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“Unfortunately, Lysander is still MIA.” Kina interrupts my mental rambling, once again proving that she’s excellent at her job. “We have all the alerts set up if he uses his credit cards or returns to his usual stomping grounds.”
“We’ll wait. For now.” Bryce turns to Louis. “Go ahead. Tell us what you learned last night.”
“Briggs’s wife called an ambulance because he was complaining of a headache before falling into a seizure. It must have escalated quickly. He’s in a coma.”
“The guy who was following me is in a coma?” Bile rises up my throat. I do what I’ve been wanting to since we sat together. I reach under the table to entangle our hands.
“Any headway on the cause? A diagnosis?” Bryce asks. If he thinks it’s weird that I’m squeezing his fingers, he doesn’t show it.
“No solid diagnosis yet, but his records show a long history of extreme high blood pressure. The wife hasn’t made any calls to her friends or family. There’s just a lot of waiting around.”
“Have you monitored the activity at the house? Is it being treated like a suspicious scene?” Bryce asks while drumming the fingers of his free hand on the table.
“Actually, no. No one is there except when she ran home to get changed. She’s in the hospital for hours,” Jake says.
There’s a pause while something wordless passes between the four of them.
“Ana, we’ll need to meet about some other jobs. You’re not going to the office today, are you?” he asks since it’s Sunday.
“The twins’ birthday is coming up. I thought I’d go shopping, check out a bookstore and this locally owned toy store that—”
“You can shop from home.”
“Excuse me?”
Bryce sighs like this one conversation with me is more exhausting than a twelve-hour workday.
“This won’t take too long,” he tells me while gesturing at his team. “Wait for me to finish, will you? I gotta get the twins something too.”
Oh yeah, that’s a good point. I nod, thinking how much fun it will be to find something for Alec and Cale. Maybe we could get the presents together. I’ve never done that before: give something from me and someone else. It’s weird that I want to.
I shut the French doors to my sitting room to give them privacy. On my antique wooden desk, I fire up a personal laptop that I keep separate from any work duties.
Scrolling through an online bookstore, I’m immediately frustrated. Holding a book—especially a children’s book—gives you a glimpse of how a child will react to it. The weight, the illustrations, the first few pages. I shut down the laptop. It’ll be good for me to go outside, browse a bookstore, pick something fun before the upcoming week ties me down at work.
I’m about to head upstairs to prepare for an outing when my phone rings. Father. It’s late afternoon in Moscow, his usual time to grab dinner after a workday and before he settles in at home to do even more.
I refuse to bring work home. If it means staying in the executive offices or at the dry dock where we repair and construct the ships for long days and some nights, that’s fine with me. I like the personal and the professional compartmentalized. Do I spend a majority of weekends at work? Unfortunately, yes. But when I’m home, I’m home.
Besides, I handle sensitive material. Security risks lessen when the projects stay on site. The memory of Bryce air quoting “proprietary technology” makes me smile. Much of the research I’m supervising and implementing falls under that category.
“Zdravstvuy, papulya,” I greet Father in Russian.
“Privet, Anastasia.”
“Ne ozhidal? tvoego zvonka. Nadeyus’, chto u tebya vse v por??ke,” I continue with my clumsy, American accent to ask him if everything is OK. He never calls out of the blue.
From the first summer I spent with him in Moscow, we’ve slowly transitioned from one percent to about sixty percent Russian when we speak to each other. He’s fluent in English and four other languages. I’m the one who needs practice.
“Why didn’t you tell me yourself that you need extra security. Why do I hear this from your brother?”
“It’s handled, Father. No need to worry when you’re so far away.”
“I will bring you back to Moscow. It is not safe so far from me.” Worrying makes the men in my life unreasonable.
“We have talked about this, when I moved back two years ago. What I need to do is only possible here. The manufacturing infrastructure is in Virginia, and so are the engineers. It isn’t possible to rebuild the fleet anywhere else.”
“Then we stop. For now, we stop the rebuild.”
