Free Djinn and Tonic by Jasinda Wilder Page A

She pauses so briefly I almost miss it. “I’m an only child, and my mom is a traditional stay-at-home mom.”
    “What is the family business?”
    “My dad is in…transportation. Moving goods around the country, stuff like that. Import, export.” She shrugs, casually dismissive, her tone so persuasive now that I almost believe her. “I was never interested in it, so I never took much notice of it, really. My dad’s done really well for himself, though. I grew up in Chicago, I think I told you that before. I went to private schools, got dropped off by limos, vacationed in the south of France every summer, that kind of thing. My parents are really…old school. I wore a hijab until I moved here, actually.” She makes a motion around her head, indicating a head-covering.
    “So you grew up rich, huh?”
    “Yeah. My parents are… very wealthy.” She sighs, and it’s a sad sound. “But, like I said, they’re really, really traditional. They had so many expectations of me, you know? They just wanted me to do everything their way. They expected me to marry by the time I was twenty, and have a bunch of kids and live near them and keep quiet, wear the hijab and never shake a man’s hand, pray facing Mecca five times a day, and be a dutiful daughter. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, and a lot of my friends back in Chicago are living that life very happily. But as I got older I realized it was just not for me. I embraced the modern Western culture and I just couldn’t do what they wanted. It led to conflict after conflict, and eventually I had to get away. I needed space from them, from their expectations and their disappointment that I couldn’t fulfill them, so I moved here a while ago and I haven’t looked back.”
    I can feel the omissions in her story, can sense that she’s leaving out more than she’s telling. No one leaves their family that easily, especially not a wealthy, orthodox Muslim girl.
    “You just left? Just like that?” I stare back at her. “Do you miss them?  
    “Of course I miss them,” she says. “They’re my family. But I had to do things my way, and they just couldn’t accept that. And I can’t accept what they want for me. They don’t care what I want, they just expect me to obey. To be the dutiful, honorable little female, and that’s just…not me.” Leila stares into the middle distance, distracted and distant.  
    She’s being evasive, leaving out most of the truth. I hold her in silence, debating with myself. I want the truth, but am I willing to hurt her to get it? No. I can sense that if I push the subject, demand the truth from her right now, I might shut her down completely. She’s skittish, nervous. She’s waiting for me to push the issue, her eyes shifting back and forth, searching mine, and I can feel her silently pleading with me to let it go.
    Frustration burns in my chest.  
    I’m intensely attracted to Leila, but it’s more than that. There’s a connection unlike anything I’ve ever experienced, but it’s marred by her secrecy, by the lies and the omissions.  
    What is she hiding?
    I shift tactics. “Leila, what really happened at the bar?”  
    I watch her carefully, assessing her body language, the way her eyes shift away from mine and fix on the ceiling above my shoulder before she speaks.  
    She closes her eyes briefly. “Carson, I told you everything I know already. I have no clue what happened. One minute we were talking and the next I was standing outside on the pavement.”  
    “Yeah, but what you told me doesn’t make sense. My captain looked into it, and there’s a lot that just doesn’t add up. For one thing, how it is that you’re completely fine, not so much as a scratch, while I’m in here? Then there’s the bar itself. Captain Archer says it’s completely destroyed. The only thing left was a pile of smoking rubble, and forensics can’t figure out how it happened. Archer said it looks like both a fire and a