Page 80 of The Diamond in the Rough

I really should have gone to bed, but it was four in the morning and I hadn’t even tried yet. Just dove into the worry stone again and again and again until I made myself physically ill. And then kept going until I lacked the strength to get off the bathroom floor.

The stone was in the sink, where I’d dropped it before collapsing in front of the toilet. I hadn’t managed to get back up to get it.

I probably shouldn’t.

I was supposed to get up for work in about two hours, and even if I didn’t sleep, I knew that if I tried to go into the stone again—or anything else—I’d be so completely drained that going to work would be out of the question.

I didn’t want to call in sick.

For one thing, I’d feel bad about leaving Ward and Mason without someone at the front desk. For another, it would leave me alone with my thoughts for the whole day, and that was out of the question.

So I stayed on the floor, my eyes staring at the faint pattern of mildew on the textured ceiling that someone hadn’t bothered to paint with high-gloss, the stippling hidden in the shadows cast by the strip lights above the mirror.

I felt trapped by my own weak-willed stupidity. If only I’d been able to keep myself from following Raj into his dreams.

Self-control seemed to be my worst fault, since my failure to control my abilities, whether because of a lack of skill or a lack of will-power was what had gotten me into all of my current problems.

I let out a heavy sigh.

And then spent the next two hours right where I was until the sound of my alarm from the other room forced me to drag myself back up.

15

She was upset,worried, and afraid. She touched her purse again, fingers slipping through the open clasp under her arm to check for the tenth or eleventh time that the envelope was still inside.

“Doyou want me to touch everything in this?” I asked Hart, trying—and probably failing—to keep the concern from my voice.

He’d appeared without Raj, not that I found that at all surprising. I’d essentially resigned myself to the fact that I was unlikely to see Raj again unless it was absolutely necessary. And I couldn’t really think of a situation in which that would be the case.

“I—” Hart’s pointed ears turned bright pink.

“So ‘yes,’ then,” I answered for him.

“Just to see if everything in there is hers. If it’s not related, you can stop immediately.” He grimaced. “I am sorry,” he offered.

I just nodded. Agreeing would be rude, but the normalresponse—that it was fine, that I didn’t mind, something of that nature—would have obviously been a lie.

“May I dump it out?” I asked him. It would be easier to touch each thing individually if I didn’t have to rummage through the purse at the same time that I was trying to do it. In fact, I wasn’t sure that I’d even be able to do what he was asking if I had to leave everything inside the purse.

“Um,” was Hart’s response. He shifted in his chair. “How about if I hand you things, one at a time?” he asked.

I nodded again, relieved. “Yes, that will work.”

He took the purse back, wearing gloves. I obviously wasn’t, given the fact that I had to make contact with objects in order to read them, but Hart had assured me that my fingerprints would be eliminated from suspicion, since they’d taken them when I’d gone to the FBI for precisely that reason.

They had Hart’s, too, but apparently the fewer prints they had to sort through, the better.

He reached in and pulled out a small cylindrical object.

She put on the lipstick,steeling her spine. The dark red—darker than it should be, according to the campaign consultant Simon had hired—made her feel as though she were donning armor. She didn’t like the crowds at these rallies, but she would put on her lipstick and face them for Simon.

I handedit back to Hart, shaking my head. “Just lipstick,” I told him. “She last put it on before some sort of rally.”

He nodded, then passed over a small notebook with a tiny silver pen tucked in the side. I assumed they’d already looked at it, so I didn’t bother opening the pages.

The campaign consultanthad told her the she would have to do interviews and commercials. And she didnotwant to. She’d pointed out that plenty of people’s spouses didn’t campaign actively, and the consultant had gotten very annoyed with her, arguing that she had an obligation to stand up and speak for her people.

She’d flushed and told him it was none of anyone’s business who her people were or were not.