Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors (The Rajes #1)(65)

He picked up immediately. “Trisha? What’s wrong?” It made sense that he’d think a call from his screwup sister had to mean something was wrong.

“How are you, Yash?” she said, trying to sound breezy. “All well in DC?”

“Everything’s great. Except what’s not so great of course.” His voice did a groaning/smiling thing. “I was actually just going to call you.”

“Really?” she said without thinking, surprise far too clear in her tone.

“Yes, I wanted to know if you had seen Nisha. She’s not answering her phone.”

“Oh. Yes, I have. She’s been a bit busy with Neel gone and your fund-raiser coming up.”

“Hm. I just wanted to make sure you’d seen her and that she was okay.”

“Did I tell you about my grant?” Changing topics inelegantly, yes, that was the way to go here!

“Ma did,” he said, sounding alert. He’d caught the topic change but didn’t point it out. He hadn’t bothered to congratulate her. Not that she’d been waiting or anything. “Sorry, I should have called to congratulate you. Congratulations, Shasha. We’re all so proud.”

“Are you really?” she wanted to ask. But the real reason for her call meant that they couldn’t possibly be.

“Thanks,” she said quietly.

“You sure you’re okay?” he asked.

Maybe he knew about Julia. What if this was a test? “I’m fine.”

“Good. Can I call you later?” He seemed to be in a busy place with lots of voices in the background. “I need to finish this meeting and have dinner with Naina. She’s only in the country for a day.”

Oh. Yash’s long-term girlfriend had been living all over Asia working on her postdoc on feminism and feudal Eastern cultures for almost five years. Trisha had no idea she was visiting. “Is she coming back for the fund-raiser?”

“Not sure,” he said absently. Too absently. Trisha had been seeing pictures of Steele with his lovely wife and two children splashed across every California paper. At church, on vacation. Would Yash’s unmarried status be a problem for his campaign? Maybe not, unless the fact that he hadn’t married a woman he’d been with for close to two decades was coupled with an old video of him with an underage intern who had worked for him.

“Yash?” Sometimes her mouth did things without her permission.

“Yes?”

Other times it totally gave up on her. Seriously, why couldn’t she just live in the OR? All her parts worked just fine in there.

“Shasha, what’s the matter?”

“Well . . . um . . . I don’t want you to worry, but I . . . I just ran into Julia.” Shit! HRH was going to kill her for telling him. Why hadn’t she thought this through?

There was a beat of silence. A very long beat. “Okay. Is that why you’re sounding like this? What did she want?”

How the hell would she know what Julia Wickham wanted? Other than to destroy everything and everyone in her path. Why did her family think being her roommate for one year made Trisha an expert on a sociopath? “I don’t know. I ran into her by accident. We didn’t talk. She didn’t seek me out. I swear.”

“Sweetheart, I’m not saying she did. Listen, stop worrying so much.” Easy for the gray-eyed prince to say. He had never ruined anyone’s life because of his inability to judge people. “So you ran into her. It’s a free country. Did HRH say something to you?”

She couldn’t answer that. She wasn’t a snitch. But HRH was right, Julia’s timing wasn’t an accident. Something was off. Actually everything about the Julia she had just seen was off. It wasn’t just that she was all tattooed and pierced and dreadlocked. There was nothing wrong with being any of those things, but it reminded Trisha too much of how Julia had taken to regularly wearing Indian kurtas and bangles when they had been friends. She had even bought a book of henna and ordered henna cones off a mail-order catalog and started to wear it all the time. Trisha had only ever worn kurtas in college at the Indian Students’ Association’s Diwali celebrations, and she’d only ever worn bangles and henna at Nisha’s wedding. The Indian ceremony, not the church one.

“Does your friend think she’s desi?” Nisha had said on a laugh, back when they had still been able to laugh at a conversation that involved Julia.

Something about Julia dressing desi all the time had made Trisha uncomfortable, but she’d said nothing. “It makes me happy! Your people’s stuff is so much more beautiful,” she’d said with so much longing that Trisha had told herself that her friend deserved to be happy.

And now it seemed Julia had decided that dreads made her happy. Trisha felt physically sick. More than how Julia looked, it was her eyes that terrified her. They hadn’t changed at all.

“Something is off. I have a bad feeling about this,” she wanted to say to Yash. But where would she even begin with explaining her bad feeling? Someone else spoke to Yash, and he asked for a minute. The brother she could pour her heart out to was long gone, she’d lost him. Julia Wickham had used her to almost destroy him and taken that from her forever. Plus, how could she dump more stress on him right now?

“Listen,” he said coming back to her, “if Ma and HRH get on your case about it, you call me, okay?”