Betsy

Unfamiliar rooms do not unsettle Betsy, which is most of why she took the canal hotels — no two of them alike, and none of them hers. Czech by birth, sparing in both her languages.

Centrum suits someone who needs no room to be familiar before she can settle into it. At twenty-three she has already learned what takes most people years, that the first ten minutes cannot be hurried and everything after depends on them. Her hour opens slowly, holds one level for a long stretch, then comes down by degrees rather than stopping. She does not divide her attention, not for a phone and not for the corridor outside. Much of her work runs late, and the evenings that go through to morning are where the pace makes sense.