I glanced at the incoming text on my phone, and Tessa’s eyes followed mine. “So, is she on her way?”
“Just parked. Looks like she should be here in a couple minutes.”
My fiancée, Special Agent Lien-hua Jiang, was a profiler and one of my coworkers on the Bureau’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, where I split my time between consulting on cases nationwide and my teaching responsibilities at the Academy.
Tessa set down her root beer, touched her hair back again, and quietly studied the cumulus clouds piled soft and high in the sky above us. I knew her well enough to guess that a poem about the sky, perhaps its contradictory qualities of tranquillity and ferocity, was already forming in her head.
We’d met when she was fifteen and living with her mother, Christie Ellis, the woman I was seeing at the time. Christie died tragically and unexpectedly of breast cancer five months after we were married — less than a year after we met. Tessa’s dad had never been in the picture, so I ended up with custody of her, and at thirty-five, I’d suddenly become the sole caregiver of a teenage girl I hadn’t raised and barely knew.
In the wake of Christie’s death, Tessa, who kept her mother’s last name of Ellis, had become withdrawn and started cutting. I was clueless as to how to connect with her, and things were really rough between us for a long time. Fortunately over the last year or so they’d improved, and now she wasn’t just the girl I’d ended up with when her mom died, but the daughter I fiercely loved, would do anything for, and couldn’t imagine living without.
Over time, the “step” part of stepfather and stepdaughter had disappeared from our vocabulary, and I wasn’t upset about that at all.
She took a deep breath and then steered the conversation in an entirely different direction. “So anyway, our assistant principal, you know, Thacker? He asked me to write something for graduation.”
“Write something?”
“Yeah…” She hesitated. “Sort of like a speech.”
“What does that mean: ‘sort of like a speech’?”
“A speech.”
“Ah.” Earlier this year she’d thrown up in her speech class just getting up in front of a dozen classmates. I couldn’t imagine how speaking in front of a thousand people would work out. “And does that mean write one or give one?”
“Well, both. But there’s no way I’m gonna give a speech, and there’s no way I’m gonna write one that I’m not gonna give.”
Over the winter we’d moved here to DC from Denver, and although her stellar GPA had transferred, according to school policy, since she hadn’t attended here at least one year, she wasn’t in the running for valedictorian. However, her near-perfect SAT score was something the administration couldn’t ignore.
She’d found two grammatical errors while taking the test (a missing comma and a misuse of the past tense of “lay”) and had purposely gotten those two questions wrong as a way of protesting “having to proofread their stupid test for them.”
She could’ve gotten a free ride at nearly any college in the country, but she still had no idea where she wanted to go and still hadn’t applied anywhere. As more application deadlines slipped past, I’d been pressing her to at least send out some applications, but she was procrastinating and it’d become a sore spot for both of us. However, for now, I left all that alone.
“How did that go over, then? When you told Thacker you weren’t going to write it?”
“Well, I haven’t. Exactly.”
“You haven’t.”
“Not exactly.
“So, not at all.”
“Um, yeah.” She let out a breath. “Thing is, I was gonna do it on Monday — tell him, you know? But…”
She waited a long time, and finally I said, “But?”
“But there’s someone who I think… well, there’s this extenuating circumstance.”
“You mean there’s a guy.”
She looked at me incredulously. “I thought you were supposed to be the one who’s always gathering all this evidence before drawing any conclusions? Aren’t you the guy who says we’re never supposed to assume, but ‘hypothesize, evaluate, test, and revise’?”
“So it’s not a guy?”
“No, it is, but that’s not the…” She sighed with her eyeballs. “Never mind.”
I wasn’t quite sure what the connection was between a boy and her doing the speech, but I took what she’d just said to mean that in some way writing it might impress him. “Is this the guy you were telling me about last week, by any chance? Aiden Ryeson?”
She was quiet.
Normally she went for guys three or four years older than her, and I was actually relieved this boy was in her class. “He’s that cute, huh?”
She shrugged. Then suddenly her eyes grew huge. “You so better not do a background check on him. I seriously hate it when you do that.”
I’d only done a few of those on her potential boyfriends; it wasn’t like it was a habit or anything. “You know I have nothing against you dating respectable guys,” I told her somewhat evasively.
“Uh-huh. And that must be why you wear your gun when you open the door to let any of ’em in, and why you always happen to offhandedly-on-purpose mention that you track serial killers and sexual offenders for a living and that if you set your sights on someone he’s going down.”
“I don’t think I ever put it quite like that.”
That brought an eyebrow raise.
“Just looking out for you.”
“Uh-huh.” Her attention shifted past my shoulder toward the forest, where I now saw Lien-hua emerging from the woods on the walking trail.
Even from here her Asian poise and athletic grace were striking. For her it couldn’t have been one of the milder martial arts; it had to be kickboxing. We spar sometimes, but I try to avoid it as much as possible — even though I’d never admit that to her. Three years younger than I am, she’s beautiful, intuitive, cool under pressure, and I’d been attracted to her from the moment our paths first crossed eight months after Christie’s death.
Dressed in black jeans and a green button-down shirt, Lien-hua smiled as she approached, and after a quick kiss she took a seat beside me.
Over the last week she’d been in London teaching a class for Scotland Yard on criminal profiling, and apart from Skyping, we hadn’t seen each other since last Saturday. After bringing us up to speed on her trip, she asked me, “So, did you finish sending them out?”
“The invitations?”
“Yes.” Absentmindedly, she massaged her engagement ring with the thumb and forefinger of her right hand.
“I was going to mail them out yesterday, but when I stopped by the printing place to pick them up I noticed they’d spelled your name wrong: Jang instead of Jiang. They promised to have the new ones printed up by Monday.”
She mulled that over. “We should’ve mailed those out weeks ago, Pat.” She politely left out the fact that I’d been the one responsible for getting them out earlier, but we were pretty much behind in everything, and she hadn’t even decided on a maid or matron of honor yet, so I didn’t feel quite so bad.
“It should be okay,” I said. “Everyone who matters already knows when we’re getting married. We could just not send the invites out at all. That way we could weed out all the—”
“Careful now, dear. Be nice.”
“I’m just saying.”
I rummaged through the picnic basket for the rest of our food and overheard Lien-hua ask Tessa quietly, “So, did he ask…?”
I caught sight of Tessa shaking her head.
“Don’t worry,” Lien-hua had lowered her voice to a whisper. “He will.”
Did he ask…?
Ah, prom.
Yes. A week from today.