Page 12 of Shadowing You

It was time to find Mei Lin.

CHAPTER FIVE

Mei Lin had hopped onto a local train, which had deposited her in downtown Changsha.

She’d used some of Ethan’s money to purchase new clothes and had changed into jeans, a gray sweater, and a black wool jacket completely different from the royal blue puffy one she’d worn years before. She’d added a wool hat and a face mask, hoping to blend in with the locals. The pollution was bad enough that face masks had been common even before the pandemic.

There were cameras everywhere. They hung from traffic signals, from building corners, from the eaves over storefronts. All she could do was try to keep her face averted.

Lu Feng had known she was on the train. Had he tracked her ticket, her ID, her phone…?

Her phone.

The last thing she wanted was to discard it, her only chance of reaching Ethan. But if it was being tracked…

She tossed it into a trash can and heard the heavy clunk when it hit the bottom.

She’d find a way to reach Ethan. There had to be a way.

But how? Lu Feng had found her. A system somewhere must have alerted a person in the government, who’d alerted him.

Unless the government was after her?

No, that didn’t make sense, considering the warden who’d released Mei Lin worked for the government. Why would the government free her and then try to capture her again?

Policies come from many doors. Her grandmother used to say that about bureaucracy, about how one group was doing one thing, another group doing the opposite. That had never felt more true. One door had opened for her while another was trying to lock her in again.

Or maybe Lu Feng had bribed someone to help him track her.

There was no way to know for sure.

She kept pace with the foot traffic. Not too fast, not too slow. She was a woman on her way somewhere, unremarkable, uninteresting.

The afternoon moved toward evening. The streets shifted from commercial to residential and back again. She registered none of it, really, just the rhythm of footsteps, the shape of the crowd. Children going home from school. Workers on their evening commute. Young people looking for fun. They were a constant stream of feet on the sidewalk.

She’d caught sight of a clock in a pharmacy window earlier and, reading the time, had stopped to watch the minutes tick away.

Ethan would be getting off his plane now.

Taking the train to Kowloon Station.

Waiting on the platform for her to emerge.

If only she’d made it. She would have stepped off. She’d have seen him. She’d have told herself not to run, but she would have run. She would have thrown herself into his arms.

He’d lift her off her feet like he always did, hold her close. Maybe he wouldn’t want to put her down again. Would he kiss her?

Did she want him to?

He’d tug on her short hair and lie, saying it looked good. Or maybe he’d think she was beautiful no matter how skinny, how sallow, how ugly. That was love, wasn’t it?

If only she were with him now instead of wandering aimlessly around a city where she didn’t know a soul.

How long would he wait for her? When he was convinced she wasn’t on the train, what would he do next?

Would he go to a hotel? Wait for word? Fly back to America?

Suddenly, she’d realized what she was doing—just standing on the sidewalk like a fool. She’d put her head down and kept walking.