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said. Then a thought occurred to me. “Hey, wait, if you talked to his lawyers and got the key, why didn't you just ask them to ask him where it is?”
    A faint stain of color shone on her cheeks for a moment. Anton had put his cup down and was watching her intently. She looked from him to me and back again, then sighed. “I thought, if he really is innocent, maybe he hid a clue in the vase.”
    “A clue?”
    She nodded.
    “In the broken vase?”
    She nodded again, though this time she looked uncertain.
    “A clue left behind when he was literally going to kill himself rather than expose his pseudo-brother's betrayal? Left in the hopes that someone would look in a bunch of broken vase bits and find a stack of papers a mile high proving the innocence of a dead guy?”
    Felicia stomped her foot. “It could happen! And besides, it doesn't have to be paper. He could have hidden it on a disk or something.”
    “In the broken vase?”
    “Or in the pile of broken vase bits, yes,” she snapped. “So I didn't ask the lawyers directly about it. I just said you needed something from his house. They cleared it with him, and I'm assuming he told them it was fine to give you a key. So here it is.”
    I stared at the key in my hand.
    “Look,” she said after a moment. “You don't have to. But you are really broken up over this crazy guy. Go find that vase and get some closure.”
    Sometimes I really do have the best friend, and I don't deserve her.
    “I'll call for a car,” Anton said. “You'll avoid the paparazzi that way.” I looked at him, but he was staring at Felicia. “My dear,” he continued before I was able to say thank you, “I think we should be seen in the vicinity of Mr. Ward's house doing something terribly illicit. Surely the dogs of the press are watching Mr. Ward's house as well.”
    “Oh,” Felicia said, “I didn't think of that.” Then the blush on her face grew deeper. “What should I wear?”
    I took that cue to beat a hasty retreat upstairs to get ready.
    ––––––––
    Freshly showered, dressed in my best giving-up-on-life clothes from back when I was just a struggling artist, and preoccupied with the sick feeling in my gut, I sat a block from Malcolm's house in the back of the car Anton had called for me.
    I chewed my lip and stared at the phone in my hand, waiting impatiently for the text from Felicia to let me know she was about to be caught on camera by whatever paparazzi had been lying in wait for me. I just hoped she wouldn't be caught up in the moment and forget. Then again, maybe that would be for the best. What if the vase wasn't there? What if I found it and... then what? Who cared? Just a reminder of a sweet, dreamlike time I could never return to. Why would I want it?
    But I did want it. I wanted to see it, touch it. Maybe then I could figure out why Malcolm thought it was so important that his last words to me were his insistence that I have it.
    I couldn't quite decide how to feel about things, and it was making me nervous. I always know how to feel about things. Until Malcolm came along, I suppose. He set me off balance, made me speechless, shocked me with his utter candor.
    I hadn't heard his voice in days. Almost a week? Yes, four days, maybe five. I hadn't called his cell phone in the hopes of hearing it, because that was pathetic and also I didn't want to get pegged by the feds again. I wished I had, though, and now, sitting in the back seat of a fine car, hidden from the world by the dark windows, a silent, discreet driver studiously ignoring me, the sudden temptation to call him was almost overwhelming.
    Then the phone buzzed in my hand, and a text from Felicia flashed across my screen.
    “SKJii SDOI(*&h ddd Kanye i”
    Yeah. She was kind of caught in the moment. Good thing the content didn't matter.
    “I'm out,” I told the driver, unnecessarily. “I should be back in, like... an hour? Tops?”
    The driver, whose name was Jeff, though I didn't want to use it