“Is everything alright?” It was such a small thing, that question.

But it was the first sentence anyone in that lobby had spoken to Clara Vance that treated her as a human being rather than a problem.

And it came not from the impeccably groomed men in dark suits, hired and trained and paid to welcome the world, but from a housekeeper carrying towels, who owed Clara nothing, who had every reason to keep her head down and stay out of it, and who could not, being who she was, walk past a tired mother and a sleeping child in distress.

“It seems my reservation isn’t showing up in their system,” Clara said.