But Phantom’s grandmother didn’t seem to care about that nearly as much as me. She pulled me down a first-floor hallway into her apartment, which didn’t look anything like I’d expected.
There was a lot of furniture stuffed in here for such a small space—like anti-feng shui.
I spotted another room through an open door. Not a bedroom. From what I could see, it only held a table with two chairs. On top of the table sat a leather cylinder with several pieces of wood stuffed inside of it.
It kind of reminded me of those incense stick holders that you turn over every week or so to release more scent into the air. But these sticks weren’t tubular. They were more like slices of some light wood.
I walked toward those sticks with the urge to examine them more closely for some reason. Did they…did they have Chinese characters etched into their surfaces?
Phantom’s grandmother shut the door to the room before I could reach it.
“Hak-kan fortune. Not you!” she told me in broken English.
At least, I thought “fortune” was the word she used. But what did that even mean?
“Excuse me?” I asked, hoping she’d clarify.
She just babbled something else in Cantonese before disappearing into another room and closing the door behind her.
Which left me to look around the front room some more while I waited for her to return. I soon realized why the space struck me as strange and overcrowded earlier.
There were two couches but no TV, and what appeared to be decades worth of Chinese tabloid magazines fanned out across two coffee tables. This wasn’t a living room. It was some kind of waiting room.
Was Phantom’s 200-year-old grandma still working?
And if so, as what?
His grandma returned before I could posit too many guesses. She had a purse strung over her arm, and she smiled with a gleaming new set of dentures as she motioned at me to follow her out of the door with a downward flap of her hand.
I trailed behind her, not sure what else to do. And to my surprise, I found a yellow cab idling right in front of the building—a cab she tugged me toward with a vice grip around my wrist.
Phantom’s grandmother was asking me to follow her to another location.
Where? Who knew? But wherever it was, I might find some answers.
Instead of asking her another question she wouldn’t be able to reply to because of our language barrier, I swallowed down my doubts.
And followed her into the cab
20
PHANTOM
Where was she?
Phantom had shown up at her work, just as he’d been doing every night since he got back from Hawaii, and made the hardest decision of his life. It didn’t matter how much he’d wanted to keep her, make her his for real. He couldn’t be with her. Not after what happened to Jazz and Dawn.
So that evening, he stood in his usual hiding spot in the alley of the Italian restaurant that sat across the narrow no outlet street from the clinic and watched the usual suspects emerge from the building. A few doctors and nurses who’d finished with seeing patients for the day. Bernice, leaving fifteen minutes early like she always did to go pick up her kid from the daycare center at the Manhattan Mercy hospital complex, which sat right next door.
But no Olivia. Where was she? Was she working late again?
His phone vibrated in his inside suit pocket, and Phantom pulled it out. It was yet another text from Victor about whether Phantom’s terse Maybe had become a Yes to spending Lunar New Year’s Eve in Rhode Island with him, Han, and their women.
VICTOR: I respect and understand what you are doing in New York for VIP Bai3. But we haven’t seen you since you returned from Hawaii. Joi misses her other uncle.
The three Dragons weren’t talkers. But if he told Victor the truth—that he couldn’t fucking bear to see him and Han happy after giving Olivia up, then it would become a whole thing.
And Phantom’s head was already a mess after everything that had happened in December when their 24K enemies had come close to ending both Dawn’s and Jazz’s lives in two separate states—even though both women had guards with them at the time of their kidnappings.
So no, he couldn’t be with Olivia. But he also couldn’t not watch over her.
He re-pocketed the phone without answering his cousin’s text. Just then, a tall guy in a navy blue peacoat approached the clinic doors.
Someone who Phantom recognized—Byron, that brother of Dawn’s who he and Victor had saved from a bully ex-secret boyfriend back when he’d been attending high school in Japan.
And Eric seemed just as surprised to see Byron as Phantom was when he came out of the clinic to meet him at the front door.
“What are you doing here?” the voice of Olivia’s best friend came floating back to Phantom on the winter wind. “I thought we were meeting at my place!”
