Interference

by Danielle Girard

  “Thank you,” A Bàh told Sabrina. “Black would be great for me. Xue likes a little cream. Let me give you some money.”

  “I’ve got it, Mr. Ling. See you all in a little bit.” She smiled at Mei and left.

  Mei’s parents stepped away from the bed as a nurse entered to take her blood pressure and temperature. “You’re looking good. The doctor will be in shortly.”

  Mei’s mother pressed her to drink more, then set the cup on the bedside table. “She seems very nice,” her mother said, straightening the covers around her. “Sabrina, I mean.”

  Her father shifted on his feet.

  “It’s okay,” Mei told them, trying to shift in the bed without pain. “This is a lot to get used to.”

  Mei looked at her father’s pained face. “I’m sorry, A Bàh.”

  “For what are you sorry?”

  “For this. For not telling you.” Tears slid down her cheeks. “For not wanting to be married to Andy. For being what I am.”

  “No,” her mother said. “You don’t have to be sorry.”

  But it was her father Mei watched. He took her hand and clasped it between his own. “Zhu zhu, one happiness scatters a thousand sorrows.”

  Mei started to cry in earnest.

  “Oh, A Bàh, enough,” her mother scolded. “This is how your father talks—in riddles.” Her mother touched her face. “Mei, please don’t cry.”

  When she didn’t stop, her mother took a tissue from the box beside the table and dabbed it across Mei’s cheeks. Mei didn’t try to stop the tears. Maybe it would be okay. They were here. “Your father is saying that your happiness matters most,” her mother repeated.

  Mei nodded. “Do you believe that, A Bàh? About happiness?”

  “Of course I do,” he responded. “I am not a hypocrite. You are my daughter. If this is what makes you happy, I am happy, too.” Her father leaned over and kissed her forehead.

  “Thank you, A Bàh,” Mei whispered. She might have slept a little, waking when Sabrina returned with coffee. “The nurse promised apple juice, Mei. Should be here any minute.”

  Her parents took the coffees from Sabrina. Mei’s mother came back to the bed and whispered. “We will go and leave our things at Ayi’s then come back.”

  “Okay, A Mā. I’ll see you later.”

  Her mother started to walk away but paused a moment, watching her father talking with Sabrina. When she turned back, she spoke loud enough for all to hear her. “It’s nice that she’s Chinese,” she said.

  “A Mā.,” Mei said. “Go. Please, go.”

  Her mother laughed and her father made a guttural noise, his own version of amusement. Pausing at her side, A Mā touched her forehead to Mei’s. “We are okay, Mei. You don’t need to push us away now. We can understand.”

  Mei nodded.

  Her mother kissed her then joined her father in the hall.

  When they were gone, Mei looked at Sabrina. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be. Your parents are a lot like mine. Maybe they can tell my parents I’m gay.”

  “Oh, Sabrina. You haven’t told them?”

  She shook her head, horrified at the thought. “God, no. I’m an only child. They’ll die.”

  Mei laughed and something stabbed in her side, melting the laugh into a painful cough. “Here I thought I was the only one.”

  “Seems like they took it pretty well.”

  “It does,” Mei admitted. “We’ll see.”

  Sabrina sat on the edge of the bed. Her expression softened. Gone was the brave face, she looked scared. Mei felt her own fear rise up.

  “You called me from the apartment,” Sabrina told her.

  Mei pushed away the memory of her terror. “I was trying to call someone.”

  “It went to my voicemail,” Sabrina said like an apology. “I didn’t even hear it until you were already here.”

  “Sorry.”

  Sabrina took Mei’s hand. “God, no. Don’t you be. I’m sorry.” Her eyes welled up. “I was really scared.” She blinked hard and swiped a hand across her eyes. “I heard Sophie’s voice. She was so angry. I thought—”

  Mei squeezed her hand. “I’m okay.”

  “I’m so glad. So so glad.”

  Mei watched her.

  “I don’t want to lose you, Mei.”

  She tried to smile. “I’m here.”

  Sabrina let out a sigh. “I haven’t dated someone in a really long time.”

  Mei smiled for real that time. “Me, neither.” She thought about Andy. That her parents hadn’t mentioned him.

  “But I’d really like to spend time with you.”

  Mei focused on Sabrina. “I’d really like that.”

  Sabrina leaned over and kissed Mei on the cheek then softly on the lips. “Call me after your folks head home.”

  Mei laughed. “How about if I call you when I get out of here and you can come have dinner with Ayi and my parents?”

  Sabrina smiled. “I’d love that.”

  They sat together for some time before the door opened and Hailey poked her head in. Sabrina squeezed Mei’s hand. “I’ll talk to you soon, then.”

  “Thanks,” Mei said and watched her go. She tried to imagine them together, some day in the future. She couldn’t. Not that it seemed like it wouldn’t work out. There were just too many things to take care of first. The realization didn’t make her sad or even uncomfortable. She had time. One thing she had now was time.

  Hailey came in, followed by Ryaan. Hailey set a box of See’s candy on the table. Ryaan carried a bouquet of irises. “Flowers or chocolate. Couldn’t decide, so we brought both.”

  Mei tried to sit up in bed, taking shallow breaths as she adjusted herself upright.

  “How are you feeling?” Hailey asked.

  “Ready for a vacation,” Mei said.

  “Well, after Lanier and Findlay’s grand screwup with Aaron Pollack, I’ll bet you can get a nice, long, paid one,” Hailey told her.

  “So Aaron wasn’t involved in Oyster Point at all?”

  Ryaan shook her head. “We don’t even know if Josephine—Sophie—knew what he was up to.”

  “Hard to imagine she just got lucky,” Mei said. She wouldn’t be surprised if Sophie had planned Aaron’s part in it, too.

  “We might never know,” Hailey said.

  Mei nodded. “I’m okay with that.”

  “You feel at peace about Sophie?” Hailey asked, pulling a chair up to the bed.

  “You mean about going out with her or watching her fall out a window?”

  Hailey smiled. “Thatta girl.”

  Mei sobered at the image of Sophie landing. “She didn’t survive the fall.”

  “No,” Hailey said.

  “What about the guns?”

  Hailey looked at Ryaan. “Actually, we found eleven in the Tenderloin. Bunch of kids shooting up a vacant bar. Got the AKs back and a couple other high-capacity.”

  “Was anyone hurt?”

  Ryaan smiled. “Miraculously, no.”

  “So all the guns are accounted for.”

  Ryaan shook her head. “Still seven babies out there.”

  Mei didn’t know what to say to that. Ryaan excused herself to get an extra water pitcher from the nurse’s station to use for the flowers. Hailey filled Mei’s water glass and passed it over to her. “She takes it pretty hard.”

  Mei nodded. “Is there anyone to hold accountable for the distribution of the guns? With Sophie gone, I mean?”

  “Sophie pretty much disposed of everyone involved,” Hailey said. “There was one other suspect—kid named Dwayne Henderson—but it looks like maybe Sophie tried to hook him and he didn’t bite.”

  “Smart kid. Wish I’d seen through her bullshit.”

  “We all do,” Hailey ag
reed.

  Mei took a couple of sips of water before the pain made it uncomfortable. She lay back and breathed through it.

  “The pain bad?”

  Mei nodded.

  Hailey handed her a small white remote control. “Push this button. It’ll deliver morphine through your IV.”

  “Every time I push?”

  Hailey shook her head. “It’s on a timer so you can’t overdose.”

  Mei pressed the white button and closed her eyes until she heard the door open. Ryaan returned with the flowers in a pink plastic pitcher.

  “Those are really gorgeous. Thanks again,” Mei told her.

  “Did Hailey ask about your plans?” Ryaan asked.

  Hailey shook her head.

  “What plans?”

  “We weren’t sure whether you’re planning on heading back to Chicago.”

  “I don’t know. Computer forensics was never this dangerous at the FBI,” she said, trying to make a joke, but it wasn’t funny. She had killed someone. Someone who was trying to kill her, but someone all the same. A woman she had trusted and thought of as a friend. A smart woman. Maybe even someone she could have helped. “I’m staying,” she said finally.

  “Good,” Ryaan told her.

  When had Sophie walled herself off and begun the race toward her own destruction? Mei couldn’t reconcile the woman she’d come to know with the one who had tried to kill her.

  “I still don’t understand why she did it. Seems like there were better ways to help her father.”

  “We spoke to her father’s sister this morning,” Hailey said.

  Ryaan brought a chair up to the bed and sat. “It’s sad,” Ryaan said. “Her aunt said Sophie was the only person Joe communicated with after the stroke. She was his translator, his counselor. She did everything for him. Sophie’s mother, Barbara, left Joe about three months after it happened. She tried to take Sophie with her, but Sophie refused to leave her father. For a few months, Sophie tried to take care of him herself, but eventually, child services put her back with her mother. The lawsuit took almost two years to resolve. It devastated the family’s finances. Her mother had some issues of her own. Alcoholism, the aunt thought, and maybe substance abuse. The records are long gone now.”

  “We suspect some abusive boyfriends,” Hailey added. “It’s possible something happened with Sophie, but we’ll never know for sure.”

  “She spent a lot of years waiting for the right time to destroy Mendelcom,” Ryaan said.

  “She did. And she found someone who could write that code and hack into the system to overwrite those data files,” Mei said. “Sophie said Sam had even figured out a way to corrupt Mendelcom’s old backups. That’s not everyday stuff.”

  “That and she waited for Mendelcom to release the results on Prostura,” Ryaan added.

  Mei shivered and pulled the covers up around her arms. She stifled a yawn.

  “You should get some rest,” Ryaan told her.

  “We’ll have a drink when you get out of here,” Hailey promised.

  Mei nodded, knowing that it would be no time at all before they were swept into another case, some other crisis. “Thanks for coming by.”

  When the door clicked closed, Mei shut her eyes and reveled in the silence. She could smell the floral scent of Sabrina’s perfume, or maybe it was the flowers. When she was completely still, the pain under her ribs subsided. The fog of the pain killers was lowering. She would rest until her parents came back.

  Ayi would show up, too. She expected to see Lanier and Findlay, Blake and Teddy. There would be face to save and blame to assign. Some of it might come her way, and she would be forced to fight. But for these few minutes, she was safe. She was alive.

  Her parents knew who she was now. They accepted her. Eventually her sisters would find out. They would either deal as her parents had or not, but it didn’t matter to Mei. She knew who she was. A Bàh had quoted Sun Tzu, The Art of War. If you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles.

  Mei did know herself, and her enemies were becoming clearer. A hundred battles? Maybe. Maybe not. Either way she had survived the first.

  There was still one person left. She lifted her phone off the bedside table, unlocked the cracked screen, and dialed her husband’s cell phone number in Chicago.

  For the first time in weeks, she hoped he’d answer.

  “Mei,” came his voice.

  Her heart broke a little at the sound. “Hi.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes and no,” she said honestly. “I’m in the hospital but I’m okay. It’s a long story.”

  She remembered the times when he would have told her he had all the time in the world. They would have spent hours on the phone, talking. “I’m going to fly home as soon as I can.”

  He took a quick breath. “But not to stay,” he said after a beat.

  “No,” she told him. “Not to stay.”

  She reclined the bed and closed her eyes, focusing on the meditative sound of the processors and gave her husband the time he needed.

  “Oh, Mei…” She could hear his tears.

  Hers came, too. Silently. Her tears, the soft sounds of her husband. Saying good-bye to the greatest love of her life. So far. Around her, the sounds of the machines washed her with warmth. She was strong. Getting stronger.

  When the next battle came, she would be ready.

  Preview: Everything To Lose

  Rookie Club Book 5

  Chapter 1

  It was the way he held her hand. His long fingers wrapped around her hand and held firm like he was saving her. His skin was warm and dry. Boys her age never had dry hands. He thought about what she’d said before answering, considered exactly what she was asking. He was calm, sometimes so serious. A grown up. She studied him standing in the doorway.

  It was the way he laughed. Not some hysterical cackle like guys at school, and not the I’m-too-cool-to-laugh that others put on. Though serious, he laughed softly, more with his eyes than his mouth.

  Such a silly, schoolgirl crush thing to say, but she swore his eyes changed colors. They could be the exact color of toffee or they could deepen to the shade of black coffee. They could change in an instant. “On a dime,” as her father liked to say when he was lecturing her about how lucky she was and how much she had been given, and how easily it could all go away if she made one wrong decision.

  It was also that she knew he was the wrong decision, at least to everyone but her. He was not one of the ones she was supposed to choose. Not one of the boys she’d always known, whose parents knew her parents, whose mothers were on the opera board with hers and only worked outside the home to raise money for the “underprivileged.” Not one of the boys in designer jeans and shirts that were washed by someone who worked for them. In fact, not like most of the boys at City Academy.

  He had lived on the street. He had been given nothing. His father had been in jail. Yet he was the one who asked the tough questions. What would she do? How would she be someone who counted? Challenging her to move beyond her comfort zone. And he talked about the chances of survival for someone like him, the slimmer chances of not repeating the patterns set by his father.

  It was the way he stood at the door, giving her plenty of time to speak up, to say she didn’t want to, that it was too much. They could go back to the way they’d been. To talking and holding hands if she wanted. But she didn’t. As he closed the door, she scanned the mattress that lay on the floor. Covered in faded green sheets, a gray comforter. A single pillow lay at the top, propped against the bare white wall. One pillow while her bed was a mountain of them. Why did anyone need all those pillows?

  They had never come here before. This had been her request, but he’d tidied up for her. Although she didn’t know if he’d moved things elsewhere or if this w
as everything he had. The room was almost bare—no dresser and no closet. His clothes were stacked in three piles along one wall, two pairs of shoes lined neatly alongside. Books were stacked on the small table he used as a desk. Candles provided soft light, giving the room the smallest bit of ambience. The air smelled of ocean and coconut.

  “We don’t have to do this,” he said again when they reached the mattress.

  It was that he didn’t apologize for the room or try to play off the way he lived. He was the first person she’d ever known who felt truly real.

  She took his hand, felt the tremor of energy as they touched. “I want to.”

  He waited a beat, watching her, scanning her face.

  “Really.”

  Only then did he reach up to unzip her jacket, moving slowly, reassuring her that he would stop any time, for any reason. But she didn’t. She wanted this. They both did. She was awkward. He was kind and careful.

  It was that he didn’t tell her he loved her just because they’d had sex. Afterwards, he lay beside her, running his finger along the profile of her hip. She’d thought his naked form would make her uncomfortable, but instead, she felt calm.

  She wasn’t a stupid high school girl at City Academy. She wasn’t Gavin and Sondra Borden’s daughter. She was just Charlotte. Charlotte naked in bed with a man.

  It was how he was afterwards. As he convinced her that she had to go home before her parents started worrying. She’d already texted to say she was staying late to work on a school project. He wasn’t into rebellion. He didn’t need to make a point. Better to play by her parents’ rules, he said, than to risk not being able to see her again. It was that he wanted to see her again.

  He blew out the candles and reached for the door. He grabbed his baseball mitt off the floor and tucked the ball deep into its pocket.

  “You going to play some ball?”

  “Thought I might toss it around a little. It’ll distract me when you’re gone.” He took her hand and together, they crossed through the darkened main room. The smell of burnt food lingered along with something like sour milk. He didn’t live alone. Where were the others? The candles had been meant to mask the smell and the mixture was like something rotting on a beach. Anywhere else, she might have felt slightly sick.