“I want my mommy,” Anna suddenly whimpered.
And she did. She wanted to go home to her mom and her dad, to Beth and Tony and the boys, to her family who missed her and loved her and who still might not accept that she was the first divorced Jensen in the history of the Jensens, but who had to love her anyway, because that’s what family did.
“Don’t you dare leave over Christmas and not come back,” Kaci said. “I need you here. You hear me? Don’t you take the easy way out on me now.”
Anna managed a hiccup that could’ve passed as a laugh. “There’s nothing easy about my parents’ couch.”
“Oh, sugar.” Kaci dabbed at her eyes. “That’s the best news I’ve heard all day.”
They spent the rest of the night alternately crying and laughing. By the time Kaci left, Anna was absolutely positive she didn’t have a single emotion left in her body.
But then Jules called in sick Monday morning.
And Shirley came tearing through the lab bellowing about certifying the last shipment from EFA Inc., their newest vendor. Anna lost her temper and yelled back that it hadn’t been delivered yet, and Shirley told her to find it anyway. Not even the paperwork with the backup printout from the samples inventory database could convince her.
So she spent the day in a stupor, tired of the lab, tired of running tests, tired of her life. She found the paperwork Jules had misfiled and had a sample delivered from the storage tanks, then set everything up to run the test in the morning. She’d delivered the final results of the day to Shirley’s office when she noticed something wrong in Jules’s cube.
One of the stacks of magazines had fallen over, which was situation normal.
But the sample container tucked in the corner behind the magazines wasn’t.
“Dammit, Jules,” she muttered.
Sure enough, it was the missing sample from this morning.
Now she had two samples. Great.
She grit her teeth and carried it to the samples storagelocker.
But then she thought about having another row with Shirley tomorrow when the tests hadn’t been run. She heaved a sigh, went to grab her protective gear again, and suited up to run the analysis.
Three full runs later, Anna felt as though she’d swallowed the stuff. Her stomach burned with a nauseous twinge that went beyondI’m going to be sickand straight tothis must be hell.
Because the container was labeled 50/50 HRJ biofuel, delivered Friday, from EFA Inc., but the contents were most definitelynot.
Not in the container from Jules’s cube.
Not in the container that the field had trucked in today and that had been waiting all weekend for clearance to go into storage.
But those two containers matched perfectly.
Anna stumbled back to the storage locker. Her heart wanted to quit, and the air in the lab was too heavy to breathe. She’d used the fume hood properly and nothing smelled out of the ordinary, but the knowledge that something was very, very wrong made her throat and her tongue and her nasal passages swell with panic.
She flung open the storage locker, scanning last month’s inventory until she found the previous sample from EFA, Inc.
It tested wrong too.
Completely at odds with the data in the inventory system.
She’d run a test wrong, she’d missed a step, she’d added a wrong test solution, the timing was wrong.
She’d done something wrong.
Because the other option was that the problem wasn’t in the testing but in the fuel, the fuellabeled and approvedby Jules, the fuel cleared for use in the planes she could hear flying overhead and cleared to be stored in the same tanks as the other biofuel.
Anna wrenched her coat off and fled the lab.
She needed fresh air.
