I can do that much.
I look at Renzo. "Get our best people together," I tell him. "We have a wedding to attend."
* * *
The two weeks fly by and I am in New York again. This time, to watch Nathalie get married. In my room, watching her interview on TV. Her face and the Hartleys' boy's face are everywhere these days.
She is in a pre-wedding interview, sitting beside her fiancé, her hair done and a smile that reaches every part of her face except her eyes, and she is saying, "I knew the moment I met him. I just knew. It sounds ridiculous but that's the truth of it."
The interviewer leans forward delightedly.
James is nodding beside her. I sit up slowly.
On screen, Phillip Keller is dabbing at his eyes with a handkerchief and saying, "She is my heart. She has always been my heart. Giving her to a man who loves her the way James loves her, that's all a father can ask for."
I look at Nathalie's face while her father says this.
She is looking at James with a warm and slightly shy look but I can't help but see that it looks like she hasn't slept properly in months.
The camera cuts to citizens on the street and a woman is saying, "Isn't it wonderful? After everything that happened with the scandal, they stuck together. That's real love."
The screen goes dark. Renzo is standing at the television with the remote and he looks at me and says, "The wedding is starting in two hours."
He is holding my dry-cleaned tux.
I nod.
He lays the tuxedo out and puts his hand briefly on my shoulder. He leaves and I dress up. I walk to my closet and reach for the watch box that I brought from Las Vegas.
The watches are arranged as they always are. Then my eyes fall on an old piece I hadn't worn in years, and I turn it over in my hands without particular intention and then I stop. One of the crystals is missing from the face.
I frown at it.
I turn it toward the light and I look at the gap, a small clean absence in the arrangement around the dial, and I try to remember when I last wore it and I can't place it immediately and then I can.
New York.
Two years ago. The night I had been shot and had ended up in a parking garage barely conscious. Where the woman saved me.
Then something else clicks. I look at the missing space then I set the watch down on the dresser. I open the side drawer and pick up the crystal. I was going to leave it back in Las Vegas but for some reason I slipped it into my pockets. I take out the crystal, Nathalie's crystal, the one Renzo had brought me from her hotel room, the one the cleaner had thought was important enough to set aside, and I hold it up.
I look at it and I look at the watch.
I bring the crystal to the gap in the watch face and I hold it close without touching it and I stand very still.
It looks like it fits. I set the crystal down carefully on the dresser beside the watch, I take a step back and I rub my hand slowly over my jaw and I look at both of them.
It could be nothing.
Crystals like this are not uncommon. Watches like this exist in the thousands. The gap in the face could have happened anywhere, at any point in the last two years, and the crystal Renzo found in Nathalie's hotel room could have come from anything, a bracelet, a hairpin, something she bought herself.
I pick the crystal up again and I turn it slowly between my fingers.
But why did the cleaner think it was important enough to keep separate from the rest of her things?
And why, I think, frowning at it,does Nathalie have something that looks exactly like a piece of my watch?
I think about that night, the woman who pulled me into her car, I was in and out of consciousness and I hadn't seen her face clearly, not once. I had nothing to identify her with except the undergarment I had taken.
