“How have I never heard about this?”
“Well, we don’t exactly advertise.” He chuckled and focused his attention on my hand. “There’s a little bleeding, but it looks like your stitches are all intact. I’ll just clean and rewrap it.”
“Thank you,” I whispered. “So how are you here?”
“Here in my flat?” He raised a sarcastic eyebrow.
“No.” I rolled my eyes. “I mean, how did you end up here… in this country?”
“I needed to get away from home for a bit.” I tilted my head and narrowed my eyes in suspicion, which caused him to add, “Not for legal reasons. I just needed a break, a holiday. I honestly don’t know why I ended up in Georgia. I found myself at Heathrow, booking the next plane bound to America. It just so happened to be headed to Atlanta. If I’d shown up twenty minutes later, I would have ended up in New York. Maybe it was fate. I was only planning to stay for a few weeks, but then I met George and Harriet. You know the rest. They sponsored a work visa for me, and I’ve been here for the last couple of years.”
“Wow,” I breathed. At the Laramie Firm, we’d had to securework visas for some of our clients. They aren’t easy to come by—or inexpensive.
“When I met George and Harriet, I wasn’t in a good place. I needed an escape. They took me in and gave my life purpose again.”
“What were you escaping from?”
At my question, he smoothed his fingertips over my freshly bandaged palm but didn’t meet my eye. “A life that wasn’t really mine.”
“What?” I spluttered, not satisfied with his cryptic response, especially after the embarrassing, painkiller-sponsored, rambling confession I’d made in the greenhouse.
“It’s a story for another day.” He shot me a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “I think you’ve had enough excitement for the last twenty-four hours.”
He definitely had a point. Between slicing my hand open, sharing a physician with a goat, passionate kissing in the greenhouse, twilight investigations, and discovering that my grandparents were a cross between Patch Adams and Nino Brown, I definitely needed some time to process everything. A few years would have been nice, but I didn’t have a few years. I’d have to make a decision about the farm eventually. Despite feeling as though I’d been given more information than a person should be able to handle in a lifetime, I knew I didn’t have nearly enough to make an informed decision. There were still so many questions.
I nodded and rose to my feet with Dan’s help.
“I should go to bed… in my own room.” I wasn’t sure why I added the last part, but the mischievous smirk that Dan was trying to suppress told me that he had a clue. I turned and quickly hustled toward the staircase leading to the main part of the house.
“Hey, Emma,” Dan called to me. I turned to face him. “When you weren’t trying to kill me, it was nice having you visit. I’d be happy to have you again.”
I tucked my bottom lip between my teeth to bite back a chuckle as my heart pounded in my chest.
“Well, thank you for being such a gracious host.”
He answered me with a tiny bow. I took two steps toward the staircase before turning around to face him.
“You’re still not off the hook for lying to me.” He opened his mouth to protest. “You told me the door had fertilizer and equipment behind it.” I crossed my arms and raised an eyebrow.
“Technically, that was true. I simply left out the other contents of the room.”
“A lie of omission is still a lie,” I said.
“You’re right,” he conceded. “I’m sorry, but I hope one day you’ll understand why.”
“We’ll see.” I turned and slowly made my way out of Dan’s apartment. Though I couldn’t see them, I could feel his eyes following me as I left.
The bane of my existence, whom I’d named King Richard, woke me up again, letting out earsplitting screeches outside my window. I sat up and glanced outside in the direction of the chicken coop to see him standing on top of the henhouse, singing the song of his people whether anyone wanted to hear it or not. I could just make out his multicolored body with a shock of red on the top of his head. He had to be at leastfifty yards away, but he sounded like he was in my bedroom. With the thousands of dollars I’d spent on farming equipment at the Feed ’n’ Farm, the idea of purchasing earplugs hadn’t even crossed my mind.
I stayed in bed long after he’d quieted down, wondering what my next move was. My life had become an out-of-control roller coaster, and I had no idea how to stop it. How was I so adept at solving other people’s issues but completely hopeless when it came to my own? Even if I wanted to ask for help—which I didn’t, despite the voices of Max, Becks, and now Dan warning me about the dangers of trying to do everything myself—who would I even ask?
Hi, I just inherited an illegal marijuana farm that provides potentially lifesaving treatments for people all over the world but could also send a lot of good people to prison—possibly including me—for a really long time. What do you think I should do?
The scream of frustration I let out could’ve rivaled King Richard’s fiercest crows if I hadn’t covered my face with a pillow to muffle the sound. This was a complete disaster, but I wasn’t going to solve any of my problems by staying in bed all day.
Dan wasn’t in the kitchen when I went downstairs, but there was a white piece of paper stuck to coffee machine covered in Dan’s handwriting.
Good morning, Batgirl,
