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  “Sir,” the doctor spoke in soothing tones, "this is a private conversation and I did not accuse the young lady of slitting her wrists.”

  “Different words, same meaning,” grumbled the voice.

  Harsha furrowed her brow. “What do you mean, slit my wrists? I didn’t do this. It was ”

  “You see, Ms. Mooreland,” the doctor interrupted with a voice which seemed louder than necessary, “some people have chemical imbalances that, left untreated, can cause suicidal thoughts.”

  “But I didn’t slit my wrists.”

  The doctor’s expression softened. He dropped his voice almost to a whisper. “Ms. Mooreland, you did slit your wrists.”

  She shifted, too confused and frustrated to be comfortable sitting still. “No. I didn’t ”

  “You slit,” the doctor leaned forward, his smile vanishing as his brows drew together and his muscles tensed, and emphasized each syllable in deep, quiet tones, “your wrists.” He straightened, and his posture and expression returned to normal. “Suicidal thoughts can happen to the best of us. Fortunately, I know of a special, uh, hospital that deals with such things.”

  Harsha pulled in several breaths to quell the anger wriggling along her arms. She wanted to get up and be productive, not sit here listening to a doctor insist on nonsense. He probably mixed up his patients.

  She looked at the bandage swathing her left wrist, understood his confusion, and decided to deal with it later. For now, she needed a fix to help her calm down. “Will you hand me my purse?”

  One corner of the doctor’s lips twitched further upward. He handed her the bag, then cupped one elbow and tapped his lips with the forefinger of his other hand while he watched her.

  Harsha riffled through, noting her wallet nestled in its usual place, safe and sound and available as a reproach to the careless hospital staff, until she found her candy.

  Dr. Green leaned closer. “Flower-flavored candies. How interesting. Acquired taste?”

  “More like an inherited addiction.” She popped a lavender drop into her mouth, inhaled, and let out her breath with slow, deliberate calmness. “Did anyone get the name of the man who brought me in?”

  “Addiction? Any extra ingredients?”

  “What? No.” She held out the tin. “Try one. Or have it analyzed. Whatever. Just please tell me who brought me in and what they told you.”

  “Now, now. You’re upsetting yourself again.”

  “I am not upsetting myself.” You’re upsetting me. She massaged her temples with her right hand. Her left wrist and ankle throbbed in time with the pulsing in her head. She needed to talk to someone competent soon, or she’d start screaming profanities, an activity she felt sure would result in being injected with sedatives, given the behavior of the staff so far.

  “I’ll give you a few minutes alone. The nurse will come in and check on you in a minute. In the meantime, you take a little break.”

  Clamping down her teeth to keep from flinging a vociferous retort at him, she watched the doctor pass through the curtain. As soon as his footsteps receded down the hall, she reached for the hospital phone, ignoring the dizzy spell and the pain shooting through her injuries. I’m not staying here to be treated by idiots . “Get me a discharge nurse. I want this catheter out, and I want to go home, right now.”

  She used her debit card to pay her bill in full, which impressed the person who processed her discharge, and brushed off anyone who tried to advise her against leaving the hospital or traveling so soon. She leaned against the wall and staggered like a drunkard when she walked, but made it to a cab, then the airport, and finally onto a standby flight headed for home.

  Chapter 3

  Harsha forgot how she got there, but she snuggled deep into the covers of her bed to reassure herself of their reality. She inhaled the floral fragrance of her favorite laundry detergent and pressed her head into her pillow. Poking her right hand out, she patted her nightstand until she found the dish of candy she kept there and rifled around to pick a random flavor. Rose. Her favorite. She savored it, and another, and another, to put off rising until she felt ready to face Jason.

  Her dizziness seemed less severe than in the hospital. Wondering if the doctors gave her one of the drugs on her known-reactions list, she wrote herself a note to get her medical records before pulling on a bathrobe. Braced for a scolding, she shuffled down the hall toward the video game noises that indicated Jason’s presence.

  The term “scolding” fell short of the mark by many miles. He even shut down his laptop to yell at her. She couldn’t remember the last time he turned it off. Her stomach knotted with hunger, she decided not to present her defense until after they ate. While he ranted from the couch, she looked through the refrigerator. She found canned whipped cream, freezer waffles, and leftover chunks of pineapple.

  Enough to improvise.

  “Did you hear me?”

  Harsha grabbed the plates she had finished piling with the hodgepodge meal and went back to the living room. “Not over the whipped cream spray. Here.”

  Jason accepted his plate. “I said, ‘you’re already a millionaire. You could retire and enjoy dying.’”

  “Like you?”

  “Yes. Like me. We could go off to some tropical island ”

  “We live on Kauai.”

  “and spend the rest of our days in the sand ”

  “It’s a mile to the beach.”

  “making love to beautiful women; men, in your case.”

  “Neither of us ”

  “And we could sleep in every day.”

  “You can sleep in on your birthday.”

  “If I make it that long."

  Harsha kept her face from showing the hurt his words caused her and feigned exasperation instead, as if his dramatic statement irritated her. “You’ll be twenty-six. Mom made it to thirty-eight.”

  “Yeah, but Ami only made it to twenty-one.”

  Harsha looked at the picture of her older sister. The sharp pain of loss had long since faded to the dull ache of living without a loved one, but Harsha still missed Ami. No one cherished life more than she. Their mother, almost destitute, hadn’t been able to afford doctors for her. Harsha went to dangerous lengths to ensure she and Jason got a better chance at survival.

  “At least tell me that was the last doctor.”

  Harsha turned back to Jason. He gave her his best puppy face and batted his long lashes. Streaks of red marred his large, cocoa-brown eyes, stealing playfulness from the expression. As usual when his caregiver wasn’t around, he wore a pair of shorts and nothing else. His hip bones poked out from the waistband and his ribs stood up against his skin like a freakish relief map of a skeleton. Several new bruises dotted his back and sides.

  “Harsha?”

  A flashback of being strapped to Ashley Rice’s table forced a startled gasp from her mouth. She never wanted to go through anything like that ever again, but she didn’t have much time to save Jason’s life. Or her own. Painful memories of Ami’s and her mother’s last days mingled with the sight of Jason’s current condition.

  A fist of resolve tightened its grip on her heart. She took a deep breath to steady her nerves and shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

  Jason growled and threw his fork onto his plate. It bounced off and landed on the floor. “Are you kidding me? After what you just went through? You’ve been to so many doctors and all they ever say is ‘we don’t know.’”

  Jason rarely let anything rile him up. Hoping to calm him down, Harsha hurried her words. “But ”

  “But what?”

  “You’re so sick.”

  “You think I don’t know that?”

  “No. It’s just ”

  “You’re not going to save me, Harsha, or yourself!”

  She bit her lip to stop the stream of angry words threatening to pour out of her. He’s worried. He doesn’t mean it. He can’t mean it. With slow, controlled movements to hide the shaking of her hands, she set aside her
breakfast tray. “I’m tired. I’m going back to bed.”

  Back in her room, Harsha nestled into her covers, but instead of sleeping, she grabbed her phone and dialed Josh.

  He answered with groggy tones. “Do you know what time it is here?”

  Harsha checked her clock and cringed when she realized he probably went to bed three or four hours ago. “Noon. Sorry.”

  A woman’s voice mumbled a few words to which Josh replied. “A friend. Go back to sleep.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

  “Hang on. I gotta go to the other room.”

  Harsha waited, as if speaking over the phone to him might disturb his guest.

  “Okay. I can talk now. What’s up? Did the payment not go through?”

  Josh, a former coworker and friend who lived in and managed her Las Vegas quadriplex, being a lover of numbers himself, took great care to ensure rent payments reached her on time.

  “Yes. No problems there,” Harsha reassured him. “I was wondering if you would check something for me, though.”

  “Maybe. What needs checking?”

  “I ran into some trouble in Los Angeles.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “The kind that results in excessive bleeding and hospitalization.”

  She heard the slow inhale which meant Josh wanted to do permanent damage to someone.

  She waited until he exhaled before going on. “Will you ask Jefe about it for me? See if he knows anything?”

  “We’ll take care of it.”

  “Thank you, but don’t get yourself killed, okay?” As an afterthought, she added, “And don’t kill anyone, either.”

  He chuckled at her half-joke. “I’ll do my best on the first. No promises on the second. What can you tell me about the guy who came after you?”

  Harsha filled him in on the pertinent details, leaving out the bit about aliens. She asked about the man with ebony skin and hazel eyes, as well, hoping to track him down to thank him.

  Josh promised to make inquiries and hung up with his usual, “Catch you next lifetime,” a phrase he started using after she left Vegas to take the job at Ho’ola and, to her knowledge, reserved for her as a mark of his esteem.

  She put her phone back on her nightstand and settled onto her pillow, happy to know she had a friend to watch her back.

  Jason’s caregiver gave Harsha as much attention as she could spare from him, which was far too much. She asked question after question, or volunteered unnecessary information, until Harsha suspected Jason’s video game addiction stemmed less from any desire to play than from self-defense against the woman’s non-stop mouth. She pretended to be asleep most of the time. With the loss of blood, she didn’t have to try hard.

  After a week, she went back to work, not recovered enough to make it through a full day, but eager to be back at it. Besides being ecstatic to get away from Jason’s caregiver, she enjoyed her work as chief financial officer for the Ho’ola Complimentary Medicine Center and Health Spa. She whistled as she slipped her purse into her desk drawer and booted up her computer.

  With a tap on the intercom, she called her assistant. “Jamala?”

  “Yup!” Jamala’s cheerful voice added an extra layer of sweetness to the day. Harsha knew her assistant’s earlier life in Haiti hadn’t been a happy one, but in spite of whatever tragedies lay behind her, she sloshed sunshine wherever she went.

  Harsha smiled into her desk phone. “Will you please bring in all the finance reports and anything else I missed while I was out?”

  “Sure thing, Boss-Lady.”

  Harsha glanced over her stuffed inbox while she waited. Jamala staggered in under a large but neat stack of files.

  Harsha stood to pull off a couple of inches of paper at a time until she transferred the entire pile to her desk. “Thanks.”

  Jamala beamed. “No problem. How was your trip? Find what you were looking for?”

  Harsha grimaced and held up her scarred wrist. “No, and I don’t want to talk about it.” To avoid any further questioning, she switched to playfulness. “I keep telling you, don’t call me ‘Boss-Lady.’ Dr. Vyacheslav might think I’m trying to oust her.”

  Jamala laughed and tossed her bead-tipped micro-braids. “It’s hard to oust the owner of a small business with no board of directors. Besides, you don’t know the first thing about complimentary medicine.”

  Harsha wrinkled her nose and spoke in a wry tone. “I know a lot about any medicine. For one thing, I know I’ll never let Dr. Vyacheslav talk me into another cleansing fast as long as I live.”

  Laughing, Jamala walked out. Once left to herself, Harsha dove into her financial reports. Her eyes caressed the long lines of figures, lingering over each entry and analyzing them with skill, almost tenderness. She liked the world of accounting and finance. Even the shaky economy couldn’t change the immutable laws of math. A number never morphed into something it wasn’t. Numbers were reliable, stable, and altogether beautiful because of it. Next to the smile of a loved one, nothing delighted her more.

  In spite of her diligence, the stack of papers lacked less than an inch of its original height when lunchtime rolled around. Jamala came in and asked a question. Harsha waved her off, muttering a reply that seemed appropriate at the time. After Jamala left, Harsha realized her assistant had offered to pick up lunch, and she’d said, “no thanks.” Her stomach rumbled. She snagged a candy from the dish on her desk and bent her entire focus on her work. Eating could wait.

  A few minutes later her cell phone rang. At first, she assumed Jason wanted to pester her about not working for too long and ignored it, but then she recognized the ring tone as the one she’d set for Josh and picked up. “Hey. You’re up early.”

  “Hey, baby. Jefe had all the boys check around. Whatever happened in L.A., it didn’t start here.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Positive, and no leads on a black guy with hazel eyes.”

  Harsha turned this over in her mind. A part of her had wanted Vegas to be the cause of the Los Angeles incident. Tracing the violence back to her foolish, albeit lucrative, past made it simple. Without that tie, everything that happened at the Rice Clinic and at the hospital afterward still needed explaining. Unless it came down to nothing more than a group of crazy conspirators and idiotic staff. The crazy conspirators she could believe. One “doctor” she tried years ago advised her to dance naked on a hilltop at exactly midnight on the spring equinox to cure her disease. To her everlasting embarrassment, she’d tried it. It resulted in an invitation to a rave and much teasing from Jason when he found out, but no cure. An entire hospital stuffed with incompetent staff, however, seemed unlikely.

  “Okay, thanks for checking. What do I owe you and Jefe?”

  When Josh spoke, she heard his amused half-smile in his tone of voice. “Jefe says this one’s on him. For old times’ sake. He also says if you ever come to town, he’ll be sure to wear your favorite cologne.”

  Harsha wrinkled her nose. Jefe knew she hated his pheromone-laced cologne. “Yeah. Tell him it’s not likely, but I’ll send him a bottle of pineapple wine. What about you?”

  “How about a new AC?”

  “Done. You want me to send money or you want to take it out of next month’s rent?”

  “I’ll take it out of rent. I gotta go. Catch you next lifetime.”

  “Okay. Bye.” Harsha hung up and got back to work.

  By Friday, Harsha regretted returning to work. The painkiller she took for her wrist and ankle fell short of her expectations in regard to relief, slowed her thinking, and upset her stomach. After catching her second mistake in simple arithmetic before her first coffee break, she went home for the weekend. Jason’s caregiver met her at the door, chattering about how she enjoyed looking after a brother-sister pair. Harsha dismissed her for the day.

  With a steaming cup of her favorite tea, a spicy-sweet combination of jasmine, cinnamon, peach, and ginger, she settled on the couch next to
Jason and opened her favorite book, Jane Eyre. She turned three pages, seeing the words but processing none. Her mind, though addled by drugs, wanted to be at work.

  She set aside her book in favor of moving to her desk to pull up the hospital’s webpage. Her internet connection oozed along at a rate comparable to dial-up days. “Jason, are you downloading a big file or something?”

  “Yup.”

  Wrestling Jason’s massive game downloads for internet space translated to several hours of frustration, so she picked up her phone. She listened to the hospital’s menu and pushed the appropriate buttons. A building exploded in Jason’s video game, causing her to miss a round of options. She hung up, dialed, and pushed buttons. The doorbell rang. She hung up and went to the door. The mail carrier handed her a package. She accepted it with a generic smile and set it down on the desk. She picked up the phone. After all that, she expected a voicemail box to take a message. When an actual human being picked up, it startled her and she missed their greeting.

  Hoping she’d navigated the call menu to the right department, she used her standard business monotone to cover her surprise. “Hello. My name is Harsha Mooreland. I’d like a copy of my records for my recent hospital visit.”

  “All right, Ms. Mooreland. I suppose you want them for personal use, then?”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  “Sure. When did you say your visit was?”

  Harsha gave the approximate dates, assuming her rescuer took her to the hospital the same day Ashley attacked her.

  “All right. I’ll get your address in a minute and send you the appropriate paperwork, but that’s pretty recent, so let’s take a peek and see what I have for you. Do you mind holding for a minute?”

  “I don’t mind.”

  While she waited, Harsha flipped through her appointment book. One of her neighbors needed help with taxes, a big project, if Harsha understood. She blocked out several hours to tackle it the next weekend.

  “Um, what did you say your name was?”

  “Harsha Virika Mooreland.” She wrote likes purple next to an entry indicating a luncheon date with a Ho’ola investor. She liked to keep tabs on little details to make the generous folks supporting the work done at the Center feel valued. She knew each one’s favorite color, preferred cuisine, and year-to-date contributions by heart.