By the time Mike drove to New Amsterdam Hospital, Heidi had already been moved out of the emergency room.
She had scrapes on her face, and her right arm was immobilized in a cast.
Heidi was resting against the raised hospital bed when she heard the door open.
She looked toward Mike as he entered and greeted him with a smile.
“Hey.” Mike didn’t answer.
He closed the door behind him, walked to the foot of the bed, and studied her for a moment before asking in confusion, “Aren’t you an intelligence analyst?” Heidi was indeed an FBI agent, but she wasn’t one of the field agents commonly shown in movies, the kind who constantly went out to crime scenes and arrested suspects.
She was the kind who stayed in the office, compiled the evidence and information collected by field agents, and then produced analytical conclusions.
By all rights, it was supposed to be a relatively safe job.
Yet somehow, Heidi had still gotten hurt.
Mike thought about her recent transfer and looked at her suspiciously.
“Don’t tell me you switched to field work.” Heidi laughed.
“Do you really think FBI Human Resources would approve me becoming a field agent?” Mike thought about it and realized she had a point.
Heidi had no military background and no professional combat training.
Forget the FBI—even an ordinary police department probably wouldn’t send someone with no field experience into active operations.
“So what happened?” “It was an accident.” Heidi gave a helpless smile and shook her head.
“I had just walked out of a coffee shop when the floor above it exploded.
Just bad luck.” Mike raised an eyebrow.
“An explosion?” “Yeah.” Still leaning against the bed, Heidi met his gaze.
“Pretty unlucky, right?” Mike nodded.
“Definitely.” Then his expression turned slightly strange.
“But the FBI’s New York office is in Lower Manhattan.
If you were injured there, they should’ve taken you to Presbyterian.
This is New Amsterdam Hospital in Kips Bay.
No ambulance is going to pass up a closer hospital and bring you all the way here.” He had found the flaw in her story.
New Amsterdam Hospital was in Kips Bay.
No matter how he looked at it, someone injured in Lower Manhattan was unlikely to be brought this far uptown.
Heidi paused, then looked at Mike with genuine surprise.
“Wow.
Since when were you this good at deductive reasoning?” Mike gave her a dry laugh and refused to let her change the subject.
“Don’t dodge the question, Heidi.” “I’m not.” Heidi shifted her uninjured left shoulder.
“I never said I bought coffee near the office.
The coffee shop was on East Twenty-Third Street.” Mike stared at her.
“You drove all the way from Lower Manhattan to Kips Bay for one cup of coffee?” Heidi answered without the slightest embarrassment.
“It tastes good.
Why shouldn’t I?
Besides, you drank some last night too.
Tell me it wasn’t good.” Mike stopped.
He remembered the coffee he had stolen from Heidi after coming home the night before.
After thinking about it seriously, he had to admit that it really had been very good.
Then he remembered what Heidi had been like as a child.
If there was something delicious she wanted, she would save her allowance for it and sometimes even dip into his allowance too.
Fine.
Mike couldn’t speak for anyone else, but Heidi absolutely had a history of doing things like driving from Lower Manhattan to Kips Bay just for a cup of coffee.
Once that inconsistency was resolved, Mike looked at her with a mixture of amusement, disbelief, and helplessness.
“So what happened to the coffee shop?” Heidi shrugged with her left shoulder.
“What do you think?
It’s a complete wreck.” Mike visibly relaxed.
“Good.” Heidi blinked.
“What?” She stared at him, clearly surprised that he sounded pleased the coffee shop had been destroyed.
Mike smiled.
“Now you won’t drive halfway across Manhattan just to buy coffee from there anymore.” Heidi stared at him for a second.
Then she pulled her uninjured left hand out from under the blanket and raised a universally understood gesture toward him.
“You’re a cold-blooded bastard, Mike.” “If I were cold-blooded, I wouldn’t have made a drive that normally takes half an hour in fifteen minutes.” Mike completely rejected the accusation.
He could certainly be cold toward outsiders.
But Heidi wasn’t an outsider.
She was family, and in this life, she was the only family he had left.
Only Mike knew what his first thought had been when the FBI called and told him Heidi had been injured and taken to New Amsterdam Hospital.
Kill whoever was responsible.
Kill them thoroughly enough that nothing remained, not even enough for anyone connected to them to escape.
Heidi had only been teasing him, but when she heard that he had reached the hospital in half the usual time, the playful expression on her face slowly faded.
She pressed her lips together, looked at Mike standing at the foot of the bed, and gave him a small, sincere smile.
“Thank you, Mike.” Mike smiled back.
“You’re welcome.
Besides, if something really happened to you, who would bail me out in the future?
You’re basically the reason I’ve had the confidence to stay unemployed this long.” Forget the cliché that Western parents threw their children out at eighteen and expected them to become completely independent.
In reality, Western society relied heavily on personal connections too, often without even pretending otherwise.
Recommendation letters were a perfect example.
In any normal family, people helped one another.
Becoming an adult didn’t suddenly mean you had nothing to do with your relatives anymore.
Parents helped their children, and siblings helped each other too.
And in a sense, Heidi really was part of the reason Mike hadn’t been worried about finding a job after graduation.
No matter what happened, she would never stand by and let him end up homeless on the street.
The serious expression Heidi had worn while thanking him immediately collapsed after hearing that.
The moment she became sincere, Mike started joking again.
She looked at him with a mixture of irritation and amusement.
“I take it back.
You’re not cold-blooded.
You’re just completely immature.” Mike grinned brightly, slipped one hand into his pocket, and tilted his head toward her.
“Don’t think saying that is going to make me find a job.
I’ve already decided I’m going to live off you for the rest of my life.” This time, Heidi didn’t hesitate at all.
She raised her left middle finger at him.
The gesture said everything for her.
Mike burst out laughing.
Just then, someone knocked on the hospital room door.