He invented it, of course. He prepares for it months in advance, reminds everyone when it is approaching, and is particularly good at ensuring that the rest of us understand the importance of disappearing for a while. He simply does not believe the rule applies to him.

So when he left for New York in late July, no one thought very much of it. He was meeting Gabriela Moreno, an actress and longtime Kas di Kos guest whom he had known through the course of their working relationship for years. He was her Concierge, she was his guest, and the meeting itself was entirely ordinary by the standards of their acquaintance.

What followed was not.

Not long after arriving in New York, the Concierge sent word that
he would be taking August off. The entire month.

There are moments when professionalism requires composure. This was not one of them. His staff was delighted, partly because they had spent years watching him encourage everyone else to participate in The August Pause while somehow managing never to participate in it himself. Still, delight quickly gave way to curiosity. The Concierge does not take August off, and nothing about the trip had suggested that this year would be any different.

Then someone noticed the keys.

The Concierge is rarely seen without them. What they open, where they belong, or why there are quite so many of them is information he has never volunteered, and over time we have learned not to ask. Gabriela, however, had known him long enough to understand that the keys mattered to him, and at some point during their time in New York, she took them.

From there, the record becomes considerably less reliable.

What remains are glimpses of Gabriela moving through the city with the keys still in her possession, appearing in places that offer very little explanation of how she arrived there or what, precisely, she intended to do next. We did notice that some of them she is known to frequent. There is something almost casual about the entire affair, as though she had simply decided that the Concierge had worked quite enough and was prepared to make the decision on his behalf.

Gabriela has always had a certain appetite for mischief, which may
explain why none of this appears to have troubled her very much.

What is harder to explain is the Concierge.

Somewhere between his arrival in New York and Gabriela making off with the one thing he is almost never without, a man who had spent years insisting that everyone else stop working finally agreed to stop working himself.

For thirty-one days.

The Concierge has since returned to Kas di Kos and, true to form, has offered very little by way of explanation. Gabriela has not been especially helpful either, leaving us with the films, the photographs, a set of circumstances that do not quite add up, and the growing suspicion that the story of his August began long before anyone realized there was a story at all.

We are still piecing together what happened in New York.