She’s tempted to call him but that will end one of two ways: with her screaming or with her crying and begging. He knows she has student-loan payments. He knows Edie and Love’s financial future is uncertain. Love actually asked Lizbet if she could use one more person on the desk （Love did it under the pretense of “offering help,” but she needs the money）， and Lizbet snapped her up, so now Edie’s mother is going to be working one night shift a week to give Richie a break. Graydon also knows that Edie’s shame about what she did, what she agreed to, is deep and painful and that she’ll do anything to conceal it.
Through the blur of tears, Edie takes inventory of the lobby. No one needs her; the phones are quiet. Zeke is stationed by the door in case of emergency.
Edie runs to the break room, and as soon as the door closes behind her, tears fall.
“Edie?” a voice says. “Are you okay?”
Alessandra is sitting at the counter with…some kind of craft project in front of her. Both this and the unexpected concern in Alessandra’s voice stop Edie from going into a full-blown meltdown.
“Fine,” Edie says, wiping quick fingertips under her eyes. She approaches Alessandra as she would a venomous snake and peers at the project before her. It’s an eighteen-inch frame, the inside of which is spread with some kind of adhesive. Alessandra is pressing in broken pieces of pottery and colored glass. She has only half the square completed, but from where Edie is standing, it looks kind of like…
Alessandra says, “I’m making a mosaic.”
“I didn’t know you were crafty,” Edie says, and this makes Alessandra laugh.
“I’m not, particularly,” Alessandra says. “I just wanted to try my hand at this. It’s harder than it looks. You have to lay down the pieces and hope that when you step back, it makes the whole you’re looking for.”
“It’s a woman’s face,” Edie says. “It looks like you. Is it you?”
Alessandra shrugs. “I’ve always thought of mosaic as this big metaphor for my life,” she says. “All these jagged, incongruous pieces…” She holds up a small shard of milky jade-green glass. “These are like the things that happen to you. But if it’s laid out a certain way and if you take a step back from it, it makes sense.”
Edie thinks about her own life: growing up the beloved child of two wonderful parents on an island where she felt safe and nurtured and championed, where she was such a success academically that she was accepted to an Ivy League college. Cornell was its own dreamscape. Edie loved the hotel school, her classes, her professors, the guest lecturers from New York City and Zurich and Singapore, and the natural beauty surrounding the campus. There was nowhere prettier than Cascadilla Gorge in the autumn.
But then, in January of her junior year, Edie returned from her facilities-management lecture to find Love and the dean of students sitting together on the bench in front of her dorm. When they saw Edie approaching, they both stood up, and Edie nearly turned and ran. She knew her mother hated to drive on the mainland, especially in winter—Edie’s father was the one who always brought her back and forth; he had dropped her off just a few weeks earlier. Love never would have made the seven-hour trip from Hyannis to Ithaca under anything but urgent circumstances. There was also an unfamiliar expression on Love’s face: a mixture of grief and dread. Edie dropped her backpack on the path and raced into her mother’s arms, knowing before Love even said the words that her father was dead.
Edie took ten days off from school, and when she returned, she had acquired the questionable mystique and celebrity of someone who had undergone a tragic loss. Students whom Edie knew only tangentially, including Graydon Spires, the most popular and successful student in the hotel school, offered condolences. Everyone talked about Graydon’s poise, his charm, his silver tongue, his social savvy. Edie’s best friend, Charisse, once remarked, “It’s almost freakish the way he always says the right thing.” And not only did he say the right thing, Edie learned as she got to know him, he also always struck the right emotional note. He wasn’t a conversational skater, he didn’t speak simply to fill silence, he didn’t do small talk. He listened and responded in a genuine and intelligent way. When he turned his light on Edie—asking her out for a midnight snack of burgers and coffee at Jack’s （“I’m guessing you’re not sleeping much these days”）—she fell in love.
They grew close very quickly. （“Too quickly,” Charisse said. She was offended by Edie’s sudden abandonment—within days of the date at Jack’s, Edie was always with Graydon.） When junior year ended, they both accepted summer jobs at Castle Hill in Newport, Rhode Island. They worked at the hotel’s front desk and found they were dynamic together. The atmosphere in the lobby all summer was electrifying; the air crackled with the barely sublimated sexual and romantic energy between Edie and Graydon. They tried to outdo each other in customer service in a good-natured way, and the guests （and management） ate it up. They scheduled Wednesdays off together, when they did all the Newport-y things: went to Annie’s for lunch, hung out on Thames Street, did the Cliff Walk, sailed on the hotel’s Sunfish, biked around Fort Adams. Edie couldn’t believe how Graydon had appeared just when she needed him most. She imagined the life they would have after they graduated—they would work together in hotels in Alaska, Australia, the Azores. They would climb their way up the corporate ladder at a major hotel chain—or they would start their own hotel chain. They would get married and have babies.