"La ami?" he asks.Do you love her?
The study is quiet.
I look at the desk, at the space where the crystal sat before I moved it back to my pocket this morning. I wonder about what love is supposed to feel like and whether what I feel constitutes it.
I answer honestly, "I don't know. I have never been in love so I don't have anything to measure it against."
Renzo waits.
"I thought I was in love with her," I say. "The woman from the car. Two years ago. I spent two years trying to find her, thinking about her, building a whole search around a woman I had seen for less than an hour while I was barely conscious." I pause. "And then Nathalie walked into my meeting room and the woman from the car moved to the back of my mind for the first time and I didn't even notice it happening until it had already happened." I look at Renzo. "I don't know what to call that."
"I know what to call it," Renzo says.
I say nothing.
"What if you found her?" he asks. "The woman from the car. What if she appeared tomorrow, exactly as you imagined her? Would you choose her or Nathalie?"
I open my mouth and I close it again.
I had not let myself consider this. I had kept the two things in separate rooms in my mind, the woman from the garage who had saved my life and Nathalie who ignited my heart. I had not asked myself what would happen if both rooms opened onto the same corridor at the same time.
The woman from the garage had lived with me for two years as a feeling more than a person. She felt like the warmth and capability that I had attached significance to because it had arrived at the moment I needed it most.
Nathalie is not a feeling.
"I can protect her," I tell Renzo. "Whatever Keller does, whatever this costs us, I can protect her from it."
Renzo nods slowly. "I don't doubt that." He pauses. "But you need to think about what you're asking her to lose. Her father. Her family. Her social standing, such as it is. Her name as she knows it." He looks at me with the directness he reserves for the things that matter. "She has already lost so much, Luca. If you're not going to choose her, you need to let her know that now. Before she loses anything else."
He pauses.
Then he says, quietly, "And I think you should tell her about her mother. You owe her that. Whatever else is true, you owe her that."
"Tell me what about my mother?"
We both turn.
She is standing in the doorway in my shirt and a pair of trousers that are several sizes too large, the waistband folded over twice to stay up, the fabric swamping her completely. Her hair is loose and disordered and there are marks on her neck and her eyes are wide, very awake, and fixed on my face.
She heard.
Renzo recovers first. He stands and looks at me and I can see him deciding, and then he says, "I don't think you should hide it anymore." He moves toward the door and Nathalie steps aside to let him pass and then she puts her hand on his arm.
"Don't go," she says. "I want you here."
Renzo looks at her hand on his arm and then at me and he sits back down.
Nathalie turns to me.
"What do you know about my mother's death?" she asks.
Her voice is very steady. I think about the wrong thing to say and I think about all the versions of this conversation I could haveand then I say, "It's late. Go to bed. We can talk tomorrow when you've rested and?—"
"Don't do that." Her voice is still quiet but the calmness has a threat to it. "I want to hear it." She takes one step into the room. "If you have ever felt anything genuine toward me, anything at all, then tell me what you're hiding."
Whatever I say next, I am going to lose her.
And I know, in the same moment, with the same absolute clarity, that she is my choice. That she has been my choice for longer than I have been willing to say. And that it doesn't matter because after I say what I have to say she will never be mine to choose.
