A Shot of Red by Tracy March Page B

of fame forever, and Mia was glad for him to get it out of his system. Unfortunately, his one moment in time was hardly likely to satisfy him, and there was no telling how many public events he’d show up at with her during the One Shot campaign just for the thrill of standing on the stage in front of everyone. He was clearly his mother’s son. Their dad hadn’t had a self-aggrandizing cell in his body. Mia never wished ill for her mother, but she sometimes wondered why her dad had been the one who was taken from her, and not the other way around.
    “Moncure Therapeutics is proud to be the sole purveyor of vaccine for the One Shot program.” Matthew’s tone was a note lower than usual. “As the CDC director explained, we’ve worked to make it easy for health care providers to give the proper dose to each patient. I’d like to say we’ve also made the process as painless as possible, but the needle was a necessity.” He paused for the tepid chuckle that came from the audience.
    Mia struggled to keep herself from rolling her eyes. Jimmy Fallon needn’t worry about losing his job to Matthew.
    “As a demonstration, the United States surgeon general is here to give the inaugural vaccine in the One Shot Program to my grandmother, Lila Moncure, chairman of the board of Moncure Therapeutics.”
    Lila rose from her seat among the who’s-who on the stage and made her way to the tall stool next to the lectern, looking lovely and chic in a stylish, short-sleeved lavender dress. Mia caught sight of Claude out in the audience, and his proud gaze never left Lila. The surgeon general, a sturdy man in full uniform, joined Lila along with a young nurse wearing a white dress and cap. The nurse turned up Lila’s sleeve and swabbed her upper arm with alcohol. She pulled a prefilled syringe with a red stopper out of the pocket of her dress and handed it to the surgeon general. Lila sat primly as he stuck the needle into her arm and depressed the plunger.
    Mia tried not to wince. She’d given hundreds of vaccines in Haiti herself, but somehow she’d lost the stomach for it now. Surely all of these people wouldn’t be going through this charade if something was wrong with the vaccine.
    …
    The stress of her long day left Mia eager to get some sleep, but she wondered if she could. She’d managed to avoid Gio after the press conference even though she felt the electricity of simply being nearer to him than she had been in months. But now that she was safely settled in by herself in Lila’s guesthouse, she could no longer avoid Brent. She had to see what he had sent her from the dead. After all the production of the launch tonight, and seeing all the officials at the press conference, she was having an even harder time wrapping her head around Nora’s story about Brent and the vaccine. But the flash card she held in her hand might convince her otherwise.
    Mia had found her old laptop among some of the things she stored in the walk-in attic of the guesthouse. She was glad that Nora had been careful not to watch her video on her computer, but Mia wasn’t nearly as paranoid about viewing hers on her old laptop. It had been months since she’d been online with it, and she didn’t plan to connect now. So she was pretty certain no one was monitoring her activity on it. The idea that anyone was monitoring her at all seemed surreal.
    She sat cross-legged on her bed, staring at the computer, a foreboding feeling slithering up her spine. Her hand trembled as she slid the flash card into the reader and waited for the icon to appear on the screen. The moment it did, she clicked it to find that the only file on it was a lone video taken the day before Brent died. Suddenly paranoid, she glanced at the door of the bedroom even though she was alone in the guesthouse. She took a deep breath, turned up the volume, and clicked play.
    Brent’s face appeared on the screen, and Mia’s heart pitched seeing the stress around his eyes and the fear in