Free The Glass Hotel: A novel by Emily St. John Mandel

in the lamplight. He ran his fingertips down the length of her arm, and then turned her around and slowly unzipped her dress.
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    —
    But what kind of man lies to his daughter about being married? There were aspects of the fairy tale that Vincent was careful not to think about too much at the time, and later her memories of those years had an abstracted quality, as if she’d stepped temporarily outside of herself.
    Accomplices
    They had cocktails at a bar in Midtown with a couple who’d invested millions in Jonathan’s fund, Marc and Louise from Colorado. At that point Vincent had only been in the kingdom of money for three weeks, and the strangeness of her new life was acute.
    “This is Vincent,” Jonathan said, his hand on her lower back.
    “It’s so lovely to meet you,” Vincent said. Marc and Louise were in their forties or fifties, and after a few more months with Alkaitis she would come to recognize them as typical of a particular western subspecies of moneyed people: as wealthy as their counterparts in other regions, but prematurely weathered by their skiing obsession.
    “It’s so great to meet you,” they said, and Louise caught sight of Vincent and Jonathan’s rings in the round of handshakes. “Oh my goodness, Jonathan,” she said, “are congratulations in order?”
    “Thank you,” he said, in such a convincing tone of bashful happiness that for a disorienting moment Vincent entertained the wild thought that they were somehow actually married.
    “Well, cheers,” Marc said, and raised his glass. “Congratulations to the both of you. Wonderful news, just wonderful.”
    “Can I ask…?” Louise said. “Big wedding, small…?”
    “If we’d made any to-do about it at all,” Jonathan said, “you’d have been the first names on the guest list.”
    “Would you believe,” Vincent said, “that we actually got married at city hall?”
    “Good lord,” Marc said, and Louise said, “I like your style. Donna’s getting married—that’s our daughter—and my god, the logistics, the complications, all the drama, the headache of it, I’m tempted to suggest they follow your lead and elope.”
    “There’s a certain efficiency to elopement,” Jonathan said. “Weddings are such elaborate affairs. We just didn’t want all the hoopla.”
    “I had to convince him to take the day off work,” Vincent said. “He wanted to just go down there on his lunch break.” They were laughing, and Jonathan put his arm around her. She could tell he appreciated the improvisation.
    “Was there a honeymoon?” Marc asked.
    “I’m taking her to Nice next week, and then on to Dubai for the weekend,” Jonathan said.
    “Ah, right,” Marc said, “I remember you telling me that you love it there. Vincent, have you been?”
    “To Dubai? No, not yet. I can’t wait.” And so on and so forth. She didn’t want to be a liar but his expectations were clear. As a former bartender, she was accustomed to performing. The lies were troublingly easy. On the night when Jonathan had walked into the bar at the Hotel Caiette, someone had written terrible graffiti on the window, and she was standing there polishing glasses, counting the minutes till the end of her shift, wondering why she’d ever thought it was a good idea to come back here, trying to imagine the rest of her life and getting nowhere because of course she could leave and go work in another bar, and then another bar after that, and another, and another, but leaving Caiette wouldn’t change the underlying equation. The problems of Vincent’s life were the same from one year to the next: she knew she was a reasonably intelligent person, but there’s a difference between being intelligent and knowing what to do with your life, also a difference between knowing that a college degree might change your life and a willingness to actually commit to the terrifying weight of student loans, especially since she’d worked alongside enough bartenders with college