Page 51 of Shadowing You

Ethan snatched the phone off the coffee table. “She’s staying where she’s safe. I’ll need to get in⁠—”

“I’m working on a plan.” Michael’s voice was calm despite Ethan’s anger.

“She’s staying here.” Ethan said the words as if he had the authority to decide. “Help me figure out a way in, Michael. Or we find someone local who knows the layout.”

“It won’t work.” Mei Lin kept her voice even. She wasn’t a child he could order around. “I know where the jar is, I know the building, I know the corridors that are most likely to be empty at which hours of the day. Who else can say the same?”

“You’ll tell me what you know.” Ethan straightened to his full height. “I’ll take care of it.”

She was struck, as she’d been so many times since Changsha, at how extremely tall he was—almost two meters. He was handsome and broad in the shoulders and spoke with authority and self-assurance.

“You?” She nearly laughed. “You will walk into a rural Chinese hospital and retrieve evidence from a basement archive without attracting attention?”

“Michael can tell me how⁠—”

“You are a full head taller than every other person in that building. And you’re Caucasian, in case you forgot. You’ll stand out like a crane among chickens.” She crossed her arms. “How do you plan to move around when you are the most noticeable human being in the entire hospital? The staff will remember you. The cameras will certainly capture you. And when Lu Feng sees the footage⁠—”

“Fine. I get it.” His eyes flashed an instant before he turned his focus to the phone. “Michael, we’ll have to hire someone.”

“Yeah, about that.” The words came carefully. “That’d be tricky. It’s not like I have contacts there, and I haven’t been able to find anyone who does. Even if I could hire someone, he wouldn’t know the layout and wouldn’t know exactly what he’s looking for. We’d hate to send someone in and have them either not get to the storage room at all or grab the wrong thing. We’d just put the hospital on alert. Even worse, he could broadcast the location of the evidence to Lu Feng.” Michael sighed, the sound weary. “I’m not saying it can’t be done, but it’ll take days. That’s a lot of time for you two to stay off the radar. I hate to say this, but Mei Lin’s right. She’s our best shot at getting the evidence.”

“No.” Ethan lowered his voice, which was worse than when he raised it. “Would you let your wife do this? Walk into a building where the people who want her dead could have informants, where she could be recognized in a second?”

“Ha.” Michael’s laugh was as warm as it was surprising. “If you think my wife waits for my permission to do anything⁠—”

“These people want to kill her.” The words came out very measured, very controlled, but Mei Lin knew the fear that hummed beneath. “My wife is not going to put herself in any more danger.”

My wife. She didn’t hate the way the words sounded, though she wasn’t crazy about his dictatorial attitude.

“My husband,” she said. “This is my fight, and you are not my master.”

His gaze swung from the phone to her. “I didn’t mean…” He took a breath, ran a hand over his hair. “I’m trying to keep you safe, sweetheart.”

“I know. But if we don’t get that evidence, then I will never be safe. Also…these women are worth the risk. You don’t know them, you don’t know their faces or their stories, but I do. Lu Feng took them from their children and their husbands and their parents, and they have been waiting for someone to do something about it. I am the only person who can prove what he did. I spent six years in prison for knowing what he is, and I am not going to hand that evidence to a stranger, and I am not going to watch from a hotel room while you”—she waved toward her too-tall, too-white husband—“try to make your way to a basement where you’ve never been and wander around a room you’ve never seen looking for a jar you can barely picture, while eyes and cameras track your every move. No.”

The muscle in Ethan’s jaw moved, and his face grew a dangerous shade of red. She looked at the phone, not wanting to see the fury in her husband’s expression.

“Michael,” she said, “I look different than I did when I worked there. I’m older, obviously, and thinner, and my hair is short. Any staff members who knew me before might be fooled, even if the cameras aren’t. There must be a way.”

“I think so, and you made a great point about Ethan. We can use him to attract attention, get people looking the wrong direction.” Michael paused, maybe waiting for Ethan to argue.

Her husband was standing at the windows, arms crossed, looking into the distance. She studied his profile, the strong set of his jaw. He didn’t turn around.

“I’ll work on a disguise for you, Mei Lin, and a plan. In the meantime, the two of you need to be on the same page. When you do this, you need to be working together as a team. Got it?”

Ethan said nothing, but his head dipped the slightest bit, which she decided was as close to agreement as she was going to get.

“We will turn to the same page.” Apparently, she hadn’t gotten the idiom quite right because Ethan’s lips twitched at the corner.

“Good,” Michael said. “Meanwhile, I want you moving. I’ve found a place outside Enshi City…”

Enshi.

The name rippled through her like butterflies. Her parents’ village was east of there, a few hours deeper into the mountains. Her home, her people, would be so close.

She wouldn’t reach out to them, not until she was safe. Better to let them go on believing she was dead than get their hopes up.

But the butterflies weren’t about her parents. It was Enshi, where she and Ethan had spent the first night of their marriage. Ethan had planned every detail of that trip, including the luxury hotel that had overlooked the river. He’d ordered so many flowers that the scent of them had permeated every corner of the suite. They’d eaten dinner in front of the window, they’d talked late into the night about his residency plans, her mother’s garden, a book she’d read, a dream he’d had. They’d talked and laughed, and when they’d moved to the bed, it had been the most natural thing in the world.