by Sonali Dev
“Is he worth this kind of pain?” Jane asked unexpectedly as they were saying good-bye.
Trisha hadn’t said one thing about what had happened with DJ, but she had talked about him in the context of Emma, whom they had discussed in detail.
Still, she’d grown up with Esha, so Jane’s perception didn’t faze Trisha. “It doesn’t matter if he is or isn’t,” she answered. Except, deep inside she knew that he was.
As she began the drive home, that realization ramped up the pain again, making her heart feel like it was having an infarction. This had to be how it felt when your heart muscle died. Switching out her contacts for her magnifying-lens glasses again, she tried not to sob in tune to Kishori Amonkar belting out her agony in raga Durbari.
AN HOUR INTO the drive, Aretha Franklin’s “RESPECT” ringtone cut Amonkar off. Trisha honked into a tissue to clear her voice before answering her sister’s call.
“Where are you?” Nisha said, sounding as desperate as Trisha was feeling.
“I’m an hour away. What happened? Are you okay?”
“No, Trisha, I’m not okay!” Nisha let out a sob. “It’s not the baby. It’s Neel. He’s on a plane. He’s coming home early.”
“What? Why?”
“I don’t know. But Neel never changes his plans. Ever. What do you think it is?”
How on earth was she supposed to know? “What did he say it was?”
“For some reason his call didn’t come through. He left a voice mail hours ago, but I just got it. He said he wanted to see me and that Mishka was done with the trip, so they were getting on a plane. That doesn’t sound right, does it?”
“It sounds fine.” Mishka was at that age. A tween, or whatever they called it. She could get bored with London. Children that age could get bored anywhere. Trisha still got bored most everywhere that wasn’t the hospital. “She’s probably bored and Neel doesn’t know what to do with her. Maybe he’s just missing you.”
“Then why didn’t he say that? He says things when he feels them. He’s not one of those uncommunicative men.”
“Sweetheart, your husband’s coming home to you earlier than he had planned to. That’s a good thing.”
Except, shit, what were they going to tell Neel about Nisha not being home?
“Caught on, have you? I’m in your condo. I’m four days away from this trimester being over, and he lands in a couple hours. What are we going to do? I have a terrible feeling about all this!”
“What? Are you Esha now?” But Nisha had had a terrible feeling about everything recently. “Nothing is wrong with someone coming home early.”
“Trisha, his ex lives in London!” Great, now she’d said it. And now they had to deal with it.
“Nisha, I want you to take a deep breath. Are you listening to yourself? He’s coming home, not staying longer.”
“Something has happened between them. I can feel it.”
“Did Esha infect you or something? Neel is the most solid man I know. He worships you.”
There was a long pause where Trisha could practically hear Nisha breathe through processing those words. “You have to go get them at the airport,” she said finally. “He’ll be expecting me. Think of something.”
“I’ll think of something, I promise. Do not freak out.” Although that ship seemed to have left the harbor some time ago.
Nisha grunted. “Did you get my muffins?” she asked much more calmly.
Trisha looked down at the carnage of crumbs and tried to salvage—and count—the unravaged ones. “Yes. But Naomi only had a dozen.”
“Everything okay with you?” her sister asked when Trisha couldn’t quite stop her voice from wobbling.
It felt like she would never again be okay. It felt like she had never before truly understood that question.
She assured her sister that she was fine and let her discuss the fund-raiser for a while.
“Why didn’t you tell me that Julia Wickham was back in town?” Nisha asked suddenly.
“What, you’re spying on me for HRH and Ma now?”
“Shasha.” Nisha used her big sister voice. The one she used when she was spying. “Has she contacted you?”
Trisha snapped. “What is wrong with you people? Julia Wickham is too damn smart to contact me. She knows that I will never let her hurt our family again. Apparently, she’s the only one who knows it.”
“Don’t be dramatic. You know why I’m asking. Now don’t sulk. And drive safely.” With that Nisha hung up.
As a matter of fact, Trisha had no frickin’ idea why Nisha had asked. Why they all kept asking. For a moment she wondered if she should have told Nisha that DJ and Julia knew each other. The idea that she might be repeating the worst mistake of her life jabbed at her. Was she doing it again, protecting an outsider at the risk of harm to her family? But there was no artifice in DJ. If he had meant to get close to her and harm her family, she had just presented him with the perfect opportunity to do it.
Pain scraped at her insides at how that had gone.
For all that she had got wrong about him, there was not a speck of evil in him. She wasn’t seventeen anymore, and that much she knew without a doubt. When she had kept Julia’s secret, Julia had already betrayed her and then used their friendship and Trisha’s fear of being a bad person against her. This was not the same thing.
No, she couldn’t bring herself to be the cause of her family firing DJ. Not until she had figured out what the hell Julia was up to with him.
He might think she was too self-absorbed to care about anyone but herself. But then he’d already proven that he didn’t know her at all.
TRISHA’S BROTHER-IN-LAW HAD one of those boyish faces that made him look like he was still in high school. He sported a goatee and wore rimless glasses from the last century to make himself look more mature, but none of it stopped him from being regularly subjected to those “whom are you kidding with that judge thing” looks. They were his favorite stories to tell. But today Neel looked so exhausted he could have been a hundred years old. At least that’s how his eyes looked.
Trisha’s first thought when she saw him was that Nisha was right, something was very wrong. Neel hadn’t just decided to come home early for nothing.
Naturally, he looked surprised when he saw Trisha. “Where’s Nisha?” he asked, searching over her shoulder.
Yup, definitely something going on with that look.
Mishka body-tackled Trisha. “Trisha Maushi! I missed you so much!”
For the first time that day, Trisha didn’t feel like she wanted to lie down and die. “I loved London. We have to go back. You and Mom and me. We’ll take Aji, too, and Ashi Maushi. Everyone there talks like Aji. Did you know?”
“Come to think of it, you’re sounding kinda funny too.” Trish tucked a lock of wild curls—a prettier version of her own hair—behind Mishka’s ear and tried not to think of DJ saying Are you bloody joking? in that accent of his.
“Am I now?” Mishka said, hamming up her swanky London accent. Then like Neel she, too, seemed to register that Nisha wasn’t here. “Where’s Mom? Dad made me come home early. I didn’t want to! It was so unfair!”
Trisha’s heart sank.
Their bags showed up on the baggage claim belt and Trisha pulled them off. Neel had gone to find a cart. Mishka’s phone pinged and she started to furiously type something out. Then she flipped her phone over and showed Trisha her new phone case. “It’s Mr. Bean . . . well, Rowan Atkinson; doesn’t he look totally different? It’s from the National Portrait Gallery. I loved it so much that Barbara had it printed on a phone case for me. Isn’t it amazing?”
Barbara? Why the hell was ex-Barbara giving Mishka phone cases? “Totally amazing.” Trisha handed the phone back to Mishka. “Did you enjoy it? The gallery?” And why the hell was ex-Barbara taking her niece to art galleries? That was something she did with Mishka. It was their auntie-niece thing.
Mishka actually bounced on her heels in excitement. “It was incred
ible! Barbara’s friend gave us a tour. Like a backstage tour at a concert. She was really cool.”
Trisha had never thought of Barbara as cool. Too pseudonerdy for her taste. Horn-rimmed glasses, plaid—who dressed like that outside of books? “Barbara must’ve gotten cooler over time,” she said, when she shouldn’t have.
“Yipes, not Barbara!” Mishka said, and Trisha tried not to smile. Really, she did. “I meant Reina, the curator. She’s really cool. Wore the highest boots I’ve ever seen.” She pointed to her thighs, looking completely smitten.
She did sound different. They were going to have to go to the movies, eat some In-N-Out. Do something American. “Ah, so Barbara didn’t go with you?”
“No, she did. For a while, then she and Dad went off and left me with Reina. You want to see a picture?”
“Sure.”
Neel came back with a cart and started to put the bags on it.
“That’s Reina and that’s Barbara.” Mishka handed Trisha the phone.
The bag slammed Neel’s fingers into the metal of the cart. Not even a whisper escaped him, but Trisha gasped. “Neel! You okay?” She pushed the bag into place and grabbed his hand.
The skin on his knuckles was all scratched up and a blue welt was starting to form across his fingers. “I’m fine.” He pulled his hand away and started pushing the cart toward the parking garage.
When they got to the car, Mishka climbed in the backseat and pressed her phone to her ear. “Mom’s not answering,” she announced and then popped her earbuds into her ears.
Neel waited a moment to make sure her music was on, then took a deep breath. “Where’s Nisha, Shasha?” he said without looking at her.
“She’s got tuberculosis.”
“What?” Neel spun to face her.
“What?” Trisha moved the car into traffic.
“Did you just say Nisha has tuberculosis?” He squeezed his hurt fingers with his other hand because he’d just slammed them against the dashboard in his shock.
“No. What? Not Nisha. I thought you were asking about a patient of mine. Um . . . Nisha’s in Carmel.” Someone help me. “Mishka’s phone case is really nice.”
Neel turned back around still gripping his fingers, poor guy.
“Should we stop for ice? Or an x-ray?”
He shook his head. “I’m fine. What’s Nisha doing in Carmel? Why didn’t she tell me?”
Why did you drop you daughter off with a stranger to go off with your ex? “It was an emergency. Well, not an emergency exactly, but Naomi had some ideas for the fund-raiser and Nisha needed to go check them out.”
“I thought DJ Caine was doing the fund-raiser. How is Naomi involved?”
“I’m not quite sure but DJ and Naomi were trying some . . . um . . . farm-to-table stuff. Naomi has coops. Did you know Naomi has coops? But yes, it has to do with California and farmers and everything.” She took a breath. “They’ve been working all day. In fact, it’s going to take a couple days, because while Nisha is there she was going to set up the family getaway at the beach house.”
“A family getaway?” He looked like he was furiously trying to remember if he had forgotten about a family event. See, she was a genius.
“Did you forget? We’re all going to the beach for the weekend once the fund-raiser is done. Ma wants to do a postmortem weekend this time instead of just a tea.”
Neel groaned. Then covered it with a vigorous throat clearing. “Of course I didn’t forget.”
Trisha felt awful. “Nisha said she’d call you as soon as she gets back to the beach house and gets service.”
That seemed to satisfy him.
“So why the rush to come home?” she asked, focusing hard on the road.
“We were done with the trip,” he said a little softer than usual. He must have realized how cryptic that sounded, because he added, “Work was piling up and I figured being gone so close to the fund-raiser wasn’t fair to Nisha. I wanted to make sure Yash didn’t need something before the big announcement.”
With that he moved the conversation to the fund-raiser and kept it there until Trisha dropped him and Mishka off at their house and went back home to her sister.
Before she got home, Neel had already called Nisha.
“Why did you have to come up with a place that’s only two hours away? Now Neel wants to drive out and see me. It wasn’t easy to hold him off.” It was the first thing Nisha said when Trisha walked into her room.
Then Nisha burst into tears.
“What’s wrong now?” Trisha didn’t even know why she was asking. She sat down on the bed next to her sister and felt a few leftover crumbs move around under her blouse. She thought she had cleaned up, dusted herself and the car off thoroughly before going inside the airport terminal, but apparently the remnants of heartbreak-fueled muffin binges were tenacious.
“Nothing. Nothing’s wrong.” Nisha blew into a tissue.
Headline: The Raje sisters deplete California’s tissue supply just before their brother announces his candidacy to run the state that takes its tree hugging very seriously.
“It’s not nothing. Come on.”
“I was worried for nothing. He came home because he thought I’d need him for the fund-raiser. He came home because he missed me. You should have heard him. He just got off a transatlantic flight and he was ready to jump into the car to come see me. I was such a bitch to be suspicious of him.”
Trisha lay down next to her sister. They stared up at the ceiling for a while. Her sister did not need to see her face, and she most certainly couldn’t handle seeing Nisha’s. “What is it you were suspicious of, exactly?” she said before she could stop herself.
“Nothing.”
“Okay.”
Nisha rolled over on her side and propped herself up on her elbow. “Are you saying I’m missing something? Did he say something to you?” She shook Trisha’s shoulder. “What are you not telling me?”
“Nothing. I was just asking because you’re never suspicious of Neel.”
Nisha fell onto her back again. “Actually,” she whispered so softly Trisha barely heard her, “I’m suspicious of him all the time. All the damn time. We’ve been married ten years and I keep thinking he’s going to figure out that he settled for me.” Another tissue bit the dust.
“Nisha, come on!” It was Trisha’s turn to roll over on her side. She couldn’t believe Nisha had felt this way for her entire marriage.
Nisha’s response was a look that told Trisha exactly how hard it was for her to say what she said next. “Do you remember all those years ago when Neel came back from England? Do you remember how he looked?”
Trisha did remember how devastated Neel had looked despite all his forced good cheer. It wasn’t like anyone had expected anything different. “How would you know how he looked? You didn’t see him for a year after he came home.”
“Actually, that’s not true. I did see him once. Just after he came back. He was still staying with his parents. You were all in the backyard. The housekeeper told me he was in his room, so I decided to go straight up and say hi. His room door was slightly ajar. He was sitting on his bed crying. He didn’t even notice me.” Nisha looked like she was going to be sick again. “I left without telling anyone. That’s why I didn’t see him again. I couldn’t. That day . . . the way he looked was exactly the way I had felt when he started seeing her.”
Trisha twirled a lock of Nisha’s hair and tucked it off her face. “Why did you never say anything?”
“Say what? That I’m married to a man who feels about someone else the way I feel about him?” She pressed her cheek into Trisha’s hand.
“Felt, Nisha. Past tense. You’ve been married for ten years. He’s stood by you through everything. He’s lived and breathed for you and Mishka.”
Trisha would not read anything into the hell she’d seen in her brother-in-law’s eyes today. She had no way of knowing what that was. Someone had judged her today on the basis of incomplete facts. She would
n’t do that to Neel.
Nisha’s shoulders were shaking again and Trisha did what she’d done so many times these past two weeks; she pulled Nisha into her arms and settled back against her headboard.
“He threatened to leave me if I tried to get pregnant again.” Nisha sniffed. “And he just went to England to spend more than a week with the love of his life. And I’m pregnant.”
Trisha shot the blob of tissue across her room straight into the garbage can. “Those facts are all out of context. All of them. You did not try to get pregnant. Neel did not go there to spend time with her. And you are the love of Neel’s life.”
Nisha exhaled. As though she’d been waiting for Trisha to say it.
It was true.
It had to be true.
Chapter Twenty-Six
If the fact that Emma didn’t want to go to Green Acres today was a sign, DJ didn’t want to see it. The wretched worry inside him had been steadily growing.
Emma and he were sitting at his excuse for a dining table waiting for Julia to show up and pretending to focus on their work. Julia wanted to get some final footage of Emma painting before she finished up the film and posted it on social media. After trying to film interviews where Emma refused to do more than grunt and give monosyllabic answers, Julia had settled on having the camera capture Emma while she worked.
“I’m happy to be accommodating,” she’d told DJ. “Emma’s silence will be more emotionally devastating to the audience than her words anyway.”
DJ wasn’t particularly keen on anyone being emotionally devastated because of what his sister was going through.
With every passing day, Emma seemed to be sinking deeper and deeper into herself. Tomorrow would mark two weeks since Trisha Raje had discharged her. They were out of time. They were going to see Trisha right after Julia’s visit and DJ had no doubt how that meeting was going to go. He’d made sure she would be more than happy to wash her hands of him and his sister and send her off to an oncologist. Not that she wouldn’t perform the surgery if he managed by some miracle to change his hardheaded sister’s mind.
