Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors (The Rajes #1)(44)

Who didn’t return rings when they broke off engagements?

Who let a person like Neel go?

Not that Trisha wasn’t immensely grateful that it had happened.

In the end Neel had left the three carats behind in London along with whatever dreams he had taken there. After coming home, he started working for a law firm in San Francisco, attended all the family parties, and hung out with the old gang. Everyone followed his lead and went on like nothing happened. Everyone except Nisha.

Nisha had refused to meet him. Not in any overt sort of way. But if she knew he was going to be somewhere, she simply didn’t show up. When Ma tried to rekindle her matchmaking, Nisha told her that she would rather kill herself than have anything to do with Neel. When it came down to it, Nisha was definitely the more dramatic of the sisters no matter what anyone said. When Ma didn’t take her seriously, Nisha played her ace—she went on a date with a divorced-with-children colleague who’d been pursuing her and swore that if Ma ever mentioned Neel again, she’d elope with the colleague. Not surprisingly, that second threat had worked where the first one had not.

Trisha understood Nisha’s hurt. All her life, Nisha had believed that Neel was hers, until Barbara. She and Neel had been best friends. Even as kids they had been perfect together. He hadn’t seen it. Or he had seen it and he’d rejected it and wanted something else.

Almost a year after coming back, when Nisha didn’t show up for the Diwali party at the Anchorage, Neel drove to her apartment. She was in her pajamas drinking wine, eating mint chocolate chip ice cream, and watching reruns of Full House. She’d pretended not to be home and refused to let him in. He climbed the tree outside her second-floor apartment and jumped onto her balcony. Before going up, he’d shouted out to Nisha and told her he was going to do it if she didn’t tell him to go away. If that very upstanding-Neel-like gesture wasn’t the most romantic thing Trisha had ever heard, the fact that he had hurt his knee while doing it was.

Then he’d asked a sobbing Nisha why she was avoiding him. Why she hadn’t seen him in the year he’d been back.

Nisha had said quite simply, “Because I can’t bear to see you in pain.”

There was a wedding six months later, and Trisha, for one, had never doubted Neel’s devotion to her sister.

Nisha sat up and scooted back to lean on the stack of white eyelet and cutwork pillows resting against the leather tufted headboard. “He meant it when he said he was done with us trying to have more children. I know I had pushed him as far as he could go, would go.” She swiped her red, swollen nose. There was a veritable blanket of scrunched-up tissues on the bed. “No matter how we started out, after our babies, after what he went through with me for every one of our babies, we’ve been everything to each other. I can’t live without him.”

That Trisha knew. She took the wadded-up tissue from her sister and tossed it clean across the room and straight into the trash can near the desk. “Did you plan this?”

Her sister glared at her. “It wasn’t just that I knew he was done, it was that I knew why he was done. It wasn’t just that he couldn’t see me go through that one more time. It was him. I saw what it did to him, how much it took out of him to go from hope to loss without being able to show either because he had to be strong for me. It tore him up. Each time. The real reason I stopped was that I couldn’t put him through that one more time.” She plucked the last tissue from the box and pressed it into her nose. “You have to help me, Shasha.”

Trisha picked up the wadded-up tissues one by one and started tossing them into the trash can. “You have a plan, I assume.”

“The plan is to have you find a way to get me two weeks of staying in bed without Neel knowing. Without anyone knowing.” She handed Trisha the tissue in her hand and Trisha tossed it into the trash with the others.

“Did Sarita say you had to stay in bed?” How had that not been the first question Trisha asked?

“No. She wants me to come in so she can run all the tests and do a referral to Vinay.” Vinay was Sarita’s husband and he specialized in high-risk pregnancies. “But no matter what Sarita and Vinay say, I’m not moving off a bed. Not until the first trimester is over. So put all that genius gray matter to use and come up with a way to help me do that without the Farm catching on.”

Trisha slumped next to her sister. How? And what if something happened to Nisha—how would she explain that to Neel? The problem with her gray matter was that it didn’t work in situations like this. Everyone knew she had absolutely no emotional intelligence. She had to think of this the way she would think about one of her cases, logically.

“What about Sarita and Vinay? Sarita has probably already called Neel.” Sarita was Neel’s cousin a few times removed. Theirs was a crazy incestuous world.

“I’ve told her not to tell anyone, and she won’t. Anyway she’s bound by doctor-patient confidentiality.” Nisha settled her head on Trisha’s lap.

Doctor-patient confidentiality meant nothing around here. Sarita and Vinay were close family friends. Their parents, Sarita’s parents, Vinay’s parents, and Neel’s parents had belonged to the same tight circle when they had first moved to America from India and all the kids had grown up together as one large extended family. Sarita had gone to school with Yash and all of them had spent more weekend nights than Trisha could count holed up in the attic, playing video games and Ping-Pong while their parents socialized and tried to re-create the old country with food, movies, music, and raucous political debate.