Total pages in book: 113
Estimated words: 106422 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 532(@200wpm)___ 426(@250wpm)___ 355(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 106422 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 532(@200wpm)___ 426(@250wpm)___ 355(@300wpm)
Because I hadn’t told her.
It was all but silent in the ICU now, the lights lowered for the evening, and the nursing rounds done for this hour. No one would disturb us while I made my confession.
“About my past,” I clarified. “But only because I fell so hard for you—I just wanted you to give me a shot without preconceptions, and then it got too difficult to tell you.”
I swallowed then, and told her. All of it. From start to finish.
It felt like a boulder rolling off my shoulders. “Ackerson must’ve got word about the condo from Baxter and Perez in LA.” Because despite the detective’s posturing, she hadn’t actually known much about me and Susanne. Not many people did; Susanne had been the kind of wealthy that didn’t end up in the media, the kind of wealthy that ran generations deep.
Quiet, refined, private.
When Ackerson confronted me with the fact that my condo had been a gift from Susanne, I’d admitted it without hesitation. “She gave it to me when I was twenty-two, said I wasn’t to argue because she could more than afford it.” In truth, her words had been far more emotional, a prelude to a final good-bye, but Ackerson didn’t need to know that.
I’d then named the full figure of Susanne’s estate and watched Ackerson’s mind go blank with the enormity of it.
That number didn’t give Ackerson even a glimmer of my complex and life-altering relationship with the first woman who had truly seen me as who I was, and not as who she wanted me to be. So strange that it had ended up that way, when we’d begun the relationship as a flirtatious game.
Today, I spoke to another woman who would know me—because I was through with hiding things from her. “I have to dig up something else for Ackerson to sink her teeth into, or she’s going to find a way to pin the blame on me. I can see it in her eyes—she’s fallen for what my father calls the ‘too many coincidences’ theory. Susanne, Jocelyn, Virna, and now you. How unlucky can a man be?”
No one could guarantee that either Diya or Shumi would ever wake to clear my name.
Picking up my wife’s hand on a wave of terror such as I’d never before felt, I pressed a kiss to the back of it, the mehndi a stark reminder of dreams turned to ash. “I love you, D.”
Then I considered what I had to work with.
The answer was dispiriting: Ani.
A memory from another lifetime spoken of in a moment of awful pain and confusion.
It could be nothing. But it was all I had.
The question was what to do with it. Ajay had already told me what he knew, but I hadn’t broached the subject with his parents after he’d cleared up my mistake about the pronunciation of the name.
Now I messaged him: Do you think your parents would talk to me about Ani?
The three moving dots that indicated he was typing a response appeared almost at once, but his answer when it came at last wasn’t what I wanted to hear: I already brought it up with them, said Diya had mentioned Ani before she lost consciousness. They told me Ani died in an accident as a child. They said it was very sad and everyone was devastated, and that she and Diya were close, so that’s probably why she mentioned her. I don’t think there’s any other reason—they sounded sad about Ani even now, but that’s all.
I blew out a breath between compressed lips. Thanks for passing that on, I wrote back, then stared down at the floor, my hands between my knees.
Ani…they said…about Ani…not…
That wasn’t just a memory. Who said what? What did it have to do with a little girl who’d died almost two decades ago? And why was it so important that Diya had struggled desperately to speak even as her blood pumped out of her violated body?
The Prasads had no close extended family in the country, no one who might know the story of Ani’s life and death. And neither Shumi nor Diya could speak, tell me what role a lost child played in any of this.
The person with the wind chimes as their ringtone received a call down the hallway, the music of it haunting enough to raise the hairs on my arms, goose bumps that chilled me from the inside. I couldn’t understand why they’d have such a sad ringtone—especially here, in this place.
Fiji.
The word was a whisper against my ear, so real that I jolted up from my slouched position to look at Diya, certain I’d find her awake. But she lay unconscious, the ventilator constant in its mechanical breathing, while the name of her birthplace echoed inside my skull.
The wind chime ringtone sounded again.