The dark green Maybach came up the drive at 7:20. It had a new hood. The old one, with its shallow dent and the faint crescent where a pair of reading glasses had been, hung on the wall of the reception area at Ashby Reyes Design, on East Cary Street, mounted on a steel frame Lucía Reyes had designed, beside a framed print of Anjali Rao's false-color scan and a small brass plate that said only: A building remembers. So do we. People who came into the office for meetings stopped in front of it. Some of them asked about it, and some of them already knew.
Julian got out of the driver's side himself. His left shoulder had healed crooked; it sat a half-inch lower than his right, and always would. He walked around the car and opened the rear door, and Corinne got out, and then Naomi, holding a squirming child in a dress the color of the hotel's glass.
Lena Ashby-Grant had been walking for nine days. She took four steps across the crowned paving of the porte-cochère, toward the rainwater drain at the edge, before her mother scooped her up.
From the passenger side, in a rented tuxedo that fit him almost perfectly, Teodoro Barrientos stepped out onto the brick. He had a VCU student ID in his wallet, and a green card in an envelope at home he still took out sometimes just to look at, and a sketchbook in his jacket pocket. Tonight the Preservation Foundation was presenting its annual award for craftsmanship to a plasterer from Lynchburg, eighty-three years old, the last man in Virginia who still did it by hand, and Teo had been asked to say a few words about him, because he had spent the summer as the old man's apprentice, recasting the last eleven of the Marlowe's missing rosettes.
Marisol held out her hand for the key. Julian looked at it, then at Teo.
"You want to park it?" he said. "For old times."
Teo laughed, and shook his head, and handed his own claim ticket across the podium, the first one he had ever been given by that stand instead of the other way around. Marisol tore it with a flourish. The number on it was fourteen.
"I'll take good care of it," she said.
"I know you will," Teo said.
Then the five of them went in together under the amber glass, through the brass doors, into the ballroom where four hundred people were already tipping their heads back to look at the ceiling, and somewhere up there, among the gold coffers, eleven new rosettes looked back down at them, indistinguishable from the old ones, as if they had been there all along.