Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors (The Rajes #1)(6)
Trisha couldn’t get herself to bring up the grant. She’d do it at the dinner. Because maybe it was time to go to one. “You’ve been saying I should come,” she said tentatively. “I’m free tonight.” The high of winning the grant had to have shrunk her brain.
The awkward beat of silence was swallowed up by a voice asking Nisha something about flowers. Nisha let off a string of instructions that sounded to Trisha like dolphins clicking, entirely indecipherable.
“Okay. That’s great,” Nisha said distractedly, when she came back on the line. “I’ll see you at six then.” That was it? Nothing about the years of campaign events Trisha had missed. Nothing about how HRH would react when he found out she was going to be there. “Do you have something to wear?”
Of course she didn’t. Thankfully, it was a rhetorical question. One her sister always asked before she decided exactly what Trisha should wear.
“Okay, I’ll take care of it.” Something clattered ominously in the background. “Gotta go. And do not be late. I mean it.”
Just that easily Nisha was done. A two-minute conversation to condense all those years of Nisha trying to mend the fences Trisha had burned down. And by “mend” Trisha meant “ignore.” Nisha subscribed to the ostrich philosophy for conflict resolution—if you acted like a problem didn’t exist, well, then it didn’t. In that respect Nisha was every inch their mother’s daughter.
HRH and Yash, on the other hand, were incapable of ever letting anything go.
It was too late to have second thoughts now. Trisha walked around her desk and sank into her chair.
Crap, who was she kidding? Second thoughts stampeded through her like a herd of wildebeests sensing a ravenous lion. She pressed her forehead into her desk, then banged it against the cool wood. She was a genius, dammit! Surely that meant she could handle a family dinner. Even one she wasn’t welcome at.
Chapter Two
It had been fifteen years. Fifteen years since Trisha had been shut out of her brother’s political career, the family’s most precious dream. Finding excuses to avoid Yash’s rallies, and speeches, and celebrations for so long hadn’t been easy but she’d managed it, and the family had long since heaved a sigh of relief and stopped involving her. For fifteen years she had existed on the fringes of her family—where all was seemingly normal, because they were the Rajes, after all, but where the fact that she had almost destroyed her brother’s life hung in the air at all times, like a truth bubble ready to pop.
But Yash was finally running for governor—surely that meant things had turned out fine in the end. Maybe it was time to let the past go.
She maneuvered her Tesla up the curving, deeply forested drive that led to her parents’ Woodside home. The mechanical gates recognized her car and slid open under the wrought-iron arch that spelled out the name of the house she had grown up in: The Anchorage.
A rare nod to the old country. Houses in India all had names. Not just the mansions and the estates but every little bungalow and building had a name. Looking for the often grandly ill-fitting names displayed on the houses had been one of Trisha’s favorite pastimes as a child. Crumbling four-floor apartment blocks called “Royal Towers.” Tiny stone cottages called “Raj Mahal.” Metal placards and stenciled signs that proclaimed self-worth and told you that they were something more than just brick and concrete.
When Trisha’s parents had built this house, nestled into five acres of gorgeous redwood forests, her grandmother had called it “the Anchorage.” The name had been a tribute to her oldest son who had been a naval officer and the twenty-second maharaja before he died in the plane crash that had altered the family’s destiny. Only the family ever called their home by the name Aji had given it. To everyone else it was just a number on a private street. The way the rest of California did it.
Trisha pulled to a stop under the white-columned porte cochere. A caravan of parked cars signaled that the dinner was in full swing inside, underscoring the fact that she was late.
Because, yes, she was late. She hadn’t meant to be. Not on the day when she had recklessly decided to unfreeze herself out of banishment. Not when Nisha had probably taken the time out of her crazy day to prep their parents and Yash so this would be as easy as possible on Trisha.
Trisha hated not knowing how to handle things. Why couldn’t everything be like surgery? She had just excised an adenoma on a thirteen-year-old’s pituitary gland and known exactly what to do. Sure, the surgery had taken two hours longer than expected, and made her late, but a thirteen-year-old girl was going to get her life back. And sure, Trisha could have let another attending surgeon pick up the emergency surgery, but it had been the exact kind of procedure she loved. Complicated. The tumor had gone rogue and grown talons into brain tissue. Trisha had needed the sweet satisfaction of snuffing out every bit of that baby after her unexpected bout of bravado with her sister.
As if facing HRH and Yash weren’t scary enough, the idea of socializing with people she barely knew made Trisha want to gnaw her limbs off. Maybe she should turn around and go back to her condo.
She groaned the kind of groan one can only groan in the privacy of one’s car, loud and pathetic, and looked up at the bright white stucco facade, the marble columns, the black plantation shutters with Japanese roses and jasmine spilling from window boxes, and focused on the click of belonging that only ever happened here, in this place that mapped her life, this place where the memories of her at every age would always live.