Page 41 of The Librarians

“My grandmother made me apply for the job as soon as I told her I planned to stay with her for a while. She didn’t want me hanging around the house all day.”

“Why are you in Austin?”

“Because she’s getting old.”

“She doesn’t have other kids or grandkids who are closer?”

“She does, but none of them are heiresses who have no other obligations in life.”

He is silent, a thorny silence, as if she drew lipstick hearts on her final exam in lieu of supplying actual answers. Then he tilts back his glass and downs its entire contents.

As he swallows, her eyes fasten to the column of his throat.

She wants to rip the wineglass from his fingers, throw it aside, and kiss him again.

She wants to be in Nainai’s car, speeding away.

She wants him to have the decency to keep her in the dark forever and ever, because he knows something she doesn’t and she is afraid of it.

Their gazes meet. Eight feet of air separate them, but they might as well be nose to nose.

She drains her own glass, pushes it away on the bench cushion, and sticks the empty magazine into the Glock she took from him. “You think I’m hiding something from you.”

He picks up his cartridge and holds it between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. “You aren’t?”

There is an edge to his voice. It isn’t a question but a jab. She gapes at him, trying to make sense of his provocation. “No, I’m not. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

There is information asymmetry here, but not in the way he imagines.

“You’re sure about that?”

He is…mocking her. But there’s something fatalistic to his tone, a bitterness that is nevertheless not directed at her. Or not directed only at her.

“I am sure about it, but you seem convinced otherwise. Why do you think I’m withholding something? What do you think I’m withholding?”

“Tell me again why you’re here tonight.”

She would like to throw her Glock through the glass wall of the alcove.

“My colleague Astrid is currently, as far as I can tell, the only lead the police have on Perry’s death.

But I found out about your connections to him.

And I wanted to know more before I make up my mind as to whether to mention you to the police. ”

“Why do you care?” he asks coolly. Coldly. “You should have passed my information directly to the police.”

Why does she care?

Hazel rarely gives in to anger, and she tries to remain calm, but some banshee inside her howls and shrieks. Why do I care? Do you, of all people, not have a fucking clue why I fucking care?

“When I was engaged, I wondered obsessively what I would do if you were to suddenly reappear in my life. And when you didn’t—”

She drags in a ragged breath. She should stop right here—this needs to go no further. But she can’t. Her self-control has undergone a rapid unplanned disassembly and is streaking through the atmosphere in hundreds of fiery fragments.

“Let’s just say, when reality failed to validate my wishful thinking, what I experienced was not a profound sense of relief. To this day, I carry no small amount of guilt toward my husband, because I would have ditched him at the altar if you’d only shown up.”

He rises to his feet and looms above her, his expression unreadable.

“You don’t need to be so alarmed.” She speaks through clenched teeth.

“I know very well that the person I’d have left my then-fiancé for isn’t you but a construct of my own making.

All the same, there isn’t a single day in the last twelve years when I haven’t thought about you.

And there isn’t a single time I think about you that I haven’t regretted letting go of your number.

Not because I lost a soul mate but because in the vacuum created by your absence you became untouchably perfect.

You became whatever my psyche and my neuroses needed you to be. ”

Maybe he’s standing because she has pointed the Glock at him, as if with a pull of the trigger she can destroy the illusion. She tosses the unloaded firearm aside, this thing that is as useless as her willpower.

“The kind of weight and relevance I’ve poured into the idea of you does not dissipate in a few days.”

The opposite.

She’s learned to live with her yearning and her regrets.

And she’s come to believe that they have not only collected as sediments but cemented into stone—after all, twelve years is a geological era.

And she, an occasional visitor to the depths of her own heart, would run her fingers over fossilized memories caught in those prehistorical strata.

His reappearance overturned that tidy fantasy. Her yearning and her regrets have been locked away, yes, but like those children of the Khaleesi forced into the dungeon, they emerged instead as full-grown beasts, ravenous and more feral than ever.

“And when I was faced with the possibility that you might have something to do with Perry’s death…”

She couldn’t handle the cauldron of emotions; she had to channel her dread and confusion into concrete action, however stupid.

Silence.

He closes his fist around the bullet, the goddamn bullet. “What did your husband think of this idea of me?”

He didn’t bat an eye when she mentioned that she’d been married. “Do you—did you know my husband, by some chance?”

“Never met him.”

Never meeting someone is not the same as not being aware of someone’s existence.

And if he knew of Kit…“Did you know who I was before Saturday?”

He drops the bullet into a pocket of his black tactical pants.

“If you mean whether I knew you’re Bartholomew Kuang’s granddaughter before we ran into each other in the noodle shop yesterday, yes, I did.

I’ve known for a while. Not in time to create drama at your wedding, I’m afraid, but yes, for some time. ”

How? How had he found out?

Then again, such a discovery is far from inconceivable. She’s always kept the lowest of low profiles, but from time to time she does show up in group pictures on other people’s social media, from attending weddings, birthday parties, and other such rites and rituals.

With his mother’s ties in Taiwan and his stepfather’s sphere in Hong Kong, it’s more than possible that they or someone in their circle might have business dealings with her family.

Business relations turn into social relations.

People scroll through their feeds and show others nearby what they are looking at.

What had passed through his mind—and his heart—when he saw her? Had he felt any surge of wonder and hope? Any pang when he realized that she was already married?

He studies her—and betrays little of his thoughts other than a stark wariness.

The same wariness that has characterized his demeanor ever since their reunion.

“You do think I have something to do with Perry’s death,” she whispers.

In the Far East, the idea exists to this day, culturally, if not legally, that if a single member of a family perpetuates an act counter to the collective good, then the entire family is—at least partially—at fault.

Her grandfather, as head of the family, has long been considered fair and wise—or at least fair enough and wise enough.

And the Kuang clan, consequently, enjoys a relatively unsullied reputation as ethical in business and decent in personal dealings.

But every barrel has its rotten apples and Hazel has one second cousin who has been officially disowned and another skating on thin ice for his gambling problem.

She struggles, however, to connect their localized malpractice to Perry Bathurst.

And then a ghost wraps its ice-vapor hands around her spine and yanks it right out of her back.

Her fingertips, without anything to hold on to, quake. “Are you implying that my husband is—was—involved somehow?”

Conrad’s lips curve in a mirthless smile. “Yes, that’s exactly what I’ve been trying to say.”