“I have to—”
“The computer does not need you staring at it while it does its thing. I will let you come back, I promise, but for now, come on.” When he doesn’t move fast enough to suit her, she grabs his chair and pushes him at the door. He stumbles up just in time to avoid crashing into the frame.
“I’m up and I’m coming, now will you stop?” he demands.
In response, she grabs his elbow and hauls him after her to the elevator.
They end up in one of the sparring gyms, thick mats covering the floor around raised rings. One wall has lines of rhythm bags and heavy bags. Ramirez points to the heavy bags. “Go.”
“Ramirez.”
“Eddison.” She drops his elbow so she can cross her arms under her chest. “You are exhausted. You are so angry, so afraid, so tangled up in your own head that you’re not able to think straight. You’re missing the obvious, and digging yourself in deeper is not going to help. Now. Keyed up as you are, you’re not going to sleep, so go punch the shit out of the bag.”
“Ramirez—”
“Go. Punch. The bag.”
Muttering about bossy, interfering women only makes her snicker, so he gives in and walks to the bags. He rolls up his sleeves, sets his feet . . . and stares.
“For shit’s sake, Eddison, punch the bag!”
So he does, and with the first thump of impact, that taut coil twisting his gut snaps. He rains blows on the bag, heedless of form or efficiency, messy and powerful and relentless in his rage. His muscles protest the sudden activity but he ignores the pain, focused on nothing but the movement of the hanging bag and where his fist needs to be to meet it.
Eventually he slows, then stops, leaning against the bag and panting. His arms throb, and he’s a little afraid to check his untaped fists. He does feel more centered, though.
Ramirez gently takes his left hand and inspects his knuckles. “Nothing looks broken,” she tells him softly. “You’ll have some lovely bruises and swelling, and I think you left most of your skin on the bag.”
“Why didn’t you tell me to tape up?”
She reaches for his other hand, looking up at him from under her lashes. It’s not something she does to be coy, but rather, when she’s not sure if her face is showing what she’s thinking. “You seemed like you needed the pain.”
He doesn’t have an answer for that.
“Come on. Let’s get these cleaned and bandaged. Do you have things at home to change dressings tomorrow?”
“Mostly. I’ll have to stop and buy . . .” He trails off, almost too tired to chase the fragment of an idea. Ramirez just waits, watching him thoughtfully. “How many places in a reasonable distance of Huntington do you suppose sell dahlias?”
“Say what?”
“Dahlias. They’re not exactly easy to find. When Julie McCarthy was murdered last year, it took us over a week to find where her dahlias came from, but we did find the specific store, which we usually don’t. A lot of florists don’t stock dahlias.”
“Okay . . .”
“We’ve been trying to play catch-up this entire time; why not try to get ahead of him? If he wants to finish out the list, he has to find dahlias somewhere. If we can get word to all the florists—”
“In the state? Eddison, that’s—”
“A big list, yes, so we create a master list and borrow techs or agents or, hell, academy trainees, and get them calling. The flowers are always fresh when they’re delivered, so even if he has them already, it would only be in the past day or two. The sale of a less-common flower would be memorable. We might even be able to get a photo or sketch from whoever sold or sells the dahlias to him.”
“That’s . . . actually not a bad idea,” she admits. “It’s going to have to be Yvonne, though.”
“What?”
“Even with her instructions, that kind of search is not something we know how to do. Not on this big a scale.”
“Okay, so we—”
“We are not calling her in at four in the morning,” she says firmly. “We are going to take care of your hands. Then we will go upstairs and write all of this down, so at a reasonable hour, we can update Vic and get approval to send Yvonne into overtime. Then we will call in Yvonne. Do you know what you’re going to do between taking notes and calling Vic?”
“Whatever you tell me to do or you’ll make me regret it?”
“You see, mijo?” She hooks her arm through his and pulls him toward the door. “You’re thinking better already.”
Her name is Aimée Browder, and she just might be a gift from God.
You’ve been worried about Priya. You’d already left Boston—you never spend more than six months in one place—but when you went back to visit, Priya wasn’t there. It took a long time to find her; finally you saw her name and city listed in a magazine as a finalist for a photo contest. You moved to San Diego immediately. You needed to make sure she was okay.
And she isn’t, you realize. She’s still the good girl you remember, but her brightness is gone, her warmth. She’s brittle and fragile and so very lonely.
And then she finds Aimée.
You watch, entranced, as Aimée patiently lures Priya out of her pain, chattering in French and dancing around her as they walk. Sometimes literally—she’s so graceful, Aimée, and spends so much time at lessons and practice; even when she walks out of the studio late at night looking weary down to the bone, she still looks so in love with her dancing you can’t look away. And you see Priya start to bloom, smiling, sometimes laughing even, and talking about French cinema and opera and ballet houses.
It’s Aimée who introduces Priya to the boy she tutors, and you see right away that the boy is falling for her. You don’t blame him, but you watch, carefully, in case you have to step in. You never do, though. Priya knows her worth, knows what it means to be good, and she never encourages the boy, never sits closer to him than she has to, never accepts any of his invitations out.
Aimée’s mother cooks with the amaranth that grows on their porch roof. You’ve never really thought about it, that flowers can have more of a purpose than to look pretty and feed bees or whatever it is they do, but you can hear the Browders teasing each other about the plants in the kitchen and the blooms around Aimée’s bun, the women in a lazy, easy mix of French and Spanish, the father in the occasional booming German no one else understands but that always makes the women laugh.
They take to Priya nearly as well as Aimée does, and you’re grateful for that, grateful she has people to give her back that brightness.
You send Priya flowers, trying to show your appreciation for her goodness, your love for her, and your heart warms when you see her laughing over the baby’s breath, pinning it in place around her friend’s hair like a bristling fairy crown for the stage.
And then one day, Priya is gone. You were away for a few days, tracking down the flowers you needed from nearby towns so no one would link the bouquets to each other, or to you. You haven’t done this for so many years by being careless. Just a few days, but you missed the moving truck and the goodbyes and the departure. It took you too long to find her this time, and now . . .
Aimée misses Priya too, you can see it even before she mentions it to her mother. You see it in the way she twirls a cluster of amaranth in her hand, looking at it with a sad little smile, before she reaches up to pin it in place around her hair.