Paul had worked the night audit at the Harrington Hotel for eleven years, which meant he knew the hotel's secrets in the abstract but none of its guests' names. He knew that room 408 consistently had noise complaints but that the source was never identified. He knew that the third-floor vending machine had not dispensed a correct item since 2019 and that no one had fixed it because the machine company and the hotel could not agree on whose problem it was. He knew that the fire door at the end of the east corridor had a broken alarm and was used nightly by a staff member he had never seen but whose cigarette smell he recognized. What he did not know was anything specific about the people who occupied the rooms. They checked in before his shift and often checked out after. He saw them at the desk occasionally, at two or three in the morning, when they could not sleep or needed extra towels or had forgotten to request a wake-up call. These conversations lasted between thirty seconds and four minutes. He learned nothing in them except that people who could not sleep at three in the morning were mostly polite about it. On the night of February 12th, a woman came downstairs at 2:40 AM and sat in the lobby armchair and read until 5 AM, when she went back up to her room. She did not approach the desk. She did not need anything from him. He found this more interesting than any conversation he had had in eleven years and could not have explained why.