Page 36 of Shadowing You

Three days ago, she’d shared a thin pad with two women in a room overflowing with strangers. Today, she was here.

Maybe she’d actually died in her sleep and this was some sort of bizarre world between life and death. Except if she were dead, she wouldn’t need a toilet.

“Is there a bathroom?”

Ethan smiled. “Roam around and find out.”

It seemed wrong to roam as if she belonged. She left her shoes at the door and headed down a hallway.

The bathroom was weirder than the living room. The floor was marble and…heated? She wiggled her toes against the warm, smooth surface. There was a tub and a shower stall that would have fit three of her cellmates. She used the toilet, washed her hands, and stared at the woman in the mirror.

The old Mei Lin might have belonged here. The one in the mirror, with her sunken cheeks and dull chopped hair, definitely did not.

When she came out, Ethan was leaning against the sofa, arms crossed.

“This place is⁠—”

“We need to talk.”

She stopped halfway across the room. “About⁠—?”

“Where have you been?”

She looked down the hallway behind her. “The…bathroom?”

His face flushed red, and his jaw clenched. “Where have you been for the last six years?”

That question was even more bizarre than this luxury apartment. “What do you mean? Where do you think I’ve been?”

His mouth opened. Closed. He crossed the room, stopping a few feet from her. “Just tell me.” The words were quieter, though he wasn’t calm. He was fighting a battle to keep his emotions inside. “Were you in Fuyin this whole time? Gathering evidence?”

“What do you…?” Slowly, a fog lifted in her mind.

“Where. Have. You. Been?” Ethan dropped the words like landmines.

“You really don’t know?”

“How would I? You quit calling.”

The warden’s voice came back. “No record…. A clerical error.”

Six years, swiped off Mei Lin’s life like condensation from a glass.

If there’d been no record of her in prison, and there’d been no record of her arrest… Then there’d been no record of her. At all.

Even if Ethan had looked, how could he have found her?

The fog was lifting, but her world was spinning. She walked past him and lowered herself to the edge of the sofa.

They hadn’t known where she was. Not her parents. Not her brother. Not Ethan.

All those nights on that concrete bunk, cataloging the people who had forgotten her—she’d assumed they knew. That they’d weighed her against their own safety, or convenience, and chosen the easier thing.

But they hadn’t known.

Oh, Lord.

How had that never occurred to her? She’d been so desperate, so lost, so heartbroken, and all that time…