[NH pauses, takes more tissues]
NH: You wanted a feeling I was unhappy to have. There it is.
LK: What would it take to change it?
NH: I don’t know. It would have to be big.
The phone scraped across the tabletop as the Forensics detective picked it back up. “No Heat,” he said. “And I checked the whole box, in case it got misfiled or shuffled. Want me to keep an eye out for it?”
She told him she’d like that and hung up, then had to sit down, just to collect herself.
Her feet kicked into something under her desk. She tilted her head sideways and saw a gift box wrapped in wedding paper. Nikki set the box on her desktop. It had no note. She used her scissors to snip the ribbon and carefully slit the decorative paper to touch as little of it as possible. She removed the wrap and saw a gift box like you’d find at any Hallmark. She hesitated, then lifted off the top.
Inside was a manila file folder, the kind you’d see at a doctor’s office. The tab read: “Heat, N., Det. Grade-1, NYPD.” Taking it by one edge, she opened the file.
It was empty. But there was something.
She took out the manila folder. Beneath it, the box was filled with bits of paper that had been run through a microshredder. She scooped some of it up in her palm and couldn’t read any of what was on it.
But she knew what it was.
An ecru Crane’s envelope was nested inside the confetti. No writing on it, and it wasn’t sealed. Nikki slipped the card from the lined envelope and, when she read it, the warmth of another’s grace filled her, and she smiled.
Heat carefully rested the note inside the box on top of her shredded files, face up, so she could appreciate once more the woman’s neat handwriting and the message that contained only two words.
“All in.”
On the dazzling August morning of Nikki Heat’s wedding day, she stepped before the full-length mirror in her dress fashioned of silk taffeta with a sheath of silver bullion lace and wished her mother could be there to see her. She kissed her fingertips and touched them to the heirloom wedding ring she wore on a thin chain around her neck and knew that her mother actually was there, and that in a way she always would be.
Lauren Parry, her maid of honor, and Margaret Rook gasped at her beauty, declared her stunning, fussed with her hair, which was up, accentuating her elegant ballet dancer’s neck, and assured her that the scar did not show at all. Time heals, and four months had done Nature’s work. Nonetheless, she asked Lauren to brush on a bit more powder. Just in case.
Heat’s only worry was Rook. He had been in Los Angeles pitching the book he had sold based on his magazine exposé—For Whom the Whistle Blows—to movie studios, and was supposed to have returned the day before. But some welcome thunderstorms had rolled through, breaking New York’s heat wave, but also causing the cancellation of his flight. His plane had finally arrived that morning at JFK, and the Hitch! he had hitched to the Hamptons had caught fire in Shinnecock Hills. Detectives Rhymer and Feller had sped off an hour before using sirens and a gumball to retrieve him, but there was no sign of the groom yet.
Nikki parted the drapes on the beach side of the suite to make sure everything was ready. The day was simply spectacular. That storm had broken the oppressive humidity, and Saturday in Bridgehampton felt more like May than August. The guests seemed relaxed enough, most of them already seated in the rows of white folding chairs facing the gazebo where the lawn met the white sand and the blue Atlantic beyond.