Page 7 of Jar of Hearts
“Other is correct,” Geo says. “My mother was half Filipino, and my dad is a quarter Jamaican. I’m mixed.”
Clicking her pen, the counselor nods and jots something down in her file. “It’s sixty-five percent white in here, and since you look white, you’ll blend in. But if you’re part black, you can make black friends. That’s good.”
“I’m also a quarter Asian.”
“Less than one percent of the inmate population is Pacific Islander. It won’t help you.” The counselor looks at her intently. “So, how are you feeling? Depressed? Anxious? Any suicidal thoughts?”
“If I say yes, does that mean I can go home?”
The counselor chuckled. “Good. A sense of humor. Hold on to that.” She slaps the file folder shut. “All right, kiddo. We’re done for now. I’ll talk to you in a week. You need me before that, tell a guard.”
The first two weeks pass without incident, although all new inmates are on suicide watch because prison is a fucking depressingplace. Geo keeps her head down and speaks only when spoken to, spending the majority of her time alone. On the morning of the day she’s to be integrated into the general population, she’s awake well before the morning bell.
It’s hard to believe that just over six months ago, she was interviewed for an article inPacific Northwestmagazine profiling Shipp Pharmaceuticals in their annual “Top 100 Companies to Work For” feature. At thirty, Geo was the youngest female executive at Shipp by a decade, and the article was titled, “Steering the Shipp in a New Direction: The Young Face of One of America’s Oldest Companies.” The photo they used showed Geo sitting on the edge of the long table inside the thirty-fourth-floor glass-enclosed boardroom, legs crossed, skirt hem well above the knee, red soles of her high heels visible, smiling into the camera. The theme of the write-up was diversity in the workplace, though, ironically, not one mention was made of Geo’s mixed-race heritage. The article focused solely on her youth and her gender—both of which were enough to make her a standout in the old white-boys’ club of Big Pharma—and her plans to expand the lifestyle-and-beauty division of the company.
She suspected the majority of the executive team at Shipp hated that photo, that she was the one chosen to represent them, though nobody ever said so to her face.
The day of her arrest, Geo was speaking in that boardroom. The doors swung open and a tall man in dark jeans and a battered leather jacket strode in, accompanied by three uniformed Seattle PD officers. A flustered administrative assistant followed, her hands gesturing apologetically as she tried to keep up with them. The twelve heads sitting at the giant table turned at the sound of the commotion.
“I’m sorry, they wouldn’t wait for me to knock,” said the breathless administrative assistant, a young woman named Penny who’d only been with the company for a month.
The man in the leather jacket stared at Geo. He looked extremely familiar, and her mind raced frantically to place him. There was a detective’s shield clipped to his breast pocket, and she could see the slight bulge of his holstered gun near the hem of his jacket. He wastall and quite fit, a far cry from how he looked in high school, when he was forty pounds skinnier and half a foot shorter.…
Kaiser Brody. Holy hell.
It hit Geo then, and her heart stopped. Her knees felt weak and the room spun a little, forcing her to lean against the table for support. The boardroom, cool and airy only seconds before, was suddenly hot. The detective caught her reaction and smirked.
“Georgina Shaw?” he said, but he knew damn well it was her. He headed toward her, making his way around the long oval table with the uniformed officers in tow, past the shocked faces of the executives. “You’re under arrest.”
Geo didn’t protest, didn’t say a word, didn’t make a sound. She simply closed her laptop, her presentation disappearing from the large projection screen behind her. The detective took out his handcuffs. The sight of them made her wince.
“It’s protocol,” he said. “I’d apologize, but you know I’m not sorry.”
The members of the executive team seemed not to know what do with themselves, and they watched in stunned silence as the detective pulled her arms behind her back, snapped on the cuffs, and began marching her out of the room. Their confusion was understandable. The Georgina Shaw they knew wasn’t the kind of woman who got arrested for anything. She was the new face of Shipp, after all. She was a VP of the company. She was Andrew Shipp’s goddamned fiancée, and everything about this looked completely wrong.
The CEO’s voice rang out loud and clear, and everyone turned. Andrew Shipp hadn’t been part of the meeting, but his office was just down the hall, and clearly someone had told him what was going on. He was standing at the boardroom doors, barring their way.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Andrew tried to reach for her, but a young police officer blocked him. The CEO’s face reddened, no doubt because nobody had ever dared to block him from anything before. “This isludicrous. What are the charges? Get her out of those handcuffs immediately. This isridiculous.”
Geo tried to smile at him, tried to reassure him that she was okay,but Andrew wasn’t looking at her at all. He was glaring at the police officers, every inch of his body radiating that special blend of outrage and self-entitlement one can only have if one grew up with serious money.
But the police officers didn’t care. They didn’t care that the woman in handcuffs had a corner office two floors down, or that her wedding reception was going to take place at the pretentious golf club her fiancé’s family belonged to, or that she thought it was insane they were charging four hundred dollars a plate for dinner for what basically amounted to steak and French fries. They didn’t care that she’d picked pink peonies for her bouquet or that her wedding dress was being flown in from New York. They didn’t give one righteous shit. As they shouldn’t. Because none of it mattered anymore. And it probably never did.
The detective walked her out of the boardroom. His hand was on the small of her back, not pushing, but guiding firmly. Kaiser Brody didn’t smell anything like she remembered. The boy she’d known back in the day never wore cologne, but she could detect a sweet, musky scent on him now, which she recognized immediately as Yves Saint Laurent. She always did have a great nose. She bought the same cologne for Andrew once, but he never wore it, complaining it gave him a headache. A lot of things gave Andrew a headache.
The cuffs jangled around her wrists. They were loose enough that with some maneuvering, she could probably have wriggled out of them. Kaiser had put them on just for show, to make a point. To cause a scene. To humiliate her.
Andrew was walking backward in an attempt to impede their path, and Kaiser waved an arrest warrant in his face.
“Detective Kaiser Brody, Seattle PD. The charge is murder, sir.”
Andrew snatched the warrant from him and read through it with bulging eyes. Even in his two-thousand-dollar suit, he was just short of handsome, with his soft frame, his round face, his thinning hair. Andrew’s strength came from a different place. But while being rich and well-connected could accomplish a lot, he couldn’t fix this.
“Say nothing,” he said to her. “Not a word. I’ll call Fred. We’ll take care of this.”
Fred Argent was head of Shipp’s in-house counsel. He handled corporate strategy, contracts, litigation issues. He wasn’t a criminal-defense attorney by any stretch, and that’s what Geo needed. But there was no time to have that discussion. The detective was hustling her out of the boardroom as the rest of the executive team stood frozen, mouths gaping open.
Andrew kept up with them all the way to the elevator, which was down the hallway and around the corner. Word of Geo’s arrest seemed to spread faster than they were walking. She passed her assistant Carrie Ann’s desk and said, “Call my father. I don’t want him to see it on the news.” The younger woman nodded, her eyes wide, the small spot of spilled coffee still noticeable on her skirt even after her vigorous attempt to remove it earlier that morning. Less than an hour ago, they’d had a discussion about how best to get that stain out, searching the office for one of those Tide pens as Geo talked about the new restaurant she and Andrew had gone to the evening before.
