Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors (The Rajes #1)(106)

“The first thing I remember her saying when she saw him onstage was, ‘How does anyone in the U.S. Attorney’s office ever get any work done with him around?’ I was used to that reaction. I had heard some form of it all my life. Even back then Yash was mesmerizing to listen to. If you’ve heard him give a speech, you know that anytime he takes the podium—he makes magic.

“It’s his ability to let people into his mind, which happens to be beautiful and brilliant. Listening to him even if you’re in a room full of people feels like being alone with him. It feels like being in the presence of someone who has the power to understand every problem, break it down, and make it disappear. He’s always had it. That combination of intellect, humility, and an insatiable need to care and serve. Every time I hear my brother speak, I believe in the world again.

“His speech was about the history of the role of the judiciary in social programs and the responsibility of democratic governments toward those in need of assistance. Naturally the subject matter only helped mesmerize Julia. After the speech, Yash took us out to dinner. From the way she hung on to his every word, it was clear that she had it bad.

“Julia was the first real friend I ever made. Through school there had hardly been any time for friends and having five siblings and cousins in the house meant never really feeling the need for friends. The first time in my life that I remember being lonely was that first week at Berkeley. Then Julia showed up with her bright smile and easy humor.

“She had grown up in the California heartland in a town called Hesperia. I didn’t find out until after the private investigators came into it that she had worked for an old people’s home through high school and that there were a few cases against her by families of patients for theft and pressuring patients to change their wills. But charm wasn’t fraud and she had never been convicted.

“She has a vulture’s instinct when it comes to identifying your vulnerabilities and filling them up until you let her in. In me she saw someone who was such a part of something that there was never anything that was just mine. She became that, a friend who was just mine. I loved having a friend whose family was not friends with mine, who didn’t even know who my family was. She was the first person I knew who saw me only as an individual and still acted as though I was cool and funny and enough. And I let the headiness of that put my brother at risk.

“She was so inspired by Yash’s speech that she switched to prelaw. Then she started pushing me to get him to take her on as an intern. Yash has been engaged—or at least betrothed—to his childhood friend Naina for many years. I told Julia this. I had started to get uncomfortable with how obsessed she was getting. I tried to make her see sense. When she acted like she got it, I believed her.

“Then one day, without telling me, she used my computer to email Yash as me from my account, asking him to employ her.

“The awful part, the part that I will never forgive myself for, is that after I found out that she had impersonated me to my brother, instead of going to him, I confronted her, because I didn’t want to lose her friendship. She apologized and begged me to let her have this opportunity, told me I was like a sister to her, that she needed my help because she had no one else and that she wanted this internship more than she had ever wanted anything in her life. And I let it go. I didn’t tell my brother.

“I let him give her that internship, when I knew in my gut that something was very wrong. I put him at risk, knowingly.” She stopped. Somewhere during the course of the conversation, her voice had become so choked up that DJ wanted to say something to make it better. But something told him she needed to get this out, so he stayed silent.

“No one outside of our family and Yash’s most trusted political aides know this next part.” Again he almost told her she didn’t need to tell him. But she’d chosen to tell him, and he knew she hadn’t done that lightly, given how much guilt she carried about it, and he couldn’t stop her.

“I’m listening.” That was all he said.

With a quiet sniff she went on. “A week into her internship she took him to a bar under the pretext of meeting me and discussing some problems I was supposedly struggling with at school. There, while they waited for me because I was ‘late’ she drugged Yash’s drink. Then she taped them having sex. She was seventeen—both of us had graduated from high school early—and he was twenty-three and she worked for him.

“Her intent at that point had been to send the video to his girlfriend so she would break up with him. Naina isn’t just Yash’s girlfriend, she’s the daughter of close family friends. She’s family. Naina took the video to Yash. She . . . she did what I hadn’t done. She did the right thing. Yash was running for San Francisco alderman then. It was his first campaign. We all knew that it wasn’t going to be his last. It’s a joke in our family that my dad had a road map planned out for all Yash’s future campaigns since before he learned to walk. Except, it’s not really a joke.

“The footage could have destroyed everything. My family hired the best private investigators. They dug up all sorts of dirt on her. They threatened her with ruin and gave her the option to transfer from Berkeley elsewhere. As long as she never came back to California and never mentioned Yash again. She signed the papers, took an insane sum of money, and disappeared for the past fifteen years.

“And now, when Yash has just announced his candidacy, she’s back in town. I know that it’s a free country, but she’s been looking for patients in my department’s waiting room. If you believe her intention is innocent, it’s your prerogative. But please, please be careful.”