“Are we talking within the next few days?” I clarified.
“I am going to get Smith back here first. So that will be two days, give or take. I want to make sure we have someone on the outside to look out for threats since he clearly employs the kinds of people who would chase an innocent woman through her apartment building and across town, risking getting caught. I doubt he is fully unprotected. I will feel better about us going in there if we have him.”
“I want to go.”
“No.”
That came from both me and Quin and–somewhat surprisingly–Nia as well.
Nia, like her sister, was all about women being given their own agency, the same rights that men had been enjoying since the dawn of time. She wasn’t someone who would let you get away with saying that just because someone was female, she didn’t have the right to do something.
Like join in on a meeting.
“Yes,” Gemma insisted, chin lifting. “And don’t try to tell me that clients don’t come to meetings. I worked in the office. I know that they do.”
“This is different,” Quin insisted.
“Because I’m not paying?” she asked, pinning Quin with an almost intimidating glare.
“Because clients are a paycheck. They don’t matter to me personally. You do. I don’t go parading the people I care about in front of a firing squad.”
“It isn’t a firing squad. It’s a meeting,” she insisted.
“And the fact that you don’t realize that this kind of business meeting can turn into a firing squad is exactly the reason you can’t be there.”
“I’m not seventeen anymore, Quin. Don’t be condescending,” Gemma demanded, tone surprisingly angry, assertive.
To be fair, Quin had been more condescending with her than he typically was with other clients.
“I’m trying to be clear,” he told her, knowing he didn’t have a defense against the condescension thing.
“Then let me be clear too,” she said, unfolding her legs, gaze direct, jaw tight. “If you don’t let me come, I will contact Rylan myself and tell him what you guys are up to. He will make it public in a heartbeat. Your choice,” she added, getting to her feet, making her way down the hallway, closing the door, turning the lock.
“When the fuck did she grow up?” Quin asked, shaking his head.
“Yeah, Lincoln,” Nia said, eyes bright, “when did you realize she wasn’t a teenager anymore?”
Before I could respond, only managing to shoot her a hard look, Quin was sighing.
“We are going to have to bring her,” he decided. “Normally, I would say fuck it. But if she managed to do all this shit under our noses for all this time with no one suspecting a fucking thing, well, I don’t doubt she would find a way to blow this whole fucking thing up if she was pissed enough.”
“I don’t want her to go,” I objected, head shaking.
“I don’t either. But it doesn’t look like we’re going to have much of a choice. Smith will make sure we’re safe from the outside. Maybe we can get him to throw up some cameras for Nia to keep an eye on from here too.”
“I could do that,” she agreed with a nod, excited over the idea of being able to be in on an active part of the investigation. Normally, her job was done well before there was any sort of confrontation.
“She’ll be as safe as we will,” Quin reminded me and, seemingly, himself as well. “That’s the best we can do.”
Unable to come up with any other options, and knowing there would be no talking Gemma out of it, I decided not to stress too much about it.
—
“Can I talk you out of it?” I asked, standing behind Gemma as she combed her fingers through her hair.
It seemed like she was making every effort to look the polar opposite of how she looked when she was working for Phillip.
While she had been hanging around the office in brightly colored yoga pants and tank tops, she had foregone makeup, had kept her hair in a messy bun most of the time, never wore any jewelry.
This evening I came in to her in a floor-length patchwork skirt that featured every color and pattern known to mankind. She’d paired it with a cream linen shirt with long sleeves. Her hair was flowing down her back and over her shoulders. There were bangles at her wrists and mismatching earrings in each lobe–one a trio of silver stars, the other a dangling moon.
This was the Gemma who used to flit into the office all the time years ago, the Gemma everyone knew and loved.
Even with an impending tense meeting ahead of us, there was a lightness about her, a self-assurance, a calm that I didn’t realize had been missing until right that moment.
“I feel like I need to see him one last time too, I don’t know, have closure.”