Brynn Kelly - A Risk Worth Taking

No, she really wasn’t winning the concentration battle. She heaved the document shut, the echoing slap sending a cow thundering across a neighboring field. Scraping the chair backward, she pressed her knuckles into the middle of her back and arched. For many months it’d felt like a bubble of air was trapped there. She’d writhed and wriggled, twisted and stretched, bent backward over innumerable sofas and chairs in a blur of rented cottages and apartments, but the satisfying pop just wouldn’t come. If Latif were alive he’d gather her in his arms and yank her tight around the ribs. Just the right spot, just the right angle, just the right pressure. Her back would crack, the tension would release, she’d take a deep breath, they’d kiss...

She gave up on the back crack. Wishful thinking. The bubble had been wedged there since she’d read the newsflash about “collateral damage” in a drone strike in Somalia and known by the snap in her heart what it meant.

Nineteen months since his death. Thirteen months since she’d become a witness in the case against Hyland and disappeared underground on a self-imposed protection program. Thirteen months of fleeing from hiding place to hiding place, living under a series of assumed names, rarely reaching more length or depth in her conversations than “un cappuccino, per favore,” “un café crème, s’il vous plaît,” “ich möchte etwas kaffee.” Her Continental grand tour, from Africa to France, then Switzerland, Slovakia, Croatia... She traced a finger around the lip of the coffee cup. Where had she gone after that? The Milan apartment? The former monastery near Barcelona? All private, secluded rentals that didn’t require ID. Cash up front to cover a couple of months’ rent for a “writing retreat.” All the time with that bubble lodged in her spine, that prickly sensation of being watched. She shuddered.

Still, she had no right to complain—about anything. How much would Latif love to come back for this one day, as hollow as it was? Sunshine, countryside, starlings... It would all be pretty cool to a dead person.

She shook a twig off her foot and hunkered into her scarf. La couleur de minuit. A memory triggered—crunching through leaves alongside the River Loire, the scarf around her neck, hand in hand with a man she shouldn’t have been hand in hand with. But his palm was dry and warm and rough, and his voice was deep and mellow, and her grief was raw, and his kiss was...

A man who shouldn’t return to her thoughts as often as he did. Like right now, virtually pulling up a chair alongside her and nuzzling her nape, murmuring phrases that hadn’t been covered by her French tutors, his Scottish lilt blending with his throaty French R .

She tugged the scarf free and twisted its smooth cotton length through one loose fist, silver threads flashing in the deep violet. Memory or fantasy? She’d been living in her head so long...

Either way, it was unfair to force Latif’s fading ghost to compete with the all-too-vivid memory of Jamie. And futile. Both were entombed in her past and would stay there. She hadn’t replaced Latif with Jamie. Jamie had been a...what? Fling? Escape? Lapse of judgment? All of the above? It might as well have happened in her imagination, except for the scarf he’d bought her from the market below the Château de Langeais and the voice in her head, and the very real confusion twisting beneath her ribs. If it wasn’t grief over Latif, it was guilt over what she’d felt for Jamie. Still felt.

Was that really a year ago?

Her phone alarm trilled through the Bluetooth speakers. The A-Team theme. She caught the phone as it vibrated off the wrought iron table, and swiped it silent, her heart skipping. The music restarted. The scooter had turned onto her road—a dead end she shared with a boutique family vineyard and an organic farm—triggering the first of her motion sensors. She threaded the scarf around her neck and knotted it. The engine tapered from a hum to a chug as it neared her long driveway. Probably nothing, but she gathered up the file and the coffee cup.

The scooter disappeared behind a strip of strutting cypresses, its engine slowing, the sound sharpening as it turned. Samira’s pocket jumped. The second alarm— MacGyver . The scooter was in her driveway. With a few more swipes, she muted the alarm and Carole, midclimax of “It’s Too Late.” She grabbed her backpack from where it leaned against a whitewashed wall just inside the French doors—packed, always packed. She hadn’t left as much as a toothbrush out in a year. The scooter whined as it climbed the gravel drive. Breath catching, she drew the doors closed from the outside, coaxing them flat with her fingernails, and stole behind the fat trunk of an oak across the courtyard.

Probably just mail for a previous tenant, but the fewer locals she encountered, the better. The only people who could feasibly mail her anything—and only through a trusted, off-the-radar intermediary—were her parents and the journalist who’d broken the story a year ago about Hyland’s connection to the LA attacks, Tess Newell. Her friend Tess Newell. Because she was seriously short of those. And they knew not to contact her unless it was vital. Too many ways to tip off the enemy.

She leaned against the trunk, tracking the scooter’s progress by its noise as it rolled into the turning bay and idled. Over the fence, several white cows stopped chewing and stared at Samira. She made a face but they didn’t get the hint. Footsteps crunched. A knock on the thin door frame, rattling the glass inserts. A pause. Another rap. More footsteps. The hiss of the rider reclaiming the seat, and then the scooter decrescendoed down the drive. Samira waited several minutes then pushed off the trunk, strands of her hair pinching as they caught on the bark. A white stamped envelope lay beside the door.

The alarms triggered in the opposite order as the scooter resumed its rounds. Oh, for a life that simple. Deliver the mail in the morning, idle away the afternoon and evening eating panzanella and drinking Chianti...

Huh. Was any life really like that, or was this a case of greener grass in the other field—or whatever that English saying was? Her English was getting rusty. Heck, her native Amharic was rusty. Even her Italian wasn’t getting a workout.

The letter was addressed to her—at least, to one of her aliases. She scraped her teeth over one side of her lower lip as she crouched over the plain business envelope. Typewritten label, Helsinki postmark. Her shoulders settled. The trusted friend of her mother who was acting as her emergency contact—a retired former diplomat who had no sympathy for Samira’s enemies but was comfortably off their radar. Samira sent the woman a breezy postcard in a fake name every time she changed address. Laughably old school, but the irony of the twenty-first century was that every government, agency and criminal organization was too busy tracking electronic communication to bother with opening people’s mail. If it didn’t require a cryptographic exchange, who gave a damn?

Samira perched on a courtyard chair and tore open the envelope. Inside was another envelope, plain and brown. Inside that, like a nest of matryoshka dolls, a thick postcard and an unaddressed and unsigned note in her mother’s handwriting, in Italian, for good measure. Always thinking of you. Kisses. It would have killed her mother to leave it at that but Hyland would be a fool not to have her parents under surveillance, even at the Ethiopian Embassy in Ottawa, and their diplomatic protection went only so far. Her mother would have had an aide drop it in a distant mailbox. Sudbury, according to the postmark. Samira had been there once—it had to be a five-hour drive from Ottawa. She ran her thumb over the familiar looped handwriting, the bonded paper thick and rough.