Come and Find Me Read Free

You only want what’s best for me. But let me be the judge of what’s best, would you?”
    Diana tried to drop Ashley’s hand but Ashley held fast. “You’re right,” Ashley said. “After all, you never judge me . . .” Ashley held on long enough for Diana to catch the irony.
    “You’re impossible,” Diana said, but she was laughing.
    “Sorry. I couldn’t resist. You stepped right into that.” Ashley bit her lip and stared past Diana at the locked door. “So, can I at least come in and watch your meeting? I’ll be quiet as a mouse.”
    “Ha! You have never, in your whole entire life, been remotely mouselike.”
    “Come on.” Ashley held Diana’s gaze. “Sweetie, seriously, don’t you think it’s time you let someone in?”
    This time, Diana blinked first.
    Ashley gave her a look of mock surprise. “Besides, leave me out here and I might open your package. Or even worse, neaten up the place.”
    As Ashley glanced about the living room, still furnished with pieces they’d grown up with, Diana registered the discarded clothing, cereal bowl with congealed oatmeal, a week-old mound of clean laundry that she’d never put away. On the mantel over the fireplace was a simple brass urn that contained Daniel’s ashes.
    “If you’re not careful,” Ashley added, “I might even fold your towels and sort your underwear.”
    Diana turned back to her office door. She started entering the security code again. The door clicked and swung open a few inches. She could feel Ashley peering in from behind her. It really was past time to let another human being into her inner sanctum.
    She held the door wide open and Ashley stepped past her and stood in the doorway.
    “Wow,” Ashley said. “I didn’t realize you broke through the wall. This is a great space.”
    Soon after she’d moved in, Diana had spent days swinging a sledgehammer, venting her rage on the wall between what had been her parents’ bedroom and her own. It was better than lying comatose for days on end, under a mound of Daniel’s clothing. By the end, she’d been coated with plaster dust, her face streaked pink from tears. She’d patched and painted the walls and ceiling, and pieced together oak flooring to fill the spots where wall had been ripped out.
    Ashley continued into the room. “Gorgeous,” she said, running her fingers over the wall hanging that Diana had picked up in Peru when she and Daniel had gone there to climb Machu Picchu. “But this”—she took in the computer equipment—“looks like some kind of command central. And what are these?” She indicated the bank of monitors. “Surveillance?”
    “With infrared for night vision. Plus an alarm system. Redundant Internet access. Firewalls. Motion sensors. Welcome to Gamelan Security headquarters. Aka, my office.”
    “How did you manage to set all this up?”
    “Jake helped me.”
    “So all that experience hacking into other people’s systems finally pays off.” Ashley paused, but when Diana didn’t rise to her bait, she gave a brittle smile and asked, “So, how is charming Jake?” Ashley and Jake had gone out on one spectacularly awful date during which he’d spent the whole evening texting.
    “He’s good. I think. We’re working together, but I haven’t seen him seen him in months.”
    Ashley picked her way past a dead ficus, over an empty can of Red Bull and some open boxes filled with foam packing material. She settled herself in Diana’s desk chair—white fiberglass molded into a tulip shape with a red seat cushion and polished aluminum base. Daniel had given Diana that chair, a period piece from the sixties, as a Valentine’s Day gift a few years earlier.
    Before Diana could stop her, Ashley reached for the mouse and jiggled it. The monitor flickered to life. The replica of the room they were in came up. Nadia was frozen in the middle of it. The queue of waiting messages in the lower corner of the screen had grown.
    “How cool is this?” Ashley