BOUND: Together

by Cynthia Dane

  More than once I spent an extra minute in her office, leaning against the antique colonial desk and holding that frame in my hands. Knowing the ultimate truth of what happened to her as a child almost broke my heart more than knowing she wasn’t there, nor was she coming back soon. If ever.

  I had never truly been depressed before. I had been angry. Upset. Sad. But depression was a virus I had managed to avoid thanks to my disposition and refusal to offer my heart and soul to anyone else. The Natalie of early 2017 was not the same one moping around Mann-Garrett in October. It didn’t matter how many Halloween decorations went up or how the other offices insisted I come to the costume party the Friday before Halloween. Someone suggested I would make an excellent Catwoman, and that was the only time I focused all of my ire toward a total stranger since Erica went away.

  Thanks to this depression – and my lack of understanding toward it – I was slow to care about anything but Erica’s well-being. I didn’t even care about Jimmy and Aiden, who still came to the office and pretended nothing had ever happened.

  Let’s back up to that first Monday morning, because that was one of the rare moments I managed to focus on my ultimate task.

  Jimmy was already at the receptionist’s desk clearing messages while intermittently painting her nails a frosty blue to match her eyeshadow. I approached, ready to demand – in Mandarin – that she further explain herself after Saturday night.

  “Morning,” she said with her usual manner. “There are no messages for you. Just a memo I left on your desk.”

  She never looked at me. In fact, she acted like I was a nuisance until I finally excused myself from her presence.

  In the following days, she never once let on that she was a member of my father’s security team or had held a gun to my head in the back of her car. She never mentioned my aunt, and she sure as hell didn’t respond to me the few times I spoke Mandarin in her direction.

  No wonder my father had hired her. She was good. Even I had never guessed that there was anything more to Ji-min Cho than blue make-up and smoke breaks. I sure as fuck never guessed that she had been born in Taipei and her whole story about living in her mother’s native country of South Korea was a complete fabrication. If I had never spoken to her again, I may have wondered if she were merely passing as Korean instead of actually being Korean.

  I didn’t know what to believe anymore, and I was a woman who held fast to her beliefs!

  My mother remained convinced that I was going to marry Eric Mann and become the biggest Asian billionaire wife since Mrs. Zuckerberg. She was already planning my wedding, and she wasn’t subtle about it. I often came home to stacks of bridal magazines and travel brochures that highlighted exotic destinations and wintery wonderlands. More than once she insinuated that I was destined to get married on a beach in Hawaii with a daisy-chain in my hair. The fantasy brought tears to her eyes, and I had to remind myself that she was crying for her good fortune and not for her daughter’s.

  Every time I saw my mother act like this, I was reminded of my father. Being reminded of father reminded me of Aunt Melanie.

  I called her on my lunch break Wednesday. I wanted some answers.

  “A-koo,” I said the moment she picked up, “don’t hold back on me.”

  “Natalie! It’s so good of you to call!” she babbled in Mandarin. “I was thinking about you at the supermarket! Remember how you used to love kiwis sooooo much? I bought a whole bunch of them today and thought about making those pastries you used to ask for all the time. Do you think American customs would let me send them to you? I know how ridiculous things have gotten there. Last time I tried to go to the States, I thought they were going to deport me in a cargo hold!”

  Did she mean this past weekend? “You’re not doing this. Seriously. You’re going to play the part of my dumb aunt?”

  “Aiya, how can you talk to your aunt like that? You American children have no manners. If you lived here in Taiwan, I could smack that smartness out of your mouth.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous! I need to talk to you about Erica!”

  “Who’s Erica?”

  This was really happening, right? It was just like calling my aunt on any day before Saturday happened. Maybe I had hallucinated it. Maybe I had hallucinated everything between leaving Mann Manor and going home. That’s right. I happened to catch Jimmy’s Uber and she drove me home. I must have fallen asleep in the back of her car and had that stupid nightmare.

  “No, don’t tell me,” my aunt continued. “I hear these phone lines aren’t so secure, you know? Both American and Chinese governments want to listen to all Chinese conversations! It’s because of the communists! If you want to talk about your little friend, you should hang on a bit. And check your purse. I think you might have some tissues in there busting up your signal!”

  “What?”

  “Bye bye!”

  She hung up. Frustrated, I tossed my phone into my purse and screamed into its depths. Seriously, what the fuck!

  “Check your purse!”

  Yes, there were tissues in my purse. What woman doesn’t carry around a stash of tissues for those mishaps blindsiding us every day? I highly doubted my tissues had anything to do with…

  As soon as I picked up a gob of them in my fist, I discovered something that really should not have been in the bottom of my bag.

  A pre-paid burner phone. It was ringing.

  “Hello?”

  I knew who it was. I knew that someone on my aunt’s security team had placed this burner phone into my bag the other night. Because of course that shit had been real. Of course Jimmy Cho had kidnapped me and taken me to my aunt’s whacked-out party.

  Of course!

  “It’s this sort of thing that gives your aunt heart attacks. You have no idea how many I’ve had since you were a little girl.”

  I leaned back against the sink. At least this time my aunt had cut the act. The woman speaking to me was the same one scaring the piss out of me in some abandoned warehouse she either “borrowed” from one of my father’s work associates or flat-out invaded for her own purposes. In the years since, I’ve learned it made little difference to my aunt when it came to doing business in foreign countries.

  “How long have you been stalking me for?”

  “What do you think all my phone calls have been about over the years? Even if your father hadn’t asked me to keep an eye on you whenever I could, I still would have! I’m your aunt. It’s my responsibility to make sure you’re safe. Especially someone as ambitious as you! Lord, you really are your father’s daughter.”

  “My father knows you’re doing stuff like this?”

  “It’s what he pays his baby sister to do. Well, he doesn’t pay me directly. You know how shameful that looks. I technically work for a security company he founded here in Taiwan.”

  “You always told me that you were a receptionist.”

  “I fill in at the office sometimes.”

  “Anyway,” I could ask more questions about her double life at a later date. “You must know why I was calling you.”

  “Obviously. You want to know where your boss is and how to contact him.”

  Either my aunt didn’t understand the full scope of Erica’s predicament, or she was still being cautious even on a secure line. “In a manner of speaking.”

  “You think I’ve been keeping up with them?”

  “I know you have. If you’re half as good as you’re saying you are, then I have no reason to believe that you’re not stalking Eric to the best of your abilities. You probably have someone watching him from afar in Singapore right now. Possibly positioned in a unit next door or across the street?” That’s what Sherman would have done.

  “So he told you that he was going to Singapore?”

  “It’s the only information I have. She told me to come to work the following Monday, but beyond that, I’ve had no communications. Jimmy is playing dumb.”

  “Of course she is! Why would she acknowledge anythin
g else? Her job is to be a receptionist and report back to me. You think I would’ve assigned her that task if I didn’t think she could act the part so well? That girl used to perform in the Taipei theatre circuit before she was kicked out for starting fights!”

  “This is ridiculous. This is all so ridiculous.”

  “I know, I know. This is a lot for you to take in. This wasn’t something I had ever expected you to know about me. It was strictly need to know.”

  “And I needed to know.”

  “Ultimately?” My aunt sighed. “Yes. Once I realized that you hadn’t only taken a job at Mann-Garrett, but that you were probably involved with the biggest scandal walking around your part of America…”

  “Did Jimmy tell you that?”

  “I told you, dear, she reported everything to me. I put things together.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “Well, I knew it would be imperative for me to intervene more. The opportunity arose this weekend. Quite good timing, wasn’t it? Things have gotten dirty real quick in your corner of the world. I was afraid if I didn’t intervene and reveal myself, you would end up in bigger trouble. I also needed you to know that you could contact me about that if you needed any help at all. Now. What can I help you with, Natalie?”

  I released another silent scream into the bottom of my bag. When I had some semblance of composure again, I stood up and replied, “I need to find Erica. I need to know that she’s okay. I need to get a message to her… what else do you want from me? Do you know where she is – exactly – or not?”

  My aunt hesitated, which told me everything I needed to know. “Yes. I know where he is staying and who is with him. He’s holed up tight and barely stepping out in the sunlight. His team has hired local Singaporean security to do their errand-running on their behalf. They’re not taking any chances.”

  “But you know where she is…”

  “I’m not going to take you to him. That would be bad for the both of us.”

  “Can you at least get a message to him?”

  “Maybe. Depends on the severity of this message.” Before I could spill my guts to my aunt, she continued, “If you want to say I love yous, then no, I’m not going to risk our own cover to do that. If you have some incredibly important information to tell him, then I’ll see what I can do. But it has to be life or death at this point. If we play our hand too soon, we expose not only ourselves to his security team, but the Singaporeans too. I don’t have to tell you how precarious that would be for your father.”

  She kinda did, actually. After all, I knew nothing about my father.

  “I know that you’re confused and don’t know when you’ll get to see him again. But you have to trust me. He’s hiding for a reason. Don’t know if you’ve seen the press, but they’ve latched onto your Cinderella tale.”

  I had seen it. One of the first things I discovered Sunday morning was that my hot date with Erica was all over social media. Fuzzy camera phone photos from other diners at the restaurant and professional pap shots of us getting out of the Lambo had everyone atwitter. We knew it would happen. That was part of the thrill that night.

  The first part of the week was everyone asking if we were the next It! couple, and nosy assholes trying to dig up who I was. HR had a heart attack when it got back that the woman Eric was with was me. The head of HR tried to get me to see her side of the mess. It didn’t matter that I knew Eric was working something out with her. With him unable to back me up, I was subjected to dissociating and agreeing to not say a word to the press. I didn’t want to anyway.

  But after two weeks went by, the public forgot about us. Then, on a slow news day, we were brought out of the dungeon and covered a few society pages with speculations that I had been dumped and Eric had moved on to "the Caribbean” to be alone. I didn’t doubt those nuggets were produced by Erica’s PR squad to throw everyone off her trail. Meanwhile, photos of me coming in and out of the office took up precious article space on blogs. Maybe Eric had broken up with me, but I was still going to work like a dutiful intern. Nobody knew what to do with that, and they eventually lost interest.

  My aunt was probably thrilled that the press no longer cared about me. That meant fewer resources she had to spare for my security while she kept tabs on my father and my girlfriend in two separate countries. Although I still didn’t know what she meant by the opportunity finally presenting itself not so long ago…

  “You can count on me to act if I fear that Eric might be in danger,” my aunt interrupted my thoughts. “If you don’t hear from me, it’s probably good news. If you want my opinion, I’m sure he’s laying low because he doesn’t want to risk any attention.”

  Something still didn’t sit right with me. If it were only a matter of staying out of the limelight, then Erica could, I dunno, call me. She could get a letter to me. She could do anything but keep herself sequestered in an air-tight penthouse in Singapore. For her to go to this extreme suggested that something else was afoot. Something even I didn’t know about yet.

  This time I was the one to hang up on my aunt. I shoved the phone into the bottom of the bag where it belonged. I didn’t even care that my break was over. Who was going to yell at me? Erica? Brooke? Nobody was there to give a shit. God knew Aiden took way more breaks than I did. Sometimes Jimmy did too.

  Speak of the devil…

  The door to the women’s room swung open. Jimmy only expressed mild surprise when she bumped into me by the sinks. One of her eyes lingered on me as she sauntered toward a stall.

  “Fuck off,” I said.

  She glanced at me over her shoulder. “What crawled up your ass and died? It stinks.”

  I don’t want to repeat here what I called her in Mandarin. The point was, even though she would feign otherwise, she knew damn well what I said. Not all the pro-training in the Taipei theatre circuit could hide the disgust on her face as she slammed the stall door behind her. I didn’t stick around to find out how much she stank.

  The only one waiting for me in the office was Aiden. A man I had yet to figure out. I couldn’t even figure out what his relationship was to Janelle anymore, or what he hoped to gain from information she delivered once a week. Sometimes I forgot about him entirely. After finding out that the hacks were coming from my aunt, I stopped caring.

  I wanted one word from Erica. One word that she was all right and loved me.

  If I could hear that, I could wait however long necessary.

  Chapter 50

  NATALIE

  A few days later, I finally figured out what was wrong with me.

  To simply call what I had “depression” doesn’t work. That wasn’t to say I wasn’t depressed on some level. Clearly, I was, and it would have only grown worse had I not had woken up in the middle of the night with an epiphany.

  You know what my problem was? I didn’t have something productive to do.

  All my life, I had goals. Abstract thoughts and desires that kept me going every single day, whether I was exhausted or had all the time in the world. It didn’t matter if my mother made my life hell or if the kids at school called me names if I had a goal to work toward, the goal that would get me away from them and living a great life on my own.

  When I was a kid, that goal was getting good grades and joining clubs that could teach me new skills. In college, that meant still working my ass of so I could get into the best grad school that would take me.

  In grad school, that meant working until I was hired at one of the most coveted companies in America.

  Mann-Garrett was my official ticket to the rest of my life and achieving that ultimate goal I had set for myself in middle school. If I busted ass at this internship, I would earn an official position in the company. The more praise and responsibilities heaped onto me, the more I was assured that I would have a sweet gig like Brooke’s by this time next year. Work my way up in the company. Become a board member. Become vice president. Always strive for the next step up until I finally felt that I had a
chieved promotional nirvana. As if I ever could.

  But now? I had no direction. No goals. My life comprised of going to work, doing the bare minimum, and going home to sulk and feel sorry for myself. That wasn’t me. That wasn’t the way Natalie Chen functioned. It was one thing to take a well-deserved day off so I could recharge and be back in the game the next day. It was quite another to… die.

  I had to do something. I had to bring purpose back to my life again. I had to be productive, and that office wasn’t going to get me to that level.

  Productive for Erica. That’s what I needed.

  A clear goal. Help Erica. Figure out how to help her live her life (with me, of course) and how we could take down the people threatening to destroy her company for their own self-motivated sakes.

  Shit, they thought that they were self-motivated? They never fucking met me!

  First things were first. What was the closest source of ire I could find, let alone one lurking in the confines of Mann-Garrett?

  Go ahead.

  Guess.

  I marched into the office one fine Wednesday morning in my freshly laundered clothes and with my game fact intact. It was the same look I marched in with that early September morning when I started my internship. Because Natalie was back.

  I started by slamming my hands on Jimmy’s desk and getting her attention with a start.

  “Hey, you.” I only lowered my voice so the coworker following me couldn’t overhear our conversation that quickly turned to Mandarin. “I need you to back my ass up later. Let my aunt know that I’m about to get into trouble.”

  Jimmy scoffed. “Why do you keep doing that? I don’t speak Chinese!” She pulled a Post-It off the stack and slammed a pen down. “You’re the reason everyone in this office thinks we’re best buddies, you know. As if we could ever be friends.” She wrote something down in Traditional Chinese characters and wrapped my fingers around the Post-It. “Leave me alone. I’ve got work to do.”