Always Emily

“More to the point,” he said in his soft, sensible voice, “what are you doing here? I was in another lineup and saw you get ill.”

He turned to the guards and handed them his identification. “I am her doctor. May I check her out?”

The first guard scowled, but the second returned Damiri’s ID. “It’s okay. I know him. He is my sister’s doctor.”

Dr. Damiri felt Emily’s forehead. “High fever,” he murmured. He examined her throat, pressed on her stomach and asked endless questions, at the end of which, he pronounced, “Malaria.”

“What?” She hiccupped a tiny sob, playing the pity card, willing to do whatever it took to save her skin. Maybe they would let her go through without checking her bag. “But I just want to go home.”

To the guards, the doctor said, “It isn’t infectious. She can fly.”

To Emily, he instructed, “It won’t be a comfortable trip home, but you can make it. You will have fever. Chills. Great fatigue.” He smiled gently. “Maybe more vomiting.”

“My brain wants to pound out of my skull.”

“Yes, headache, too.” He wrote on a pad of paper he pulled from his briefcase. “In my estimation, you have uncomplicated malaria. There’s nothing you can do but ride it out. In America, go to your doctor and get a prescription for this medication and take it to prevent a reoccurrence.”

“That’s it?”

“Yes. That’s all you can do.” He handed her a small vial of pills. “Take these.”

“What are they?”

“Anti-nausea tablets. I always carry them when I fly, but you need them today more than I do.”

With a wink, he was gone and she was alone with two unhappy guards and a stolen artifact in her luggage.

Emily stood, her brain so foggy she didn’t know whether to come or go. “I can return to my apartment and get better, and then take a different flight another day.”

For the second time, the guards ignored her suggestion.

“The doctor has cleared you to fly. You will go today.” He reached for her bag. No!

She retrieved her cosmetic bag, leaning close to breathe in his face. “I vomited. I have to brush my teeth before I get on the flight.”

Screwing up his nose, he waved her away.

In the washroom, she entered a stall and locked the door. The washroom might have cameras, but the stalls wouldn’t. After she pulled the prayer book out of the bag, she took a moment to examine it, a little beauty in good condition. The papyrus had yellowed with age and the tiny paintings had faded, but it had obviously been cared for and well-loved by its owner.

She dumped her small toiletry bottles out of the zipped plastic bag she’d stored them in, put the book into it, secured the edges together and stuffed it into her bra, protecting it from the sweat of her fever.

After using the toilet, she washed her hands and made a show of brushing her teeth carefully, because she needed to, but also in case they watched her. She chewed a mint from her makeup kit.

Back in the room, the guards had emptied her bags and were searching every object, every item of clothing. Shivering, she picked up a pashmina she’d bought on her travels and wrapped it around her throat, dropping the ends to cover the slight bulge in her bra.

Thanks to Dr. Damiri’s list of symptoms, they wouldn’t find her behavior suspicious. She hoped.

One of the guards took her makeup bag and searched it. The other left the room, presumably to search the bathroom. When he came back, he gave the guard a surreptitious shake of his head.

She was allowed to repack her belongings, while feeling an inexorable sense of losing control. Not for long. She would fix this. Somehow.

They led her to the departure lounge and left her there. This was too wrong. Taking an artifact out of its native country, out of its home, went against every ethic, every part of her moral code.

Nausea rose into her throat, and she took one of Dr. Damiri’s pills.

She had no choice but to leave. At the moment, self-preservation was more important than ethics. And didn’t that suck? The prayer book belonged here, not thousands of miles away in Colorado.

Jean-Marc had known exactly what he was doing. Her rat of an ex-boyfriend had ruined her plan for a clean break. The prayer book tied her to him.

An hour later, she was on the first of many flights that would take her home, curled under a blanket with chills that had nothing to do with inflight air-conditioning, and everything to do with a smuggled artifact burning a hole in her chest wall, so far up shit creek without a paddle she wasn’t sure how she would recover.

CHAPTER TWO

EMILY CAME HOME to Accord angry, railing against men and their perfidy, and scared.

She’d returned to answer the toughest questions of her life—who was Emily Jordan? Who had she allowed herself to become? And how did she find her way back to being a better person?

And what on earth was she going to do with the rest of her life?

The hand she ran across her forehead came away damp. She’d been sweating for three days. The fever had to break soon.

She stood in front of her father’s house. Another year come and gone and nothing to show for it. She didn’t even have her own home.

She wrapped her arms around her violin, pressing the case hard against her breastbone, anything to stop the shudders that wracked her body.

Cars lined the long driveway to her dad’s house, a white sanctuary in a sea of green conifers, lit up like a birthday cake. As it should be. Today was his birthday—the big five-O—and she didn’t even have a birthday present for him. Was I always this self-centered? Then again, she was sick and had other things on her mind.

Where were the years going? How did her father get to be fifty already? How could Emily herself possibly be thirty-one, and what did she have to show for it?

At her age, her dad had been a parent for twelve years, had already made his first few million and had owned a big house in Seattle.

Emily had the knapsack on her back, the violin she clutched to her chest like a treasured doll and a career as an archaeologist she would never pursue again.

She’d left the dry, dusty heat of the Sudan behind as though she were a mummy shedding her wrappings, one difficult twist at a time.

Too bad it felt as if those wrappings still clung to her, like a ribbon stretching between Colorado and the Middle East, sticking to her pores like the sand of the desert during a windstorm.

She imagined one long thread of decaying but tough fabric winding its way across the earth from her to Jean-Marc. With that one artifact he’d hidden in her bag, he’d bound her to him.

“Get lost,” she whispered to the mummy wrapping. It didn’t listen. Resigned to that tug toward a man and a part of the world she had rejected, she opened the front door and stepped into a wall of sound, light and warmth, of conviviality and happiness—the most beautiful, welcoming homecoming she could imagine. And it felt all wrong.

Oh, the things she’d done. She didn’t deserve these people.

“Emily!” The voice belonged to Laura, who rushed down the hall toward her with arms spread wide. If Dad was fifty, that made Laura fifty-three. Wasn’t it a crime for a woman her age to look so good when Emily felt like crap?

Laura had a body men drooled over, albeit a little thicker around the middle than it used to be. Her chestnut hair, threaded now with silver but still thick, fell past her shoulders and framed a face with a few more wrinkles.

A crocheted sweater fell off one shoulder, revealing freckles that dotted pale skin, and a filmy flowered skirt floated around her ankles. Earth mother.