Prologue
JACK
Imagine you are just an ordinary guy. You have a good job. Your financing is almost paid off on your Ford F150 truck. You have a contact list of women around the globe who delight in your company. Your Acanthocereus tetragonus cactus is thriving. And you have your health.
On a cool summer evening in Berlin, you repossess a $10 million Caravaggio painting from a private collector. Don’t worry. The collector is a bad guy. On your way to the airport, you are run off the road by four goons in a Saab. They blow up your rental car, beat you, shoot you, and take the painting. With your dying breath, you ask who sent them. Since you are almost dead, they tell you. It was Mr. X. You are not surprised.
One year later you are not dead, but you wish you were. Your new girlfriend wants a commitment. The Ford dealer has repossessed your truck. Your boss has put you on probation even though it wasn’t your fault he didn’t get insurance for the rental car. And to top it all off, Mr. X is always one step ahead of the game.
You get a lead on a job in a small, obscure European country. You dump the girlfriend and retrieve an ancient artifact from a royal residence. Easy peasy. You make it across Europe to London. While you are waiting for your flight to Mexico, Mr. X’s goons find you in the restroom at Heathrow Airport. You know things are going to be bad when they don’t even wait for you to wash your hands. You are still in therapy from the last beating/shooting, so you just hand over the artifact. They shoot you anyway. Just for fun.
This time it takes you six months to recover. No work means no pay and no pay means no truck. You finally return to work and get a lead on the perfect score—the Wild Heart, a magnificent necklace containing twenty-six oval-shaped pink diamonds surrounded by diamonds and emeralds with a forty-carat heart-shaped pink diamond pendant center. The necklace was one of thousands of priceless items stolen by the British from India during the colonial period and is now on display in a boutique museum on the Near North Side of Chicago, Illinois.
You haven’t been back to your hometown in over fifteen years, although you still call your cousin Lou on his birthday every year. He thinks you work as a conman in New York. Your real job would disappoint him.
This time you play it smart. You travel with a fake passport under an assumed name. You book a room in a fancy hotel and forgo loyalty points at your usual budget hotel chain. Lou hooks you up with a Sig Sauer 45 and two small Beretta M9-22s. He has just been released from prison and now sells black market weapons from behind the peonies in his wife’s greenhouse. He’s 16 percent certain arms dealing isn’t a violation of his parole.
You have a good feeling about this job. When you get back to your hotel, you make two calls. First, you call the Ford dealer and tell him to get your truck ready. Then you call Lou’s wife. Her peonies are suffering from botrytis blight. You tell her treatment begins with good sanitation and she needs to prune off and destroy the infected parts of the plants. You doubt she’ll follow your instructions, and you make a mental note to buy your peonies elsewhere.
After three days of recon inside the museum, you pay a midnight visit to check out the building and grounds. The garden is thick with unpruned vegetation and smells like piss. Whatever. You aren’t there to help with the gardening. You are there to retrieve the necklace, and the thick foliage is a perfect place to hide. You take a few pictures and hide your supplies in the hellebore under a magnificent oak suffering from bacterial leaf scorch. Now you just have to wait for the perfect night.
ONE
here are people who need people, and then there are introverts.
You don’t get to choose that particular personality trait when you’re born. You’re either the kid who spends recess running around the playground looking for friends, or you’re the little angel who sits quietly in the reading corner with a book, lost in another world.
I’m definitely one of the people who need people. Leave me alone for more than a few hours and I’ll be speed-dialing my way through my contact list or skulking around the local coffee shop looking for familiar faces. I’m the person who will ask if the chair is free at your table if you look like you need a friend, or chat with you in the grocery line and tell you that you’re lucky you’ve picked this till because Charlotte scans things so fast, a few items always get missed and you might go home with a free can of beans.
I’ve always admired people who are content with their own company. My bestie Chloe can go an entire weekend without talking to another human being if her daughter is away at a sports game or sleeping over with friends. Actually, that’s not entirely true. I don’t think we’ve gone more than a few hours without communicating in some form ever since we met on the school playground in fourth grade. Even in the blackest moments of her favorite romance books, when all is lost and it seems like the couple will never find their happily-ever-after, Chloe will always be there for me.
I don’t know what I would have done if she hadn’t answered my call the day I, Simi Chopra, almost killed a man.
“Oh my God! Chloe!” I held a mirror over the mouth of the naked octogenarian on the floor to see if he was breathing. People who need people are adept at multitasking, even if it involves getting emotional support from your bestie while trying to revive one of your landlady’s many “gentleman callers.” Not that I begrudged eighty-year-old Rose her extracurricular activities. She’d kindly rented me her basement suite at a reduced rent in exchange for helping with chores and keeping her company on her rare evenings in. Someone in the house had to be getting some good stuff, and it wasn’t me.
“What’s wrong?” Chloe’s soothing voice crackled over my phone speaker. I was due for a phone upgrade, but between rent, loan payments, therapy, and living expenses, even my entry-level office salary plus a side gig in a candy store didn’t pay enough to indulge.
“I think I killed someone.”
Chloe didn’t miss a beat. “I’ll grab some bleach and be right over.”
“You’ll be late for work.”
“It’s an IT help desk, babe. We spend most of the day telling people to turn the computer off and on again. I can easily get someone to cover for me.”
Chloe is my ride-or-die. No questions. No judgment. Everyone should have a friend whose first thought is to run for the bleach when you call to tell her you might have killed someone.
“Hurry. He’s barely breathing.” I cleaned the mirror and held it over his mouth again, making a mental note to thank my parents for sending me to a first aid course in twelfth grade. They thought they were paving my way to med school. Instead, the course just confirmed that no one should put their life in my hands.
“I’d better bring a tarp, too,” Chloe said.
“There’s no blood.”
“You might still need the tarp in case he loses control of his bowels.”
“Crap.”
“Exactly. I’ve been reading a lot of romantic suspense books,” she said. “I know everything about dead bodies.”
“I don’t think he’s that dead.” I held the dude’s wrist in my hand. “I feel a pulse. I’m
not sure if it’s his or mine. My heart is pounding so hard, I can’t tell.”
“Is he only mostly dead? Like in The Princess Bride?”
Chloe loves romance. We watch The Princess Bride every year on her birthday and rom-coms when it’s her turn to choose on movie nights. Honestly, all that mushy stuff is like nails on a chalkboard to me, but this is Chloe. In seventh grade, she took the fall when I brought a set of steak knives to school for my Edward Scissorhands Halloween costume, and in eleventh grade she sneaked me in the classroom window when I overslept and almost missed our final calculus exam. There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for her.
“Is there a degree of deadness that involves breathing?” I asked.
“You were the one who was supposed to become a doctor.”
I heard cupboards slam, keys rattle on the counter, the click of a lock. Chloe was on her way. She was nothing if not efficient.
“If I’d become a doctor, I wouldn’t be living in a low-rent basement suite and drowning in debt.” I pressed an ear to the dude’s chest, listening for a heartbeat.
“You would have had even more debt,” she said over the rapid thud of footsteps and the hum of traffic. A single mom working three jobs to make ends meet, Chloe couldn’t afford a car, so she took public transport to get around.
“Yes, but I would also have had the kind of job that would enable me to pay it off before I hit middle age.”
“Almost at the bus stop.” Chloe huffed into the phone.
I gave myself a mental pat on the back for choosing to stay in our hometown of Evanston, Illinois, when I finally moved out of my parents’ house. I had briefly considered finding a place in Downtown Chicago, but rents were high, and I spent most of my free time with Chloe and her daughter, Olivia, so putting almost fourteen miles between us didn’t make sense.
“The paramedics are here,” Rose called out from the hallway. She’d put on a robe after I called the ambulance, a small mercy for which I was undyingly grateful. I wasn’t judging her. I just didn’t need a visual of what the future held in store for me fifty years from now.
“Gotta go, babe,” I said to Chloe. “Rose needs me. I’ll see you soon.”
A gorgeous blond paramedic with green eyes and a face so chiseled it could cut glass gestured me to the side while his two equally hot companions crouched down to check out the almost naked dude on the floor—I’d thrown a tea towel over his hips for the sake of modesty.
“What happened?” he
asked.
“My basement suite flooded this morning.” I smoothed down my hair, acutely conscious that I’d come upstairs with a bad case of bedhead and wearing only PJ shorts and a ratty Chicago Bears sweatshirt. “I woke up with my stuff floating past my bed, so I came upstairs to tell Rose. She gave me keys to her place when I moved in so I could check in on her from time to time.”
He smiled, which I took as a good sign. Maybe he liked curvy South Asian girls with long, matted dark brown hair and a little extra lip fuzz because they hadn’t had time for the morning groom. Or maybe he was just a Bears fan.
“Unfortunately, I walked in on her and her boyfriend doing it on the couch.” The visual had been bad enough, but the cost of the extra therapy I’d need to undo the trauma of what I’d seen was beyond imagining.
“Doing what?” he asked.
“You know . . .”
Respect was the guiding principle of my family. Respect for parents. Respect for aunties. Respect for elders. With respect drilled into me from birth, I couldn’t bring myself to use the S word when it came to describing the intimate relations of two seniors. But what word could I use? Why did the paramedic have to be so sexy? Did he wear contacts or were his eyes really that vivid green? Was that a medical device in his pocket? I quickly shut down the runaway train of random thought process that was the bane of my existence.
“Boning.” The word dropped from my lips before I could catch it.
His finger froze on the tablet he was using to record my information. “Boning?”
“Okay. Fine. Sex,” I said quickly. “They were having sex. On the couch. Naked. Curtain ties were involved. And a curtain rod. I also saw a can of whipped cream, which I should really put back in the fridge so it doesn’t spoil.” I leaned in close, lowered my voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “I didn’t know that position was possible after the age of forty. The dude really knew his stuff. I guess that makes sense if you’ve been doing it for eighty-plus years minus maybe fifteen or so. Of course, I can only guess when he lost his virginity. I didn’t have sex for the first time until I was twenty.”
His eyes glazed over, a telltale sign that I’d overshared.
“Name?” he asked.
“Simi Chopra. Currently single.”
“I meant his name.”
I bit back a grimace.
Why couldn’t he have been plain or even average? I could never speak in coherent sentences when a dude was too good-looking. “To be honest, she has so many boyfriends, I can’t keep track of their names. She usually goes for younger men—fifties to seventies and occasionally forties if they’re having an early midlife crisis. She said the octo—and nonagenarians usually have performance issues—although from what I saw, this dude is an exception. I kinda liked the last guy she was seeing. He runs the Lincoln Park 10K Run for the Zoo every year. He’s super fit and has a six-pack, although I did wonder if it might just be his ribs poking out because he only eats raw, especially grass. She liked his stamina, but she got annoyed at meal times because he kept running out to the backyard to graze.”
“Would anyone like tea?” Rose had gone to change when the paramedics arrived and was now wearing a tropical print dress with a giant pink belt cinched around her waist and a pair of matching heels. Rose was in theater and still performed onstage. She loved loud colors and bold prints because they matched her personality.
“Maybe not the best time,” I called out. “What’s this one’s name?”
“Stan,” she said. “I don’t know that much about him. I met him in a bar last week after a show and we’ve been hitting the mattress hard ever since. He’s eighty-eight with the stamina of a man in his fifties. It was nice being with someone mature for a change.”
The paramedic coughed, choked before asking, “How did he wind up on the floor?”
“I walked in and scared him,” I said. “Rose was on the couch. Sort of. She saw me and screamed. Stan jumped off her. Well, it was sort of a slow push away followed by a concomitant drop elsewhere. Not that I was looking, but your eyes have to go somewhere, and mine went there, and then I immediately wished they could be somewhere else.”
“I’m not here to judge,” he said, shaking his head in a way that belied his words.
I could see my chances of getting laid in the back of his ambulance were quickly disappearing. “He lost his balance trying to get up,” I continued. “Then he fell and hit his head on the coffee table. I called 911 and checked to make sure he was breathing with a makeup
mirror.” I hesitated, waiting for an acknowledgment of my skill. None was forthcoming.
A rush of air cooled my heated cheeks before I heard the back door slam.
“I’m here,” Chloe called out. “I’ve got bleach and rubber gloves. The tarp’s in the car. Where’s the body? We could probably dump him in the river.” She froze behind the island counter that separated the kitchen from the living room. “You’re not alone.”
“Hello, darling.” Rose gave her a little wave. “I’m afraid I can’t offer you any tea. We’re on our way to the hospital.”
“That’s Chloe,” I told the paramedic. “She came to help.”
“Good thing we got here in time.” He jotted something down on his tablet.
Alarmed, I tried to read his screen upside down. “What are you writing?”
“A note to myself never to be alone in a house with you and your friend.” He tucked the tablet away, then held the door while the other paramedics carried Stan out on a gurney. Rose walked beside them, holding Stan’s hand.
“Is that a joke?” I called out. “I hope it’s a joke. Don’t forget I saved him by making sure he was breathing. If it wasn’t for me, he’d be mostly dead.”
Chloe hefted her bag and a Costco-sized container of bleach onto the counter, then ran over to wrap me in her arms. “Are you okay? Should I call your therapist?”
“No.” I shuddered against her. “If you just pour some of that bleach into my eyes, I’ll be fine. The things I had to see . . .”
Everything about Chloe is soft and warm, from her organic cotton sweaters to her fuzzy UGG boots. Her bright blue eyes, rosy cheeks, and long, bouncy blond curls are straight out of the Hallmark Christmas movie universe. I could totally see her moving to a small town to run a bakery and falling for the grumpy firefighter / police officer / sheriff who plans to spend Christmas alone until they get trapped together in a cabin during a snowstorm.
Instead, despite having a software engineering degree, she was working days on an IT help desk with a side hustle as a community college teacher and an evening side gig / passion project as a white hat hacker. Even then, between rent, bills, and student loan payments, she struggled to make ends meet every month.
“I’d better call the insurance company for Rose,” I said, pulling away. “And then I need to start cleaning.”
“Don’t you have to be at work?”
“Work” for me was a mid-level position as a pricing analyst for a food distribution company. My job involved sitting in a tiny cubicle inputting data into a computer forty hours a week. Mind-numbing boredom, constant distractions, and a lack of social interaction meant I had to drag myself to the office every morning. I was overqualified, underpaid, and the job had nothing to do with the degree I’d spent four years at college to acquire. I’d had to take on a side
gig at a candy store to help cover my bills, student loan payments, and the occasional evening out, which happened only if there was more than one hundred dollars in my checking account after paying back my friends for the Uber ride home I owed them from last week.
“I can’t leave,” I said. “I need to bail out the water, wait for the emergency plumber, call the insurers, and then I should really go to the hospital to make sure Rose is okay. I also need to salvage my stuff and let my parents know I’m moving back home until everything is sorted.” My brain was already in hyperdrive, setting off a rush of endorphins. There was nothing I liked better than having too much to do.
“You’ll get fired,” Chloe said. “They’ve already given you two warnings.”
“It was going to happen anyway.” I’d changed jobs frequently since graduation, struggling to find something that inspired my passion and utilized the skills I’d acquired for my business degree. I had too much energy, a short attention span, and a low boredom threshold. I needed to be moving. I needed constant activity and fast deadlines. If I had fifteen things to focus on at once, I was golden. If I had to sit in a cubicle doing repetitive tasks while faced with constant distractions, I had to work twice as hard as my colleagues just to keep up. Chloe said I was like a duck, appearing to swim effortlessly, but paddling furiously under the surface.
“You could ask for more hours at the candy store,” Chloe suggested.
“I’ve already gained five pounds. If I worked more hours, I’d need a whole new wardrobe.” I loved selling candy at Westfield Shopping Mall. I loved the chaos and the crowds. I loved that the owner had seen right away that I could manage the store alone—cash, stock, window displays, shoplifters, suppliers, kids, and tourists. It was a high I never got with my office jobs. Or maybe it was the sugar rush . . .
“I’d better get to work if I’m not needed for body cleanup,” Chloe said. “We can chat tonight.”
“I’ll definitely need some cheering up after I tell my parents all my bad news: I almost killed Rose’s boyfriend, I lost my apartment and my job, I might have to declare bankruptcy, and I’m moving back home.”
“Just don’t tell them you’re still single,” she warned.
“Of course not. They'd disown me.”
TWO
What do you mean you need to move back home?” My mother’s voice reverberated around the family kitchen, making my sugar hangover one thousand times worse. I’d tried to sneak in the back door after spending the evening helping Rose with her insurance paperwork over a bucket of fried chicken, three bags of candy, and Murder, She Wrote. But, of course, they’d caught me.
“It’s just until my apartment dries out,” I said. “I promise you’ll not even know I’m around.”
My parents live in a modest raised four-bedroom ranch house on a quiet cul-de-sac in Evanston, or “little Chicago” as no one in Evanston calls our leafy urban suburb. Mom is an English professor at Northwestern University, which is only a few blocks away from our house. Dad has an easy commute on the Metra to his custom tailor shop in the Loop. After my three brothers and I moved out, Dad turned the twins’ bedroom into a yoga studio and kept mine as it was for guests and/or my inevitable return.
“We’ll have to make a shower schedule if we all have to be at work by nine a.m.” My dad looked up from his glossy men’s fashion magazine. He was a master tailor and owner of Chopra Custom Clothiers, so he had to stay on top of all the trends. He’d learned his skills from his father and together they’d built the business into one of the top custom tailors in Chicago, dressing everyone from celebrity chefs to movie stars and even a few Chicago Bears.
“Why do people have to start work at nine a.m.?” I wondered out loud. “Who decided on a nine-to-five workday? Don’t people realize that workers are much more productive if they get enough sleep? We’re not machines. Everyone has a different biorhythm. I could have been twice as efficient if my boss had let me start at eleven a.m. and work until seven p.m.”
I knew I’d given myself away when my father raised an eyebrow. “Could have been?”
“I’m not working there anymore,” I admitted. “I didn’t vibe with the idea of increasing the efficiency of moving unhealthy food products through the supply chain. There’s an obesity epidemic in children.”
“What about the candy store?” My mother frowned. “How does that ‘vibe’ . . . ” She said the word with an extra dose of sarcasm. In her line of work, words mattered. “. . . with your beliefs?”
“We’re not offering it as real food,” I said. “Everyone knows it’s just sugar.”
“Juice is pure sugar,” my father said. “Twenty-five spoons in one glass of orange juice. Imagine that.” My father was a health nut. He got up at five a.m. every morning to run, followed by a half hour of yoga and twenty minutes of meditation. For breakfast he had a wheatgrass protein shake and an egg white omelet and then it was a protein bowl for lunch, if he had time to eat at all.
“Who cares about juice, Rohan? She lost another job. We’ll never get her married now.” My mother turned to me, huffing her displeasure. “What did you do this time?”
“Nothing. The office was a soul-sucking wasteland of despair. I was overqualified. The work was mind-numbing, and the open plan office meant there were too many distractions. I couldn’t have picked a worse possible job.”
“How are you going to earn a living?” she demanded. “How will you find a husband?”
Some people had a great relationship with their parents. I did everything I could to avoid spending too much time with mine. Not because they were bad people—they were kind, charitable, generous, and well liked in the community—but because they couldn’t help judging me and meddling in my life. Before college, there was the pressure to become a doctor, lawyer, or engineer. Then the resigned sighs when I decided to get a business degree, and the
seeming despair after graduation when I couldn’t land anything other than entry-level office jobs. Even worse was my marital status. Twenty-nine years old and unmarried. I couldn’t have been more of a disappointment.
“I’ll take extra hours at the candy store, and I’ll look for another job, but it will take time.” I grabbed a fluffy pav from the dish on the table. My mom was an amazing cook—an irony since my dad was not a big eater. Luckily my brothers had no food issues and could empty the pantry when they came home to visit.
“How much time?” Dad wanted to know.
“I don’t know. I applied for over ninety jobs last time, and the supply chain company was my only option. I really don’t want another entry-level position. I want to be able to use my degree, but I need money. I might just take another retail job while I’m looking.”
“Don’t dismiss entry-level positions so quickly,” Dad said. “Do you know how many CEOs started at entry-level positions? Doug McMillon loaded trucks at Walmart and worked his way to the top.”
“So now she’s going to load trucks at Walmart?” Mom was already up and tidying the kitchen. She was a woman who got things done, rushing through the house like a hurricane, ...
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2024 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
