Trust Me (Paris Nights #3)(33)

Was that knocking?

Oh, hell.

Somebody must be really pounding on her door for the noise to reach her in here, and her stomach cramped in sudden fear. Oh, f*ck, what if the police had changed their mind? What if they had decided all family members were suspects, even those who fought Abed, or all Muslims, or all Arabs, and they were going to round everyone up and deport them all like the far right *s kept talking about? The ghosts of the Jewish family that had once lived in the apartment directly across from hers and been swept away in the Rafle de Vel d’Hiv seemed to gather like a family photo in her mind, two adults and two children, and stare at her in accusation and warning. You’re not safe. No one is ever safe.

She found her heavy bathrobe, trying to dry her hair before someone broke in and dragged her somewhere.

“Lina!” A sharp call through the door. “I’m going to have to break down the door if you don’t answer. Are you in there? Are you okay?”

Her face scrunched. That was Jake.

But she hadn’t texted him an eggplant.

Oh, shit, had something happened? To her family, to Vi at the hospital? Oh, please, dear God, don’t tell her anything had happened. Please tell her that Jake hadn’t been playing some good cop-bad cop mind trick on her all this time. He was friends with Chase, wasn’t he? They were arrogant, but they all seemed like such good guys.

“I’m coming!” she yelled. “I just—” She yanked her robe as tightly closed over her dripping nakedness as she could, so vulnerable her stomach wanted to eat its way out of her body. That was one of the problems—she could fight the bad guys with a chainsaw, but she couldn’t fight the good guys with anything at all, and neither of them were on her side, so she was stuck in the middle between them, struggling to build a world out of sugar that neither could break. She pulled the door open.

Jake stood there with two police officers behind him.

Oh, f*ck.

“Shit.” Jake took a long breath, staring down at her. “You were in the shower?” He made a stand down gesture to the policemen and stepped inside, nudging her back with his body and closing the door between her and the other two men. Who, to their credit, had been scanning her and the apartment beyond her in an everything okay way, not ogling her at all.

“Sorry,” Jake said. “You’re all right? Sorry.”

So…he wasn’t arresting her? They weren’t—“Is everything okay?” she snapped frantically.

“Yes,” he said immediately, closing his hands around her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Lina. I was worried when you didn’t answer the door.”

Oh, right, the officers behind him were her guards. To keep her safe.

Paranoia. She’d been caught in another wave of paranoia. That shit. It kept coming back and taking her over, no matter how many ways she fought it.

Immediately, she started telling again through the faces of those she could trust, like her grandmother’s prayer beads, the only method she knew besides work, hot showers, hot sex, and deep breaths to fight that paranoia: her grandmother. Her parents. Vi. Célie. Her sous-chef. Her staff…

Jake squeezed her shoulders. “I’m sorry,” he said again. His voice deepened, going into that soothing tone he had used with her…when…you’ll relax in a minute. “You’re perfectly safe.” Gentle, firm, absolutely bedrock trustworthy. A lie. “It was my overreaction. When you didn’t answer the door—”

“If I were perfectly safe, you wouldn’t have worried,” Lina said and turned away. “Don’t lie to me. More. Don’t lie to me more.”

The panic was releasing in a painful slump. She hated, hated, hated having to be so damn relieved the police weren’t going to haul her off half-naked just because she was Arab.

French. Her family had been French for nearly two centuries. Algeria had been annexed as a department of France in 1848 and still been fighting for its independence when her pacifist grandfather moved to the outskirts of Paris to find work, and with the eager encouragement of the French government at the time, by the way. Hell, Camus was born in Algeria, and nobody ever said he wasn’t French.

And her grandfather’s arrival near Paris had been thirty years before she was born. Lina wasn’t an activist like her mother. To be honest, as a teenager, she’d mostly found her mother’s activism freaking embarrassing, and she’d strode away from it into the big city lights to live her very own life. She rarely ever even thought about politics or religion at all, although she’d definitely absorbed her mother’s girl power message. Deeply immersed in her career and surrounded by a raucous, high-energy team that just took people for who they were as long as they could stand the heat in a kitchen, she had grown used to being herself. Not not Arab, but not that as The Main Thing. The First thing, the Only Thing that people saw when they looked at her. The first thing was top pastry chef, and the second thing was accomplished career woman, and the fact that her grandparents came from Algeria had just faded into a taken-for-granted element of who she was rather than her identity. Her otherness.

And yet, and yet…

The attack and all the media attention on her as the Muslim Woman Who Fought Terrorists and Why Aren’t You Wearing a Hijab had made her feel alien.

Fuck you, she thought to terrorists. To her stupid cousin. I hate you so damn bad.