Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors (The Rajes #1)(87)

He thought she’d never worked for anything in her life? That it had all fallen in her lap? She did not remember sleeping more than four hours a night since high school. Her siblings were the ones who had made good grades effortlessly. She’d thrown up before every exam—in the school bathroom so no one at home would know. Her anxiety had been that brutal. She’d spent so much time staring at textbooks she couldn’t see without her glasses—a surgeon who performed microscopic surgery and was practically blind, with weird eye curvature so that no contacts ever fit right. Not one single school dance. Not one relationship that meant anything. Because all she had done all her life was work.

He thought she didn’t know what it was to want something? To work for it? She pulled a tissue from the box and blew into it. This man was not worth the mess she was letting herself become right now.

A huge crusty crumb poked at her breast. It must have fallen down her suit and into her bra when she was shoving a muffin into her mouth. She reached into her bra and grabbed it, then popped it in her mouth.

She’d had to remove her contact lenses and put on her glasses because tears made her contacts slide out of place. But she never let anyone see her in glasses. They magnified her eyes and made her look bug-eyed. She pulled into the parking lot. Good thing she was done crying. Done. Forcing her contacts back in, she tucked her glasses away and recited both the periodic table and some of the Sanskrit shlokas Aji had taught her to center herself. She would not be walking into her meeting with Jane Liu looking like a watering can.

The building where the institute was housed was beautiful, with a glass-and-steel facade and an ambience so cozy and whimsical it lifted Trisha’s distraught spirits. If her heart didn’t hurt so much, it might even have sung with hope.

And when she met Jane, the singing-with-hope option no longer seemed like such an impossibility. Jane was one of those people who carried within her a deep sense of her own human perfection. She emanated peace, the kind that was born from self-assurance. Not only had she worked tirelessly for the past two decades for the rights of people with visual impairment, but she herself was an artist of amazing skill who had started painting as a child by using her hands to see objects and then transferring them onto sketchbooks with crayons and paints.

For years she had worked with oil pastels, clay, and acrylics but now she had discovered tactile art, which was a sculptural medium and allowed artists with visual impairment to interact with their work at a more intimate level.

Jane let Trisha play with her pieces, which was how they were meant to be “viewed” anyway. Trisha stroked and caressed the metal wires, knotted ropes, and blown glass all mixed up together to form a symphony of textures as they discussed the several brain studies Jane had participated in to explore how brain chemistry altered physically when a blind artist perceived objects and tried to transmit them into art.

After spending two hours with her, Trisha felt she had never before met another person whose brain functioned so similarly to her own. Methodical and analytical to a fault but also entirely too easily tired of frills and artifice.

Jane promised to speak to Emma, and Trisha had that sense she always had when something she had been trying to solve for a long time finally fell into place. The kind of relief that was all the more special because the resolution had taken so much faith and had been just out of reach for so long. Meeting Jane Liu had been just the thing she had needed today.

“Is he worth this kind of pain?” Jane asked unexpectedly as they were saying good-bye.

Trisha hadn’t said one thing about what had happened with DJ, but she had talked about him in the context of Emma, whom they had discussed in detail.

Still, she’d grown up with Esha, so Jane’s perception didn’t faze Trisha. “It doesn’t matter if he is or isn’t,” she answered. Except, deep inside she knew that he was.

As she began the drive home, that realization ramped up the pain again, making her heart feel like it was having an infarction. This had to be how it felt when your heart muscle died. Switching out her contacts for her magnifying-lens glasses again, she tried not to sob in tune to Kishori Amonkar belting out her agony in raga Durbari.

AN HOUR INTO the drive, Aretha Franklin’s “RESPECT” ringtone cut Amonkar off. Trisha honked into a tissue to clear her voice before answering her sister’s call.

“Where are you?” Nisha said, sounding as desperate as Trisha was feeling.

“I’m an hour away. What happened? Are you okay?”

“No, Trisha, I’m not okay!” Nisha let out a sob. “It’s not the baby. It’s Neel. He’s on a plane. He’s coming home early.”

“What? Why?”

“I don’t know. But Neel never changes his plans. Ever. What do you think it is?”

How on earth was she supposed to know? “What did he say it was?”

“For some reason his call didn’t come through. He left a voice mail hours ago, but I just got it. He said he wanted to see me and that Mishka was done with the trip, so they were getting on a plane. That doesn’t sound right, does it?”

“It sounds fine.” Mishka was at that age. A tween, or whatever they called it. She could get bored with London. Children that age could get bored anywhere. Trisha still got bored most everywhere that wasn’t the hospital. “She’s probably bored and Neel doesn’t know what to do with her. Maybe he’s just missing you.”