"You clock out when I say you clock out." Corazon didn't look up from the tablet. "Twelve rooms tonight. No overtime pay, that's not how this works when you've embarrassed the hotel on camera."
"I didn't embarrass anybody," Lila said. "Bianca dumped the sheets on me."
"The video says otherwise." Corazon finally lifted her eyes. "Forty thousand views and climbing. You want to keep this job, you smile at every guest who looks at you funny for the next month. Understand?"
Lila's jaw tightened. She thought about Ma's dialysis bill sitting unpaid in her bag, about Joy's rent in Cebu, about the eleven pesos in her GCash wallet. She said, "Yes, ma'am," because that's what a maid says when the woman holding her paycheck tells her to bow her head lower.
Her phone buzzed against her hip the second Corazon walked off. Joy.
"Ate, did you send it yet?" Joy's voice cracked through the speaker, thin and fast. "Ma's clinic needs the deposit by six or they push her to next week."
"I get paid Friday." Lila ducked into the linen closet, pressed her back to the shelf so housekeeping carts wouldn't run her over. "I'll send five hundred tonight. That's all I have."
"Five hundred won't cover dialysis, Ate."
"I know what dialysis costs, Joy." Her voice came out sharper than she meant. "I'm working a double. Zero tips tonight because some heiress needed a stage for her tantrum. Let me breathe."
Silence. Then, small: "Sorry. Send what you can."
Lila hung up before her voice broke too. She grabbed the housekeeping ledger off the shelf — the old one, leather gone soft at the corners, the one nobody used anymore because the hotel switched to tablets years back. Someone had left it wedged behind the extra pillows. She should've dumped it in the recycling. Instead she tucked it under her arm, because paper doesn't crash and paper doesn't get hacked, and because some habit in her wanted to hold something that felt permanent for once.
She didn't get three steps into the hallway before a hand hit the service elevator door and stopped it from closing on her.
"Wait."
Jae Min. Still in the navy suit from the gala, tie loosened, collar open like he'd been running his hand through it for an hour straight. He didn't step back to let her past. He filled the doorway instead.
"I have twelve rooms," Lila said. "I don't have time for whatever this is."
"You were in the east wing hallway. Ten forty last night. Outside conference room three." His English was clean, clipped, no wasted syllables. "Don't tell me you weren't."
Her stomach dropped, but she kept her face flat. "I was changing towels on that floor. That's my job."
"I spoke Korean in that room." He took one step in. Close enough that she caught cedar and airplane air off his collar, close enough to see the muscle working in his jaw. "To Mr. Cho. About the harbor parcel."
"I don't speak Korean."
"Everyone says that." His eyes dropped to the ledger under her arm, then back to her face, and something behind them sharpened. "Except your face moved. When Cho said the number. You flinched."
"Maybe I flinched because a strange man cornered me by an elevator."
"I'm not cornering you." But he hadn't moved, and the elevator door kept bumping his shoulder, trying and failing to close, a soft mechanical whine every four seconds like it was keeping score. "I'm asking a question. How much did you understand."
"Nothing." Her pulse was going hard enough that she was sure he could hear it in the quiet hallway. "I understood nothing, sir."
"If you're lying to me," he said, low, "and that number gets to Whitfield before Thursday, I will make sure this hotel remembers your name for the wrong reason. Worse than the sheets."
"Is that a threat?"
"It's a fact." He reached out — not for her, for the ledger — and she yanked it back on instinct, too fast, and the brittle spine gave. Pages slid loose and fanned across the tile between them, decades of ink and dust, and one page landed face-up, corner curling, right at his shoe.
Jae Min looked down. He didn't pick it up right away. He just stared at the line typed in faded blue, the way a man stares at a name he's not supposed to recognize but does anyway.
SHARES ALLOCATED: 40% — ROSA SANTOS.
"Santos," he said slowly, and his eyes came up to her face, tracking the resemblance he hadn't bothered to look for until right now. "That's your last name."
Lila's hand was already moving to snatch the page back, but his shoe was already on the edge of it, pinning it flat to the floor between them, and he wasn't looking away.