Sold Short (Sidelined Book 3)

by Ainslie Paton

  He was still in, despite other batters getting out, when they broke for tea. Shush had demolished the other team and the Slips were ready to go into bat. In the drinks tent, Ana was surrounded, but there was no sign of either of their parents. Then it was back on the field for both teams.

  A bowler retired with a shoulder injury. A fielder tripped and was carried off with a sprained ankle. Dev hit another six off a new ball and while they were making some small repairs to the pitch, he glanced across at the women’s game to see Ana stride out padded up, with her helmet on and her bat under her arm.

  If this was a professional level game, maybe she shouldn’t be out there, but they’d been playing cricket all their lives, using trashcans as stumps and playing with tennis balls until it was too dark to see. That was all the time he had for reflection. He faced a spin bowler and misjudged, the ball hitting his shin pads, making him out on a technicality, leg before wicket.

  He was leaving the crease to sustained applause for his sixty-three runs when the shout went up. Wearing pads, he couldn’t get to her quicker than her teammates, quicker than Gavin, Alex and Connor, who’d invaded the field.

  Ana was down and not moving. Rani was on her knees bent over Ana and before Dev could get to them, Alex had Ana up in his arms, headed to the medic’s tent where Dev joined them, almost running into Dad.

  Rani was saying Ana’s name while the medic checked her over. It was a bouncer, someone said, and he could see the red mark where the ball had smashed into her discarded helmet, knocking her out.

  “She’s pregnant,” Rani told the medic, who acknowledged that and then asked everyone who wasn’t family to leave.

  That cleared the tent of Ana’s shocked teammates, but with Dad, Gavin, Alex, Connor, Rani, Tavish, Shush and himself there, it was still a crowd.

  “You boys need to leave,” Dad said. He was sweating and out of breath, also confused.

  “We’re staying,” said Alex.

  “You are not family.”

  “Yes, Mr. Patel, we are Ana’s family,” said Connor.

  “I insist—”

  “Dad, they can stay and I’m fine,” said Ana.

  She tried to push into a sitting position, but the medic restrained her. “Stay down. You might have concussion.”

  He examined Ana’s eyes with a light while it dawned on Dad who he’d tried to throw out. Dev watched his father wrestle with the decision to stay in the tent or to go. Outside the occasional crack of a ball on a bat and a scattering of applause signaled the matches had begun again.

  The medic was telling Ana to rest, the signs of concussion to watch out for. Rani would make sure she was fine. The day was done though. Dev was taking Ana home.

  “I think Ana should come with me.” From behind them, Mom’s voice. She wore a big straw hat and a floral pattern dress Dev knew she called a tea dress. She took the hat and her sunglasses off and crossed to Ana and Rani, avoiding an arm Dad extended halfheartedly to stop her. She went to her knees beside the low camp bed Ana was on and the two of them hugged, low murmurs of comfort exchanged.

  Shush sagged against his side. Tavish looked startled. It was good to see Mom and Ana together, both of them crying.

  “Is that what you want, Ana?” said Connor. He was standing closest to her and she gave him a watery smile.

  “She’s fine,” said Rani, but it would be good to go with Mom, stay the night. The medic seconded that. Rani had a tight hold of Ana’s hand, it was clear she’d stay with them both and Dev was done here. Ana could have no better care than two nurses.

  He backed up and left the tent, but didn’t get far before his father’s voice pulled him up. “Why did you bring her?”

  He didn’t face around. “Ana made the decision to come. She doesn’t want to hide from you.”

  “She has disgraced us.”

  Now he turned. “Not me. I think she’s remarkable. You’re the problem.”

  “Your mother is soft. This is not what I want for Ana, single mother. Those boys are not suitable. She should not have brought them here. Better this baby didn’t happen.”

  “That’s not up to us, Dad. You need to make your peace with Ana’s decisions or you’re going to miss out on how wonderful she is, how much those men care for her, and your first grandkid.”

  Dad’s mouth was turned down, his expression sour. “I have no peace, no peace at all, except knowing you’ll do the right thing with Shush. We have that.”

  The right thing. He hardly knew what that was. He’d offered the right thing to Sarina and been rejected. “There is no Shush and me.”

  “Of course there is. Are you that naive? Do you think marriage is like a picnic day? It’s not, it’s hard work. You choose someone you get along with and you make a marriage work.”

  No, it had to be more than choosing someone like they were in a catalogue, like Sarina chose her donor, all attributes and no heart. That’s not what he thought his parents were about. “You chose Mom because you loved her.”

  “I chose Leela because our families arranged it. We grew to love each other.”

  What? “But, no. You were both living here, arranged marriages aren’t a thing here.” They happened though, it was an industry, the exchange of biodata, specialist dating sites, matchmaking conventions. There was a whole marriage fair just for Patels. He didn’t buy into any of that, and yet arranging a marriage to suit himself was what Sarina had accused him of.

  “Do you think we left something serious like marriage to chance? We had a choice, obviously, and your mother nearly didn’t take me, but it was the right thing and we’ve been strong together because we were careful. But Ana cannot marry one of those boys and she cannot be a single mom, and you’ll do the right thing with Shush.”

  What he did, was walk away from his father’s posturing, the implication Vikram thought Ana should have an abortion, or some poor suitable sap be conscripted as her husband, collect his gear, wave away a bunch of kids after him for a joyride, and take his bat to Gita’s trunk. He struck the hard shiny metal repeatedly, until it was dull and dented and broken like everything he thought he knew.

  TWENTY-ONE

  It was Owen who told Sarina about Ana getting knocked out at Dev’s family’s cricket game. He also wanted to know what the problem between her and Dev was. She’d shrugged it off. But at the end of the week, Owen had them cornered in a meeting about pivoting and she didn’t think he was going to let shrugging stand.

  For the moment she was safe because Reid had the floor. They were talking multi-year strategy planning and Reid had ideas.

  “Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Flickr, Groupon, PayPal. Every one of them started out as something different,” he counted them off on his fingers. “Twitter was a podcast subscription network. Insta was a check-in app. Hell, even Starbucks started out selling coffee machines.”

  “Are you saying we do something completely different?” she asked.

  “Nope, but we need to expand our horizons.”

  “Pivoting is a way for us to keep one foot on what we do well and the other on what we want to do next,” said Owen.

  Reid thumped his chest. “Innovate or die.” He was so gung-ho she had to laugh. “I want us to think about artificial intelligence. We need to be in that space as it expands commercially.”

  Reid looked at Dev, but Dev’s eyes were down. He’d not said a word since they started. There was a different car parked in Gita’s spot. Blandly normal sedan in basic boring navy. The kind of car she’d implied he should own and was so horribly wrong for him.

  “Dev, you okay?” said Owen.

  Dev looked up, eyes blank. “Yeah.”

  “Yeah, what?” said Reid. “What happened to Gita?”

  “She’s off the road.”

  “Someone smack her?”

  “Yeah,” Dev said.

  He was so closed up, she felt it in the way she fidgeted, couldn’t sit still for wanting to touch him to soothe them both. “Are you worried about Ana?�
��

  “Ana is fine.”

  Owen frowned. “But you’re not.” His eyes shifted to her. “And you’re not either, Sarina. You just do a better job of masking it. What’s going on?”

  “We’re pivoting,” said Dev. “One foot on where we used to be and the other . . . not sure yet where we’re putting the other.”

  Which was a good way of describing what was happening to them and the uncertainty she felt because they’d already pivoted, from best friends to almost lovers, and then again to this distance at thirty paces from purgatory. Dev would normally sit beside her. He left an empty chair between them as if he was contagious and didn’t want to infect her. As if she was the infection.

  And maybe she was.

  She’d had an offer of marriage and a family from the only man she loved, who loved her in his own way, and she’d turned him down because her plans had pushed him into a corner and forced his hand when he wasn’t ready. He might never be ready. Only thirty percent of marriages that started out hopeful lasted. How long would it take Dev to feel like he’d been trapped, for them to become another statistic?

  And she did want more. To have what both Owen and Reid had with Cara and Zarley; a need stronger than the convenience of friendship, deeper than habit, and more durable than impulsive sexual attraction.

  She was saving them from making a terrible mistake and bringing a child into that. They would get past this awkwardness and be easy with each other again, she had to trust that.

  She startled when Owen said her name. “I’m okay. And there’s no additional news on the Project Offshoot front.”

  “Still practice dating?” asked Reid. He didn’t grin. He damn well knew he was stirring the pot.

  She responded with a glare.

  He answered with a tirade. “Do we have a problem here?” He motioned between her and Dev. “The one sure thing separating companies like ours from failure is leadership. Strong leadership means focused decision-making, no fudging around with personal politics or private agenda. The motto is Better Together for a reason.”

  “I think we get that, we sacked you, remember.”

  “I fucking remember, and you were right to do it. I fucked up.” Reid switched his drilling eye contact from her to Dev. “Now it’s you two fucking about. And if you think I’ve gone soft since I learned what an asshole I was, you’ve underestimated me. Whatever this is between you two, get it fixed. I don’t care what it takes.” He stood. “We’re done. We can’t talk about pivoting when we’ve already lost our balance.”

  Instinctively she tried to stop Reid leaving the room, but Owen shook his head. “He’s right. If I had to report to the board about our stability as a team today, I’d have to be honest and say we’re distracted. You two are distracted. I feel like a bastard for saying it, because no one was more sidetracked than me when I was addicted to pills. But it’s not clear what’s going on with you guys, only that something’s gone off, so I don’t know if it’s fixable and that’s a problem.”

  She should speak up; her issue with Dev was personal, it had nothing to do with the business. Except it did. It affected everything from her ability to sleep, to her disinterest in food, to the fact she’d put off talking to Dev about new hires.

  Owen rubbed his eyes. “Jesus, I was hoping you’d both be all over me to correct that.” He stood. “Work it out, and I can’t believe I’m saying this to two people who never stop talking to each other—talk to me if you can’t.”

  Maybe she was stunned by Owen’s statement, the idea they needed a mediator. Had to be why she let him leave the room without a word in her own defense, but when Dev stood as well, she got it together. “We need to talk.”

  “Have you changed your mind?”

  That was hope that lifted his chin. “About work.”

  “Put it in an email.”

  She stood and moved closer to him. “Dev, please.”

  He looked at her with hurt and confusion. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “You can say anything.” She’d take whatever he had to say, anything but this awful chasm that had opened between them.

  “I don’t know how you expected this to go. I would’ve given you anything. But I’m not made of rubber, I can’t bounce back the same, I’m more like metal you kicked in.” He turned for the door. “I don’t know how to be in the same room alone with you right now.” Standing behind him, she put her hand to his shoulder. She had kicked him, but it had hurt her too. He flinched, but he didn’t step away. “It’s too hard, Sarina. Let me go.”

  She watched him leave, because he was good at doing that. Leaving because she made things too difficult, because he had an easier time elsewhere with other less demanding women, because she was too different, because he’d never asked for more, because his commitment came with conditions.

  Because he loved her, but he wasn’t in love with her.

  He couldn’t be. It couldn’t just strike you like lightning after years of friendship. That’s not how it had worked for her. She’d loved him when he was shy and insecure. She’d loved him when he’d grown into his talents, and when he’d told her about his romantic adventures she’d been slow to grasp the truth. They could be the best of friends but they would never be more. It was only when he’d stopped telling her about the details of his exploits she’d known she was fooling herself, holding out for something that would never happen.

  The fact they now burned to touch each other was the worst kind of joke. The fact they didn’t know how to be with each other anymore was a catastrophic failure.

  She emailed him about the new hires and over the next few weeks they spent almost no time in the same room, but in front of Reid and Owen both of them did a better job of acting as if something vital and precious hadn’t been pulverized.

  With no reason not to, Sarina went back to the clinic for her second insemination. She had an ultrasound that proved her window of fertility and lay on the examination table with her underwear off and her feet in stirrups. In as little as ten minutes she could be pregnant. She just wouldn’t know for sure for two weeks and she wouldn’t announce the next milestone for three months.

  Her family were excited again. Brian was so sentimental, Mom got mad at him. They agreed this time they’d be no family dinner pee performance; low-key was less stressful. Ro howled about that but got shouted down. This time around Sarina would do the test by herself and phone the result home.

  She was optimistic and healthy, had started looking at baby books again, but weekends had been without eggs and bacon and Dev, and she’d never felt so lonely.

  “Ready?” the technician was in the room, bringing her back to the moment.

  “It’s my second time.”

  “Then you know how this goes.” The woman prepared the syringe. “You might feel a pinch, but it will be over in a few seconds.”

  A few seconds and a whole new stage of her life. “Wait.”

  She pushed up on her elbows. It didn’t feel right. It didn’t have to be today. Project Offshoot was her life, not a bunch of deadlines on a planner. She didn’t need drugs to enhance her fertility; her preparation was minimal, unlike what other women with fertility problems went through. She was outstandingly lucky in that.

  The technician smiled. “No need to be nervous.”

  Was that all this was? A reasonable response to a momentous event. It only took a few seconds to decide.

  And then, back in the real world, there was nothing to do but put her head down and focus on work. To wait. To hope. That was enough to do. There was another resignation from the senior management team and still no one was talking, but this time there were rumors that a new artificial intelligence start-up’s strategy was to nab as many Plus employees as possible. It was poaching season in Silicon Valley and they really were being raided.

  There were eight hundred and forty-seven AI start-ups listed in the angel investor register and thousands of job openings for talented people from a bewildering array of busine
sses. Because employment law in California didn’t restrict people from jumping to similar jobs in a new company, the labor market was fluid and talented people could often name their own price. That usually made secrets hard to keep, and whoever was poaching Plus people had made them sign an agreement that prohibited them naming their new employer. Smart. Devastating.

  Among the active recruiters there was an algorithmic athletic coaching system designed to build champions called Alpha Coach, a digital personal shopper called Nerd Wallet, a remote cat- and dog-feeder system called PetNet, and a dietary meal-delivery service called PlateMe.

  It was impossible to guess who was raiding Plus without more clues.

  It was impossible to fall asleep at night without hugging her belly and missing Dev, without worrying that she’d done the wrong thing for the right reasons. She had to make her own life, couldn’t wait for it to happen. Or the right thing for the wrong reasons. Punished her best friend for something he couldn’t change, for being a product of his family and his upbringing and his own desires that simply didn’t align with hers.

  And still Dev avoided her. Politely, intentionally.

  Until a clue dropped. Arik was offered a job, at nearly twice his Plus salary, and he wanted to talk. In a quiet corner spot on the rooftop in the middle of the afternoon, he confirmed her worse suspicions.

  “They’re raiding Plus. Everyone who has quit over the last few months is about to show up there,” Arik said.

  “And there is?”

  He looked away. “I can’t tell you.”

  Which is exactly what everyone else had said. “What are we doing here then? You’ve been made a great offer and we won’t match it.” Couldn’t match it, if word got out, there’d be a riot over increased salaries.

  “Thing is, I love my job and I love working with Dev, and Reid is just, well, Reid, he’s a one-off and I get that I’m privileged to work here.” Arik put his hands together prayer style. “But the money. I can’t ignore the money they’re throwing at me.”