by Alisha Rai
“Samson’s been running interference between Harris and me since we were in college,” Dean informed Jas.
A pang of . . . something hit Jas, and he had no idea what it was, but it was sharp. Wistfulness, maybe? Over their obviously deep, long-running bonds?
“Sorry we’ve talked your ear off, Jas. Haven’t let you get a word in edgewise.” Dean’s smile was friendly. “Tell us about yourself. What’s your story?”
What was his story? “I’m in security. I work for Rhiannon’s roommate.”
“Security work sounds so cool. Like Jack Ryan.”
“Jack Ryan was CIA,” Samson said.
“Well, who was a famous bodyguard, then?”
“The guy from The Bodyguard?” Samson suggested.
Dean shook his head. “Don’t know that one. Still sounds glamorous.”
“It’s not really. You spend a lot of your time hoping nothing happens.” Only once had something happened to Katrina, and that memory still gave Jas nightmares. “I do mostly cyber-security now. It’s basically a desk job.” His degree was in computers. It had taken a little self-study to get back to them, but he genuinely enjoyed designing digital lockboxes for information.
“Let me have my illusions. My life is pretty boring, all playdates and poop.” Dean took a sip of his beer, and Jas eyed him warily, hoping he wouldn’t go more into detail on that poop thing.
Luckily, or unluckily, depending on how one viewed his next question, Dean didn’t go the poop route. “How’d you get into that line of work?”
Jas gave the bare bones explanation. “I was in the military until I was about twenty-five, and medically discharged. I called up an old family friend to ask if he had any jobs available. He needed someone to head his security.” Family friend was simplifying Hardeep’s complicated relationship with the Singhs. Hardeep’s grandfather had started a farm in NorCal with Jas’s great-grandfather, and then bounced to go back to India. Jas’s grandfather was still salty over that old slight.
Dean raised his eyebrows. “Military, huh? Army?”
“Yes. Rangers.”
Dean gave a low whistle. “That’s, like, elite, right?”
Jas shrugged. He’d thought it was. He’d been really excited to be accepted.
“Were you deployed?”
“Yes,” Jas said, and he couldn’t help how short his tone was. “Iraq.”
“Hey, Dean, have you seen that new movie—”
Dean cut off Samson’s change of topic. “You know, we should put you in touch with the nonprofit Samson and I work for, right, Samson? We help people with Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, head injuries. Trevor’s looking to expand the organization to include veterans. A lot of service people are diagnosed with CTE, too.”
Jas leaned back in his chair. “I don’t know how I could help.”
“Trevor’s looking to consult with some veterans, get an idea as to needs and resources, especially when it comes to mental health. The symptoms no one can see and often slip through the cracks.”
“I’m afraid I’m not a typical vet.” He hadn’t had to rely on the government’s dubious assistance.
He’d had advantages his brothers and sisters hadn’t, even with his discharge, his injury, and the trial that had pitted him against his own man and left him a snitch in the eyes of many of his colleagues. He’d had a job and money and health care and a place to lick his wounds. “I don’t think I can assist anyone.”
Samson cleared his throat. “Dean—”
“Even so—”
“The girl was checking Dean out, you asshole.” Harris dropped down in his seat, cutting Dean off and entirely distracting him.
“Is that so?” Dean preened, and stroked his beard.
“It’s cool. I told her Dean was married and had an adorable baby. Informed her all about how my precious niece was going to be a sushi roll for Halloween.” Harris wiggled his phone. “Got her number.”
“She’s a tootsie roll, not a sushi—oh shit.” Dean stopped. “A sushi roll would be really fucking adorable.”
Jas sipped his soda and relaxed at the banter resuming. The last thing he wanted to do was talk about vets and mental health, a subject he was ill-equipped to handle when he was actively trying to avoid thinking about the time he’d spent in Iraq.
“Anyway,” Dean said, and raised his glass to toast his cousin. “I’m sure you’ll have a great date. Try not to think too much about the fact that she thought I was hotter than you.”
Samson snorted, and Jas couldn’t help but chuckle as Harris’s smug smile vanished. The football player growled. “Fuck.”
JAS GRABBED HIS coat from the passenger seat of his car and clambered out. His personal vehicle was a hybrid. It barely fit his body, but he mostly drove long distances when he left the house, so he preferred to save some gas.
The evening fall air nipped through his lightweight cotton Henley as he walked up the driveway. A dark figure separated from the wide porch of the big house. Jas stilled until the man fell under one of the lights, and then he relaxed. “Richard. Anything going on?”
The blond-haired man shook his head. He’d maintained his high-and-tight haircut, though he hadn’t been in the military for a while. “No, sir. Quiet night.” He hesitated. “Except there is one thing. I was doing a round and Ms. Smith opened the door to her office and yelled at me.”
Ms. Smith was the name the guards used for Katrina. It was a simple way to make sure no one who overheard knew who their client was. “Yelled at you?” That was very unlike Katrina. In all the time Jas had known her, he’d never heard Katrina raise her voice to anyone. She was unfailingly polite to contractors and people on her payroll.
“Yes. She said I scared her, that she couldn’t see who I was.” The boy’s eyes widened. “I swear I didn’t mean to scare her, and the exterior lights were on. But I thought you should know. She seemed calm when I left her.”
“Thanks.” He didn’t reassure Richard. He’d talk to Katrina first, in the morning. “Will you be relieved soon?”
“Yes, sir. John’s arriving in about an hour for the night shift.”
“Excellent. Good night.”
Richard all but saluted him. Jas stopped when he was almost at his cottage and looked over his shoulder. From this angle, he could see the dim light from Katrina’s office spilling out onto the patio. It was late. If he wasn’t her bodyguard, if he was someone . . . else . . . to her, he’d go check on her now.
He wasn’t, though.
He went inside and shut his door firmly. If only he could shut the door on his wayward feelings as easily.
His phone buzzed and he smiled faintly when he saw who it was. He put the phone on speaker and toed off his loafers, depositing them on the shoe organizer next to his front door. “Hello, Mom.”
“Hello, dear. How are you?”
“Fine. Just got home.” He went to his bedroom and tossed his cell on his bed. He pulled his shirt off over his head, placing it neatly in the hamper.
“Where were you?”
“I went out with some friends in L.A.”
His mother paused. He could imagine Tara Kaur sitting in the living room of his parents’ small two-bedroom condo. They lived in a more affordable suburb of the City, but nothing in the Bay Area was affordable for the middle class anymore. The fact that they had a second bedroom was a miracle and a product of tight rent control and a generous landlord.
“You went out with who?”
“Uh.” He took off his socks. “Friends?”
“You have friends?” his mother asked, and he tried not to be offended by her skepticism, since he had basically been marveling at the same thing earlier in the night.
“What did he say?”
Jas winced at the booming voice of his stepfather. Oh no, this was about to become a family affair. He crossed his fingers that his stepbrother, Bikram, wasn’t also lurking on the call.
“He said he went out with his friends in L.A., Gurjit.”
/> “What friends?”
His mom spoke to him. “You’re on speaker. Jas, your father wants to ask you who these friends are as well.”
“I can hear him. That’s what speaker does.” Jas sat on the side of his bed.
“What friends are these, in Los Angeles?” his dad demanded. “We don’t know them.” Gurjit was a high school history teacher and he spoke with the gentle firmness of a man used to handling shenanigans.
“You don’t know all my friends,” he said, and was immediately annoyed by how defensive he sounded. He was thirty-nine years old, for crying out loud.
“Dear, of course we do,” his mom said. She had a sweet lightness to her voice, as if the peach farm she’d grown up on had infused her with the fruit’s essence. “Who is in Los Angeles?”
“Rhiannon’s boyfriend and his friends.” Though his parents had never met Rhiannon or Katrina, they knew everyone’s names. They peppered him with a million questions about his life when he was with them.
“Samson Lima?” There was excitement in his dad’s voice now. “Say, when are you going to get me a football signed by him?”
“I don’t know him well enough for that sort of thing.” Samson would probably happily sign a football for his dad, but Jas wasn’t accustomed to asking anyone for anything.
“Don’t make him hit up his little buddies for autographs,” Tara admonished.
Jas bit the inside of his cheek, amused at the idea of his mom calling anyone who had once been a linebacker a little anything.
“Did you have fun?”
A stab of guilt ran through him at the eagerness in his mother’s voice. They worried over him so much. It would have been easier if he had gone home after he was injured and lived on the farm or in their small condo for the last fourteen years. Easier for them, not for him.
That worry was the reason he hadn’t told them about the potential pardon for McGuire. His mother had wept when Jas had come back home. For his injury, for what he’d seen. He couldn’t tell her now that she might have to relive that. “I did, yes. Thank you.”
“Good. I’m glad you’re getting out. Widening your circle,” Tara said.
“I’m going to get ready for bed,” Gurjit announced. “Good night, son.”
“Good night.”
There was the unmistakable sound of a brief kiss, and though it was his parents, Jas smiled. He didn’t know his biological father. He’d been fourteen when his mom had met and married Gurjit. He was glad his mother had found happiness with a man who loved her dearly.
Tara came back on the line, and Jas could tell she’d taken him off speaker. “I called to ask if you were going to come to the parade,” she said quietly, in a rush, and Jas knew immediately that his stepdad had probably told her not to ask him this exact thing.
He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “That’s a while off.”
“Not that far now. A few weeks.”
“I haven’t gone to the parade in years.” Not since he’d come back from Iraq, for sure.
“I know.” Her voice dropped lower. “They’re honoring your grandfather this year.”
“I’m aware.” He shifted. There it was, that tug of longing followed by fear. How to tell his mom that while he deeply missed their hometown’s annual Sikh parade, and would give anything to attend it again, the event was too big and loud and crowded for him. He avoided such places to the point that he used to have to delegate security detail to other guards back when Katrina and Hardeep had gone to areas where there might be fireworks or intense crowds. “Mom—”
“It would mean so much to him. And to me. But really to him.”
“I see Grandpa all the time.” He kept the emotion out of his tone, which pleased him. He definitely saw his parents more, but he did see his grandfather quite a bit, even went to the farm for monthly dinners with the whole family. He never stayed more than a night, but he went.
“He’s all alone and he’s getting older. This is all he wants.”
“Did he say that?”
The beat of silence told him that his grandfather hadn’t said anything of the sort to his only daughter.
Stubborn old man.
“He would have told me, but our calls have been so rushed lately. He’s out of the country for the next couple of weeks. He had to go to Mexico to work on that school he’s established.”
Is he well enough to make a trip like that? Mexico wasn’t far, but his grandfather wasn’t young. “Does he have someone with him?”
“Yes, he took a few employees.” His mother tried a different tack. “We’re all going to be there that night. It will be so apparent if my eldest isn’t here. What will people say? Come for me?”
His lips twisted. His mother played dirty. Yuba City was a relatively small and gossipy town. His absence would be felt.
“You can stay at the little house. It’s all yours. No one will bother you there. You can have your privacy and come to this one little award ceremony and then you can either go back to Santa Barbara or stay in your own home on the farm.”
When Jas was nineteen, his grandfather had deeded over the empty house his great-grandparents had built, as well as a small tract of the surrounding land. No one was living in it, his grandpa had said, so Jas might as well have it.
Deep nostalgia shot through Jas. He loved that house. Jas had known it was a lure and a bribe when his grandpa had given him the deed. A way to tie him to a business and life he didn’t want.
He had few emotional ties to the huge home his grandpa had built later in life and now lived in, so it was easier to pop in there for their monthly dinners and leave. The farm sat on hundreds of acres. He didn’t even have to see the little house.
Jas tugged at a loose thread on his comforter. Oh, but he missed every inch of that place.
It might be different now. You could go and see. Not the parade, but at least the house.
He shook that thought away. It would surely be too painful, and to what end? He and his grandfather narrowly avoided getting locked in their usual battle of wills during a once-a-month dinner. An extended visit would be rough.
“You don’t have to commit this minute. Think on it?” Tara asked.
He gritted his teeth. Tell her why you don’t want to go. Tell her about the loud noises, and the fireworks, and the heat, and the crush of people. His mother was kind and empathetic, a kindergarten teacher. She would understand. “Fine,” he said reluctantly. “I’ll think on it. No promises.”
“Good enough for now. I love you. Have a good night.”
“Good night. Love you too.” He hung up and sat there for a moment, taking a beat to collect himself. The doorbell roused him.
Who on earth would be looking for him at this hour?
Jas strode to the door and yanked it open to find Jia. He’d never seen the girl without a full face of makeup, a coordinated outfit, and a matching hijab, but tonight she wore lounge pants, a cotton shirt, and a scarf tied over her hair.
“What’s wrong?” he demanded when she didn’t speak, but merely stared at him.
“Um.” She dipped her gaze down his body and then back up, and he flushed as the cool air hit his bare chest.
“Hang on.” He shut the door, grabbed the shirt and shoes he’d taken off, and pulled them on. He was back in under a minute.
She snapped to attention and cleared her throat. “I’m sorry to bother you, but something’s come up, and, well . . . I hate tattling or anything, but Rhiannon’s on a flight across the ocean, and it seems like you’ve known Katrina the longest of all of us, so I thought I would come and see if we can—”
Jas cut off her rambling. “What’s wrong?” he repeated.
Jia bit her lower lip and looked torn. “Katrina said not to tell you.”
“Jia.”
“But she didn’t say you couldn’t guess, I suppose.”
“I am not playing charades with my Katri . . . my employer’s well-being.”
Jia didn’t seem to notice his alm
ost-slip. She typed something on her phone. “Whoops, dropped my phone.” She tossed it at him and he caught it automatically against his chest. She gave him a meaningful look.
He stared at the tweet blankly. He has a to die for! “What is this?”
“Scroll up to the first tweet in the thread. Katrina’s viral.”
Jas started to read. “What?”
“It means she’s internet-famous.”
“I know what going viral means. But I don’t understand how Katrina—” He stopped as he got to the first photo of her. She was instantly recognizable to him, despite the baseball cap she wore and the halfhearted blurring of her face. He scrolled through the tweets and embedded photos, his disbelief and fury growing as he read them. “What the hell?” He pinned Jia with his glare, though it wasn’t meant for her. “I was there. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it wasn’t . . . this.” He’d been silently seething in dismay the entire time, trying to read their lips, but even he knew this was a fabrication.
The second-most-liked tweet was the one implying they’d hooked up in the bathroom. That for sure wasn’t true. Katrina had never been out of his sight.
“That’s what Katrina said. I have no doubt it’s all lies this woman spun to fit her own narrative.”
He stepped outside and closed the door behind him. “How is Katrina handling this?” He thought of Richard saying Katrina had snapped at him, and immediately realized that was a foolish question.
Katrina craved anonymity. She invested and gave charitably, yes, but it was all done through layers of paperwork and systems he’d helped her design. Even the local small business owners who knew her, like Mona, didn’t know her full name.
“She was definitely . . . upset. I tried to tell her that no one will recognize her, which seemed to be Katrina’s main concern, but I don’t think she bought it. Her face is pretty hidden, though, right? You’re the security expert. What do you think?”
He went back to the first photo of Katrina and used his fingers to zoom in. It might be hard for a stranger to recognize Katrina from these photos, but for someone who was familiar with her? He examined the photo further for other identifiable details, grimacing when he caught a tiny clue. He turned the phone around to show Jia. “Look at her handbag on the back of the chair. It has her initials embossed on the strap.” He couldn’t believe he’d missed that until now, or he would have stopped her from ever carrying that purse.
