“I think I lost something,” Alan said.
They were in the villa’s kitchen, and Holden had two hours of functional clarity left before Doug’s wedding not much margin for whatever this turned out to be.
Phil was upstairs ironing Doug’s shirt with the focus of a man defusing a bomb.
Stu was in the shower, singing badly, which meant he was feeling better.
Doug was on the balcony in sunglasses, looking less like a burn victim and more like a groom.
Holden looked at Alan.
“What did you lose.”
“I don’t know,” Alan said.
“But I remember carrying it. During the night. It was important.”
“Important how.”
“Doug important.”
Holden felt the headache that had been waiting all morning settle behind his eyes.
“When did you have it.”
“I don’t know. That’s the problem.” Alan opened his satchel, rummaged through it.
Pulled out a Snickers bar, a deck of cards, a hotel pen, and what looked like a small flashlight.
“It’s not here. It should be here. Everything goes in the satchel.”
The bride’s gift.
The thought arrived whole and certain and cold.
Tracy had mentioned it on the phone yesterday a small jewelry box, white gold, engraved, Doug’s wedding gift to her.
Holden had seen Doug pack it Thursday night.
He hadn’t seen it since.
“Alan,” Holden said.
“Did you take a white box out of Doug’s bag.”
Alan went very still.
“Maybe.”
“Why.”
“I thought it was important. I thought I should keep it safe.” He looked at Holden with the earnest guilt of a man who’d tried to help and had, instead, made everything worse.
“Did I lose Doug’s thing? The thing for Tracy?”
Holden closed his eyes.
Reconstructed the timeline he’d already built tiger bathroom, chapel ceremony, roof access and pushed.
The night came apart into fragments.
Alan holding something small and white.
Alan climbing into a cab.
Alan
The images stopped.
Six hours.
That was the edge of what he could pull back.
Anything earlier than midnight dissolved into nothing.
He needed more.
“Okay,” Holden said.
“Don’t tell Doug. Don’t tell Phil. Let me handle it.”
“Are you going to do the thing?” Alan asked.
“The thing where you go quiet and then you know stuff?”
“Yeah.”
“Does it hurt?”
Holden looked at him.
Alan was watching with the kind of attention most people didn’t think he was capable of.
“A little,” Holden said.
“You do it anyway.”
“Yeah.”
Alan nodded slowly.
Holden had the odd sense of being seen actually seen for the first time by someone who’d spent the whole trip as a benign disaster.
“I’ll get you aspirin,” Alan said.
“For after.”
Holden sat down at the kitchen table.
Let the villa noise fade Phil’s iron hissing upstairs, Stu’s shower running, the balcony door clicking open as Doug came back inside.
He needed the hour before midnight.
Needed to see where Alan had been, what he’d done with the box, where it had ended up.
Six hours wasn’t enough.
The headache sharpened.
The night stretched backward, frame by frame, each image arriving with the clarity of something remembered instead of reconstructed.
Alan in the cab.
The driver’s face.
The strip mall they’d stopped at a 24-hour convenience store, neon buzzing, Alan wandering inside with the white box in his hand like a talisman.
Alan buying
Buying what.
Holden couldn’t see it.
The image blurred.
He pushed again.
Felt something in his head give, not painfully but inevitably, like a lock turning.
The night opened up.
Twelve hours.
The whole day, front to back, every hour Alan had touched.
Alan at the convenience store, buying gum and leaving the white box on the counter.
The clerk a teenager, bored, putting it in the lost-and-found bin without looking twice.
The box sitting there, white and small and engraved, twenty feet from a rack of lottery tickets.
Holden opened his eyes.
The villa was still there.
Phil was still ironing.
Stu was still singing.
But the clarity the whole-day clarity that had let him see the convenience store, the clerk, the lost-and-found bin was gone.
He felt hollowed out.
Emptied.
The kind of tired that started in the bones and worked outward.
Alan was standing in front of him with a glass of water and two aspirin.
“You did the thing,” Alan said.
“Yeah.”
“Did it work?”
“Yeah.” Holden took the aspirin, swallowed them dry.
“I know where it is.”
“Is it bad?”
“It’s a convenience store on East Tropicana. We can get it back.”
Phil came downstairs, saw Holden’s face.
“You okay?”
“Fine,” Holden said.
He stood.
The room tilted slightly, then settled.
“I need to make a run. Tie up a loose end.”
“You look like you need to lie down.”
“I need to get Doug’s wedding gift back from a 7-Eleven lost-and-found.”
Phil stopped.
“What.”
“Alan took it during the blackout,” Holden said.
“For safekeeping. Left it at a store on Tropicana. I’ll get it back.”
Alan looked at the floor.
“I was trying to help.”
“I know,” Holden said.
He meant it.
Phil looked between them.
“How do you know where it is.”
“I reconstructed it.”
“You reconstructed a whole night.”
“Yeah.”
“Holden,” Phil said.
“That’s not normal. That’s not a lucky guess. That’s”
“I do events logistics,” Holden said.
“You learn to track things.” He picked up his keys.
“I’ll be back in forty minutes. Don’t tell Doug.”
He left before Phil could argue.
The convenience store was exactly where he’d seen it.
“Lost and found,” Holden said.
The kid pointed at a bin under the register without looking up from his phone.
Holden found the white box in thirty seconds.
Checked it.
White gold, engraved, Doug’s gift to Tracy, intact.
He put it in his pocket and left.
Driving back, the exhaustion settled in properly.
His hands felt distant.
The Strip blurred past in its daytime configuration casinos looking tired without the night to dress them up, tourists walking slowly, hungover or determined or both.
He’d pushed past the six-hour window.
Unlocked something.
Twelve hours, maybe more, if he needed it.
A full day’s reconstruction, the whole architecture of a disaster visible from end to end.
The cost was clarity.
He could barely hold the road in focus.
He made it back to the villa on muscle memory.
Parked.
Walked inside.
Phil was waiting in the living room.
Holden handed him the box.
“Doug’s gift. Don’t tell him it was gone.”
Phil opened it.
Checked it.
Closed it.
Looked at Holden.
“How,” Phil said.
“I got lucky.”
“That’s not luck.”
Holden sat down on the couch.
Let the exhaustion pin him there.
“Does it matter?”
Phil was quiet for a long time.
Then he said, “You saved the wedding. Again.”
“The wedding was always going to be fine.”
“No,” Phil said.
“It wasn’t. Not without you.” He put the box in his pocket.
Looked at Holden with something complicated gratitude, unease, the first edge of suspicion.
“I don’t know what you are, man, but I’m glad you’re on our side.”
Holden closed his eyes.
“I’m just a guy who’s good at logistics.”
“Sure,” Phil said.
He didn’t sound like he believed it.
Upstairs, Stu’s shower cut off.
Doug called something from the balcony.
Alan came into the room with a sandwich he’d assembled with architectural precision and handed it to Holden without a word.
Holden took it.
Let the villa’s noise wash over him pack sounds, family sounds, the texture of people who’d decided to keep him.
The gift was recovered.
The wedding would land.
The night was closed.
And somewhere in the gap between six hours and twelve, he’d unlocked something bigger.
He just didn’t know yet what it would cost him.
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TL;DR —
Silver / $6 / 10 ahead
Gold / $9 / 15 ahead
Platinum / $15 / 20 ahead, no weekly wait
That’s it.