Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors (The Rajes #1)(105)

Emma laughed her big throaty laugh. “Are you actually cheering for my upcoming blindness?”

“I always did want to try out for the cheer team,” Jane said, making sweeping movements with her arms and sending his sister into fits.

He couldn’t have imagined anyone more irreverent than his sister, but now here was someone. “To Dr. Raje!” Jane held up her ice-cream cone in a toast and Emma tapped her cone against it in cheers. Both women gulped down the rest of their ice cream.

Discomfort shifted inside DJ. It did feel like Trisha had been saving the day all over the place. He sat up, a thought that had been jabbing at his conscience finally solidifying into shape. “When did Trisha come to see you, Jane?” he asked, his heart beating in a way it only seemed to beat when the good doctor was in question.

“Thursday afternoon.”

Her words landed like a kick to his ball bag.

Thursday was when they’d had that disastrous encounter at Naomi’s café.

“Are you sure it was the afternoon?” he asked.

“Dude, I may be blind but I’m very attached to my Braille watch.” She held up her wrist. “Our appointment was for four in the afternoon. She was exactly on time.”

Everything around him seemed to slow.

Jane stood. “Speaking of appointments, I’ve got to go. Mine is probably already here.”

Emma jumped up from her beach chair. “I’ll walk with you there. I need to use the loo.”

DJ said good-bye to Jane, his heart still pounding. Trisha had gone to see Jane right after she’d met him? Right after he’d shredded her to pieces. He thought about her leaving the café, the paper bag clutched to her belly. And she had sat in her car and driven to meet Jane, to find his sister a solution.

Strange thing was, he could imagine her doing it. Going to see Jane for Emma after he’d been a giant git, the idea of hurting him after he’d hurt her not even striking her.

He squeezed the bridge of his nose. A headache was starting between his brows. Every single thing the woman had ever done wouldn’t stop playing in his head. All the words she’d ever said wouldn’t stop ringing in his ears. All she’d done to help Emma, and Nisha, and Ashna, and him, too, actually.

His phone beeped; he saw a couple of emails from Nisha—they’d been trying to sort out whether to go with ceviche or escabeche—and a missed call from Trisha. She had never called him before. She left fund-raiser business to Nisha and him. Something about working with food freaked her out. Suddenly he wanted to know how she’d been burned. And he wanted to know why she’d called him.

He watched as Jane and Emma disappeared into the ice-cream shop, chattering away, and Emma threw her head back and laughed at something Jane said. DJ found himself smiling too.

He responded to Nisha’s emails first, letting her know that mango and shrimp escabeche it would be, because, yes, ceviche was becoming a bit of a cliché.

Then he tapped Trisha’s number, the strangest sensation bouncing in the pit of his stomach.

For a few rings nothing happened. He almost disconnected. But then she answered, clearing her throat before getting out a breathless “Hello?”

He could see her so clearly in his head. All the anticipation on her face creating a strange kind of unguardedness, and he had to rack his brains to conjure up that arrogance he’d held on to so tightly. “I had a missed call.”

“Yes. Um . . . Are you in Carmel?”

His surprise stole his voice.

“Sorry. I can hear the ocean. And I knew you had an appointment with Jane.” She sounded terribly apologetic. The thought that he’d done that to her, caused her to sound like she constantly had something to defend, made discomfort stab inside him again. “How’s Emma? Did she fall under Jane’s spell yet?”

He had to smile at that. “It’s impossible not to, isn’t it? Dr. Raje . . . Trisha, thank you. I don’t know how to—”

“DJ, please, before you say anything, I have something I need to tell you. About Julia . . .” His hand tightened around the phone. “You were right, you deserve to hear the other side of whatever she told you.”

“I thought you couldn’t talk about it.” He didn’t want her breaking confidences and suddenly he didn’t want her sounding like this, as though she’d found herself in a corner with nowhere to go.

“I talked to Yash. He thinks you should know. But, please, this has to stay between us.”

He sat up on the beach chair. “You don’t have to—”

“No, please, hear me out.”

“Okay.”

There was a long pause; he imagined her neck stretching as she swallowed and steeled herself. “As I’ve mentioned before, my family is very aware of the gifts we’ve been given and I swear we do our best to use them to do good. It’s all we were ever taught. But we were also taught that the world isn’t forgiving to those who want to change things. Trusting people outside of the family is not one of our strengths.” There was another pause.

Then she went on. “My greatest lesson in this came from Julia. She and I were roommates at Berkeley. Yash had just graduated from law school and was working for the then U.S. Attorney for Northern California. At the end of our freshman year, he came to Berkeley to speak at the law school. Julia went with me to listen to his speech, and she was instantly smitten.