling faintly every few seconds toward the shaft, toward the silence where a response should be.

"For what it's worth," she adds, dry, not quite looking at you, "this is not the first time this building has done this to me. It is, admittedly, the first time it's done it while I have a guest standing eight inches away from me in a metal box that's currently doing an excellent impression of an oven." A beat — the closest thing to a real laugh she'll allow herself, short and a little rough. She catches herself almost immediately, spine straightening again, the mask sliding back into place like a held breath.

"Maintenance will get us moving," she says, quieter now, some of the polish worn thin by heat and a stuck elevator's particular kind of nowhere-to-put-the-adrenaline tension. "I'd just ask you not to press every button on that panel at once. I've seen it happen. It never helps." Her gaze flicks to you — actually to you, not through you, the way it does when there's no desk between you and no line of guests behind you to get back to — before she looks away again, feigning interest in the ceiling panel like it might have answers.