Four
Gideon frowned, reaching out to shut off his alarm. Drowsiness still clung to him, a warm lassitude weighing down his muscles, and he wanted to savor it instead of drive it away. But that damn alarm.
“Damn it,” he grumbled, but instead of hitting the digital clock on his bedside table, he slapped air. No table. No clock. Hell, no bed.
He sat up, groaning at the pull of musclein his lower back. Tunneling his fingers through his hair, he dragged it back from his face, scanning the small room with a television, a long table against the far wall, a short row of gray metal lockers and the couch he was sprawled on.
The blackout.
Camille.
As if her name released a floodgate, the memories from the previous night poured forward. Serving Camille dinner. Talkingwith her. Kissing her. Being inside her. In response, his body stirred, hardening as image after image of her twisting and arching beneath him, taking him, flashed across his mind’s screen like an HD movie.
He whipped around, scanning the room with new eyes, searching for any sign of her. But only his clothes and the empty dinner plates littered the floor. No Camille.
Adrenaline streakedthrough his veins, and he snatched his pants from the floor, dragging them on. She couldn’t have gotten far. Weak morning light trickled into the room through the high window, so it still had to be pretty early. And with the house still locked down...
No, not locked down. For the first time, the low drone of the small refrigerator in the far corner reached his ears. Power had returned, whichmeant the blackout had ended. Still, how much of a head start could she have? He had to find her.
Just as he swept his shirt off the floor a Queen song erupted into the stifling room. It’d been this that he’d initially mistaken for his alarm, but it was his mom’s special ringtone. He strode the few steps required to recover the phone from beside the couch, arching his eyebrows in surprisethat it still had power.
Only 3 percent, he noted, swiping a thumb across the screen.
“Hey, Mom,” he said in greeting, fastening buttons as he spoke. “I have very little battery left, so I can’t talk long. But I’m okay—”
“Gideon,” she said, and her solemn tone cut him off. Anxiety and the first spike of fear speared his chest. He’d come to associate that particular note with one thing.And as she murmured, “It’s Olivia,” his guess proved correct.
Closing his eyes, he straightened his shoulders, bracing himself. “What happened?”
“She’s in the hospital. I had to take her in last night.” Her sigh echoed in his ear; the weariness and worry tore at him. “Gideon.” She paused. “She saw the news about Trevor Neal’s engagement.”
A familiar anger awakened in his chest, stretchingto life.
“I’m on my way.”
* * *
Gideon exited his sister’s private room on the behavioral health floor of Mercy Hospital & Medical Center, quietly shutting the door behind him.
Behavioral health. Fancy words for psychiatric ward.
Scrubbing a hand down his face, he strode through the hall to the waiting area where his mother and her parents perched on chairs. The three of themzeroed in on him as soon as he entered the small space with the connected seating and mounted television. God, it reeked of sadness and exhaustion. The same emotions etched in his mother’s and grandparents’ faces.
“How is she?” his mom asked, rising.
Frustration, grief and anger choked him, and for a moment he couldn’t speak. Instead he gathered his mother in his arms and hugged her close.Ai Knight had been his rock—his family’s rock—since his dad died when Gideon was nine years old. Though his grandparents were here now, that hadn’t always been the case. When she’d married Gideon’s father, they’d disowned her. As immigrants from Kaiping who’d settled in Canada in the 1960s, they’d wanted their only daughter to marry a Chinese man from the “Four Counties,” not a Caucasian fromChicago. But Ai had, and after she’d moved to the US with him, she and her parents hadn’t spoken for almost ten years. But since then they’d reconciled, and his grandparents had even moved to Chicago to be closer to Ai and their grandchildren. Which Gideon was thankful for, since his father had been a foster child, and so his mother’s parents were the only extended family he and his sister had.
“Gideon?” his mother prompted.
Sighing, he released her. God, he hated seeing her here in this room, the gravity of her daughter’s illness weighing down her delicate but strong shoulders.
“Sleeping. They have her heavily sedated at the moment,” he replied. Which wasn’t much of an answer.
“How long will she be here?” his grandmother inquired, stretching her arm out and clasping herdaughter’s hand.
“I’m not sure, Po Po,” he said, using the Taishanese term for maternal grandmother. His grandfather—his gung gung—remained silent, but settled a hand on his wife’s thin knee. “The doctor said definitely the next seventy-two hours. Maybe more.”
They remained there, silent but connected through physical touch. After several moments, he squeezed his mom’s shoulder. “Can Italk to you out in the hall?”
