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"It's a scar from a scalpel thrown by your fiancée in front of a bunch of your men and one of ours. It'll be the most interesting thing about you."

"The most interesting thing about me is in the basement." I smile. "Or it was, until you threw a scalpel at me."

Her mouth goes tight at one corner, which is what she does instead of laughing when she doesn't want to give me one.

Her thumb rests just under the wound, holding the skin steady. It stays there a few seconds longer than the job requires.

"Four."

Then she sits back and looks past me at the silver-framed photograph that's stood on one side of the desk for six years.

"Is that your father?"

Seven years. All that work, all the effort to keep her from finding out, even though she'd have done so soon enough. Tomorrow, probably, after the wedding. Just not today.

"Yes."

"He looks well."

"He is well."

"Is he coming tomorrow?"

"He is."

"Good," she says, then turns back to my shoulder and takes the fifth one out.

That's all. She doesn't say anything else about him, which means she doesn't remember him at all. A man in a photograph with a decent color on him, coming to a wedding.

She met him gray and half-dead with a tube in his chest, four days after they'd opened him up twice. That man isn't in that photograph. She saw hundreds of patients that year. How could she remember them all? She has no idea she's the reason he's alive, and she never will if I have anything to do with it, because the day she finds that out is the day she'll look at me differently. And I can't have that.

I sit still and let her finish. My pulse is going in my ear like a hammer on a floorboard.

"Keep it out of the sun, which won't be a problem, since you appear to have been raised in a basement." Snip. "Six. There are swans in a pen by the tennis court."

"There are. They're for the wedding."

"There's a man sitting with them on a lawn chair. He looks like he wants to go home."

"That's Bertrand. He rents out the swans, and he came with them to make sure nothing happens to them tonight. They're insured, so if one of them dies before tomorrow, I lose my deposit and Bertrand loses a great deal more."

She wipes the line down, puts a fresh strip over it and runs her thumb along the edge twice, then she packs her bag without looking at me.

"Eleven tomorrow," she says.

"Eleven."

"Right. I'll see you there."

She's at the door before I'm out of the chair.

"Manon."

She stops. She doesn't turn around the whole way. Just enough.

I have rehearsed entire speeches, working up to this moment, but now I'm standing speechless in my own study holding my shirt in one hand like an idiot.

"Eat something tonight," I say at last.