Chapter 25
Chapter Twenty-Five
Nathalie
"No, no, move it left — yes, there, perfect."
The florist shifts the arrangement and I tilt my head and look at it and I look at the garden and I think about sightlines and photographs and I say, "Actually, can we try it by the arch instead?"
The florist smiles patiently and moves it again.
"Oh, I love that," I tell her, and I mean it, which is the strangest part of all of this. The flowers are genuinely beautiful. The garden is also beautiful. In another life, this would have been a beautiful wedding.
"The white roses along the aisle?" the florist asks, holding up a sample stem.
"All of it white," I confirm. "And greenery along the chairs, keep it simple."
Behind me, Mrs. Park is on her phone managing the catering timeline, and further back toward the house two men are arguing quietly about where the lighting rig should go and a woman with a clipboard is standing in the middle of the lawn looking up at the sky.
There was motion in every room, deliveries arriving before breakfast, my father moving through it all with barely contained delight. After all, he turned a family event into a campaign strategy and found the two things completely compatible.
There would be a dinner reception after the ceremony, a hundred and twenty guests, donors and journalists, and political allies, all of whom would watch Phillip Keller give his daughter away in marriage and feel warmly about him and his family values.
I smile at the florist.
"The arch needs more greenery," I tell Mrs. Park, without looking up from the clipboard. "Can you add that to the list?"
"Already on it," she replies.
My father appears at the top of the garden steps with Gerald a pace behind him. He looks at the garden and then at me and he laughs as he comes down the steps with his hands in his pockets. He looks around at the chaos of it all and he says, "Look at you. Finally grown."
I smile up at him. "I'm trying to get it right."
"It's perfect," he says, waving his hand at the garden. He looks at me for a moment with the appraising eyes he usually reserves for press opportunities and then he says, carefully.
Did you go out yesterday?"
I hold his gaze. "Just for some air," I tell him. "I couldn't sleep."
Something moves behind his eyes and he says, "You're a wife to be now, Nathalie. It doesn't look right, going out at that hour alone." He smiles, but the smile has an edge running underneath it. "Stay in."
"Of course," I reply. "You're right.
He nods, satisfied, and he looks back at the garden.
I watch his face and I say, "I just wish Mom was here."
It comes out sincere and I watch him for a flash of guilt. A flinch. Anything, any small involuntary signal.
His face does nothing.
"I wish she was too," he says pleasantly, already looking past me toward Gerald. "But let's not dwell on that. What matters now is that you're getting married." He pats my shoulder once. "Carry on."
He goes back up the steps and Gerald follows and I watch them go and I think, that's enough. That is my answer and it is enough. He has no conscience.
I turn back to Mrs. Park.
"Can I look through the guest list?" I ask her. "I want to make sure I know everyone who's coming before the day."
"Of course," she replies, already reaching for her laptop. "Come up to the office."
The home office is quiet compared to the garden. Mrs. Park settles at the desk and opens the laptop and pulls up the guest list and I stand behind her and I look at the screen and lean forward and stop.
"Oh god," I say.
She looks up. "What's wrong?"
"Your lipstick," I tell her, pointing vaguely at her face. "It's smudged, there on the left side, you might want to—"
"Oh, dear." She is already pushing back from the desk, touching her face, turning toward the small mirror on the far wall. "Where, here?"
"Bathroom would be better," I tell her sympathetically. "The light in here is terrible."
She goes, and I listen to her footsteps across the corridor. When I hear the bathroom door, I reach into my pocket, take out the flash drive and I lean over the laptop and slide it in.
The screen flickers, a small progress bar appears in the corner and I straighten up. I put my hands behind my back and I look at the window and I listen.
The progress bar moves to thirty percent.
I hear the bathroom tap running.
Fifty percent.
The tap stops and I hear footsteps in the corridor.
Seventy percent.
The door handle moves. "I didn't see any smudge," Mrs. Park calls.
"Oh my? Are you sure?" I call.
Ninety percent.
The door opens and as it completes and I pull the flash drive out and close my fingers around it. I turn toward the door with a slightly embarrassed expression already on my face and I say, "I think I was mistaken actually. I must be losing my mind."
Mrs. Park looks at me with concern. "Are you sure?"
"It looked smudged from where I was standing and then—" I sigh and press my fingers to my forehead. "Ignore me. I'm so stressed I'm seeing things. I need some water."
"You poor thing," she says warmly, moving back to the desk. "Go, go. I'll have the list ready when you come back."
I smile gratefully and I leave, pulling the door behind me. I stand in the corridor, and I slide the flash into my pocket.
I type a message to Renzo. "Done"
I wait for what feels like ages, pacing and then I get a beep.
"We are in"
I sigh in relief and I lean on the wall and look up.
"I couldn't get him to like me, Mom," I say quietly, to the empty corridor. "I tried." I pause. "I guess you couldn't either."
***Luca
The man on the floor is breathing. I step back from him and I look at my shirt then the factory walls.
"Get him cleaned up," Renzo tells the men. "Hospital. Back entrance, no names."
I turn and walk into the cold Las Vegas night, I lean against the car and I light a cigarette.
The debt collection had been a minor thing. This man who owed a smaller man who owed us, an obligation that one of the men Renzo ordered could have handled without breaking a sweat. I had volunteered for it at nine in the evening on a Tuesday because the alternative was sitting in my office.
The ache in my chest hadn't gone anywhere.
I tried work, whiskey, and the numbness of physical confrontation and none of it had put a dent in the pain in the left side of my chest that had taken up residence the morning I watched her walk out of my New York property and hadn't moved since.
Renzo comes out of the factory and he looks at me and he asks, "Home?"
"Drink first," I tell him.
He nods and he reaches into his jacket as he comes around to the driver's side and he holds something out across the roof of the car, it's an envelope.
I take it, get in and I open it under the interior light and I look at the wedding invitation. I sit with it for a moment and then I laugh.
Nathalie was marrying Hartley Jr. after all.
"She says she wants you there," Renzo says, pulling out onto the road. "She said you owe it to her."
I look at the invitation.
"I've been meaning to ask you something," I say, keeping my voice level and my eyes on the card. "Our tech team ran an unusual access request through the New York servers about three weeks ago." I pause. "And you've made quite a few trips to New York in the last month."
Renzo is quiet.
"You're helping her," I say.
"I didn't want to hide it from you," he answers carefully. "But she was very—"
"Is she safe?" The question comes before I think it. "Is she alright?"
"She's alright." He pauses. "She had me send some of our people over to her. Disguised as maids for the wedding."
I look out the window.
I want to ask if she has mentioned me but I stop myself.
I don't deserve the answer to any of those questions.
My father sat across a table from her father and made an arrangement that put her mother in the ground and I had kept that information for years and only told her when I no longer had a choice. I had used her before I knew her and continued using her.
And now she was marrying a man whose legs I had broken while she was unconscious and somewhere in the sequence of events that constituted our acquaintance I had managed to fall for her so completely that a wedding invitation to watch her marry someone else felt like a stab.
I turn the invitation over in my hands.
"Stai scherzando con me?" I ask Renzo. Are you mocking me?
"No."
"It's better if I stay away from her," I tell him. "From all of it. I've done enough damage to her life. Keller seems to have stopped stirring up the families. It's better this way."
Was it? I tell myself that it is. Keller suddenly stopped reaching out to the families, immediately she returned. I want to tell myself that's all I care about. Peace.
Renzo drives for a moment without speaking and then he says quietly, "She gathered evidence. Her father's crimes, years of them. She had me access the records and wipe everything that connected us to Phillip's operations." He pauses. "The rest I handed to her. I think she's planning to use it."
I look at the invitation. Her wedding was in a week.
"She's going after him," I say.
"That's what I think," Renzo replies. "Which means she's walking into something dangerous with five of our people disguised as maids and whatever plan she has put together, alone, and nobody who knows what they're doing standing close enough to be useful."
I don't deserve her. That is simply true, I know it and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
But I can stand between her and what's coming.
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.
I look at the crystal and at the watch.
I press my thumb slowly across the crystal's flat face and I think about Nathalie in my meeting room the first day, the blazer, the prepared answers, and the thing that had nagged at me from that first moment that I had never been able to name.
I think about her in the cell, and how she had seemed familiar in a way I had attributed to her face, her eyes, and had never looked further than that.
I pick up the watch and I bring the crystal to the gap again, slower this time. I press it gently into the space.
It slots in perfectly.
I stare at it and I pull the crystal back out. I hold it in my palm and I set both of them down. I sit on the edge of the bed and I press both hands over my face.
It doesn't mean anything.
It might mean something.
It's the morning of Nathalie's wedding and I am holding a piece of glass that may or may not have come off my watch the night a stranger saved my life in a parking garage two years ago.
Nathalie had this crystal; was the woman who saved me, the woman I was searching for. Was that Nathalie?
I go to the connecting room and push it open. Renzo is in front of the mirror with one cuff link in and one out, he looks at me in the reflection.
"Chop, chop," I tell him.
He turns. "What?"
"Muoviti." Move it. "You're driving. Tell the men to follow immediately."
He looks at my face and puts the second cuff link in without a word and picks up his jacket.
I put the crystal and the watch in my breast pocket and I press my hand against them for a moment and I think, it probably isn't her.
But what if it is?
I walk to the elevator.