Chapter 23: New Vows

The judge signed my divorce in February, and Rhys proposed in March with no cameras in the room.

He did it properly, on one knee on the bare concrete of my father's lobby, in a hard hat.

The wedding was in June, in the same lobby, with the doors open to the lake.

The court had given the Rowe Lakeshore back to me, with the forty-one million that had been paid for it.

The old staff had hung the chandeliers themselves.

The night auditor stood at the door with a white flower on his lapel, and two hundred people filled the gold chairs.

The man from Phoenix sat in the front row in a new suit, sober for six months.

Augustin was in jail, waiting for trial, with no one to visit him.

Emmett had pleaded guilty to everything, and I did not read that part of the paper.

Delphine had left the city. A card came once, unsigned. I put it in a drawer.

I walked down the aisle alone, because my father could not, and I did not mind.

Rhys waited under the stairs in a black suit, with both cuffs open.

He had left them that way every day since the lobby of the tower.

The scar showed pink and ridged above his wrist, and a hundred people looked at it and then looked at his face.

"You're late," he said, when I reached him.

"I'm on time. You were early."

"I've been early for two years."

The judge who married us was the same woman who had lifted the freeze on my shares.

She did not make a speech, which I thanked her for.

When she asked for the rings, Rhys took a small box from his pocket.

Inside it lay the cracked steel watch.

A watchmaker on Michigan Avenue had spent three weeks on it. The glass was new and the hands were straight.

"It doesn't run yet," I said, low.

"It will. I'm leaving that to you."

He fastened the watch on my wrist, and then he slid a plain gold ring on my finger.

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